By Liz Matson

Coach Willette White was here even earlier, preparing. Now she stands alone on the sidelines, watching two assistant coaches run drills at either end of the court. The players seem a bit sluggish—who can blame them at this hour? But White isn't happy. She blows her whistle and walks to center court.

"There's no sense of urgency!" she booms. "You're just going through the motions. Pick up the pace!"

That's all it takes. The girls wake up and spring into action. White calls out words of encouragement: "Good running!" "Good job, babe!" Moving gracefully into the middle of a drill, she uses her body to show the players what they're doing wrong and how they need to fix it.

The coach and her team smile and joke as they try to shape themselves into winners two weeks out from the season opener. Several players stand a couple of inches taller than White. But there's no question who towers on this court.

White—along with Cheryl Murtagh of field hockey, and Laura Schuler, BPH'94, of women's ice hockey—is part of a troika at Northeastern, the university's three women head coaches. More coaching opportunities exist in college sports for both women and men than in all professional sports combined.

Yet despite Title IX, despite the major strides American women continue to make toward social, economic, and workplace equality, college coaching is, more and more, a man's game. At National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) schools, women head coaches occupy the dwindling minority.

Northeastern's own athletics roster speaks to the imbalance: Alongside White, Murtagh, and Schuler work twelve men head coaches.

At universities across the country, the statistics are getting people's attention, and gender inequality in college coaching is becoming a hot-button topic. What, observers are asking, can be done to lessen the gap?

And why does it matter?

From 90 to 44 percent

Many people are surprised to learn that, three decades after Title IX, women coaches are losing ground to their male counterparts. It turns out Title IX is itself part of the problem.

This seems paradoxical. Title IX is the comprehensive federal law that requires U.S. schools to maintain policies that don't discriminate against students or employees on the basis of gender. Its passage in 1972 was meant to open the floodgates for women's participation in school athletics.

But consider the statistics assembled by the 2005 Coaching and Gender Equity (CAGE) project, a research effort sponsored jointly by the NCAA, the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletics Administrators (NACWAA), and Pennsylvania State University's Commission for Women and Athletics. In 1972, 90 percent of women's college teams were coached by women, most of them unpaid volunteers. Today, women coach only 44 percent of women's college teams (and 2 percent of men's teams).

Racial imbalances cloud the locker-room picture even further. Although about 20 percent of women athletes are nonwhite, fewer than 10 percent of women coaches are nonwhite.

To determine the reasons behind the numbers, the CAGE project conducted focus groups with student-athletes, coaches, and athletics administrators. Participants were asked such questions as "Are women entering but not staying in the field?" and "Are there barriers to the movement and promotion of women?"

One factor, the investigation revealed, is a lack of work/family balance. Women coaches often find themselves shouldering what the project's final report calls "extreme workloads" involving game travel and demanding practice and game schedules that conflict with family responsibilities. Coaches and administrators described "jobs that never end." Players said their coaches led "lives that are crazy."

Then there's Title IX, which, according to Robert Drago, a Penn State labor studies and women's studies professor, and one of the CAGE principal investigators, is attracting more men coaches to college sports. When Title IX increased funding and support for women's programs, and more coaching jobs became paid positions, more men got interested in coaching women.

Researchers also uncovered evidence of gender and racial bias on the part of some hiring administrators and some fans, Drago says, which was not unanticipated.

Yet another source of discrimination caught the researchers off-guard. "The most surprising finding of this study," says Drago, "is that most of the women we talked to preferred male coaches.

"It was shocking," he says. "These same women would never think of picking a college course on the basis of the gender of the professor. But when it comes to athletics, all of a sudden gender is very important.

"So the attitude you would have faced forty years ago, 'women can't be athletes,' you now get in 'women can't be coaches,'" Drago says. "What that told us, and what we related to the NCAA and NACWAA, is that we really need girls in the elementary- and secondary-school range having women coaches as role models."

Even so, the idea that women should be coached only by women is a loaded proposition, one not taken lightly by those who work in or study the field. A hiring decision based solely on gender would violate equal employment opportunity laws, which prohibit discrimination because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

"When an institution is committed to affirmative action and diversity, you would hope that, at the end of the day, the people who are staffing those departments reflect the diversity you are striving to achieve," says Dave O'Brien, Northeastern's athletics director. "Having said that, on any particular search, you are always looking to identify the best potential candidate, and, in fact, the law requires you to do that. Title IX requires you to do that."

For now, as women's participation in college sports expands and the pool of prospective women coaches grows, the competition between men and women for coaching jobs is fierce. To rise to their positions, White, Murtagh, and Schuler had to prove they were the cream of the crop.

Indeed, they have a great deal in common. They all had strong female role models who influenced their desire to be a coach. They express unconditional support and admiration for their players, yet they can be tough and demanding with them when necessary.

They all want to win.

Poise under pressure

Willette White, born and raised in Washington State, was an All-American basketball player at the University of Idaho.

During her senior year, she started thinking about coaching as a career. Her head coach and mentor, Tara VanDerveer, now head coach at Stanford, had just left for a job at Ohio State. After White graduated from Idaho in 1982, she followed VanDerveer to Columbus, working under her on a graduate assistantship for two years while earning a master's in athletic administration.

At the time, White says, there were graduate assistantships at schools all over the country that allowed athletes to be trained as coaches as they worked on graduate degrees.

"Now it is a little bit different," she says. "There are very limited graduate assistant positions. Those positions are full-time positions, so getting someone right out of college is less likely than before. I was very, very lucky."

Lucky, yes, but worthy, too—White's coaching resume is an impressive romp through Division 1 women's basketball. After a one-season stint at Iowa State, White bounced back to her home state to work as an assistant coach at the University of Washington. In eight seasons, the team amassed a 181-59 record, three conference titles, and seven NCAA tournament trips. In 1993, she became the associate head coach for the UCLA Bruins, where she focused on recruiting.

In 2000, after eighteen years of coaching, White was named Northeastern's head coach. She took the reins of a young, inexperienced squad that had just lost its all-time leading scorer, Tesha Tinsley, AS'99, to graduation. The team's previous head coach, Joy Malchodi, had moved over to an administrative position following an internal investigation into her conduct as a coach.

"Willette inherited a very difficult situation," says O'Brien. "Through her professionalism, her own personal decorum, she's been able to gain the respect of the administration, the student-athletes, the fans, and she's going about rebuilding the program."

White clearly relishes the challenges she faces on the job.

"The most rewarding part is being a part of helping kids grow," she says. "And, hopefully, preparing them for what their next step in life is going to be. And, obviously, preparing them for the win. That goes without saying."

If players express an interest in coaching, White works with them on the requisite skills, teaching them how to review tapes, for instance, or prepare a scouting report. She encourages them to get involved with the Georgia-based Women's Basketball Coach Association (WBCA), which has a "So You Want to Be a Coach" program. Last year, Joi Jefferson, CJ'05, who worked as a student assistant under White, went through the WBCA program. Jefferson recently took an assistant coaching position at Le Moyne College, in Syracuse.

White is a firm believer in the benefits of women coaching women.

"I definitely think it's really important," she says. "I know I have an opportunity to be a role model, and I take that role very seriously. I'm not going to say every team should be coached by a woman. But to give women opportunities to coach women's teams is awfully important."

A tradition of winning

In a quiet suburb north of Boston, Cheryl Murtagh rises early, too—at 4:30 a.m.—to start her day as head coach of the most successful team in Northeastern athletics history, field hockey.

Murtagh spends the quiet morning hours planning practices and prepping for games before heading in to her Cabot Center office. She knows this routine well—she's been at Northeastern twenty-two years, four as an assistant coach and eighteen as head coach. After baseball's Neil McPhee, she has the second-longest tenure among Northeastern's current head coaches.

"If you were to sit down and try to create from scratch the ideal coach," O'Brien says, "Cheryl Murtagh would be the result of that effort."

Growing up in Peabody, Massachusetts, Murtagh preferred basketball to field hockey, though she excelled at both sports at Bishop Fenwick High School. When her basketball coach, Cecelia DeMarco, took a coaching position at the University of New Hampshire, Murtagh decided to enroll there. Once again, she did well in both sports, but she started to think about a career in coaching—in field hockey.

"I started to love the sport," she says, "and in my senior year I saw you could be a full-time field hockey coach. My junior/senior years were really when those positions started to open up. Not a lot of people knew the game. If you knew the game, you could get into a good position."

After she graduated in 1981, Murtagh spent a few years as an assistant coach at Tufts and Bentley before coming to Northeastern. She credits Jeanne Rowlands, NU's former women's athletics director (a position that no longer exists), for supporting field hockey by creating a full-time coaching position and securing funding for athletic scholarships.

A couple of decades later, Murtagh's career record of 274-118-10 speaks for itself. Her team is a nationally ranked elite squad that's garnered ten titles and four runner-up finishes in fifteen conference tournaments. She has coached some of the country's top players, including thirty-two All-Americans.

Last season, the team faced new bumps when Northeastern became the latest addition to the Colonial Athletic Association (CAA). For field hockey, this means competing against Old Dominion, a nine-time NCAA champion, as well as tournament regulars James Madison and Delaware. The Huskies finished their first CAA season with a solid 16-6 record.

Murtagh is clear on what coaching's rewards are. "For me, it's the day-to-day atmosphere, when you see kids really making a commitment to the sport, to the school, to the practice," she says. "Just seeing the kids develop as really good field hockey players. And, to me, that carries over to everything else they do."

Two of Murtagh's recent grads work as assistant coaches: Maureen Connelly, AS'04, at Northwestern, and Leigh Shea, BA'05, at UMass-Lowell. As an undergraduate, Connelly went with Murtagh to the National Field Hockey Coaches Association annual convention, a handy entree, she says.

"I told Cheryl I wanted to coach, and she was great about introducing me to a lot of people there," says Connelly, whose new boss is Northwestern head coach Kelly McCollum, formerly a Murtagh assistant.

Connelly appreciates Title IX's role in her athletic career and women's sports in general. "Keeping women in athletics is vitally important to our society," she says. "I know what I got from my playing experience. There were tough days and a lot of hard work, and I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. I hope I can be a piece of building that sentiment for the girls on teams I coach."

Murtagh believes coaching opportunities are out there for eager youngsters like Connelly. "There are a lot of jobs for good young women," she says. "There are a lot of men assistant coaches coming in, but if there is an opportunity to hire a female in field hockey, that's really what you want to do. In this country, more females play this sport than males."

The veteran coach says she tries "not to be too biased" on the gender issue and calls her own male assistant coaches "great." And yet, she says, "I do feel if you have a choice and you have a strong woman candidate, it's very important for the players to have role models."

"Deep! Deep!"

On a crisp October evening, Laura Schuler's Huskies are about to face off against the Boston University Terriers in Matthews Arena. After a warm-up skate, the players relax in a small locker room tucked into a basement corner. Loud hip-hop pulsates from the room, but when Schuler walks in, the music is quickly turned down.

"Girls, BU is a rough team," Schuler begins. In a measured tone, she lays out what her team can expect from the opposition and what she expects from her team. Then she pulls out a game-day quote and reads: "Some people dream of success, while others wake up and work hard at it."

She rallies the squad with a "Let's go, girls!" and the players gather into a bulky mass of pads and ponytails and shout, "One, two, three, Huskies!"

As the National Anthem plays, Schuler watches her team calmly from the box. The minute the buzzer sounds, whoosh, the girls are off, and the coach's laid-back demeanor goes out the door.

Schuler's focus on the game is immediate and intense. She is loudly vocal, yelling "On it! On it! Deep! Deep! Shot! Shot!" Everything is repeated. "Help her! Help her!" She puts one leg up on the dasher and leans forward, hands clenched, as she calls out commands. She leans so far forward, she looks close to leaping out and joining the game.

It's no surprise Schuler wants to be out there. She's familiar with this rink. The cardiovascular health and exercise major played for Northeastern from 1989 to 1993, serving as team captain her senior year. Her record of 64 goals, 57 assists, and 121 points stands as one of Northeastern's all-time best.

Playing under coach Don McCloud, Schuler knew she'd love to be a coach herself someday. "I remember just thinking on the ice that's the job I wanted," she says. "I also knew it wasn't really a possibility, because it wasn't a full-time job [then], but, wow, what a dream-come-true kind of job."

The Ontario native's life on the ice began at age three, and she made her way through the Canadian youth hockey system. After graduating from Northeastern, she returned to Canada to play for its national team, winning three World Championships and a silver medal at the 1998 Winter Olympics, in Nagano, Japan. While training full-time as an athlete, she also took graduate classes at the University of Toronto and coached competitive youth teams.

In 2001, Schuler came back to Massachusetts to establish a women's hockey team at UMass–Boston. In three years, she had made it into a varsity program. By then, Northeastern was looking for a head coach to rebuild its women's hockey program and restore the competitive standing it had had during Schuler's playing days. O'Brien had Schuler in mind.

"She was one of our best former players," he says. "An Olympian. She had contacts at the international level. And being from Canada is a nice recruiting advantage as well." All the pieces were there, he says. "We hired her, and we've been thrilled ever since. She's got us heading back in the right direction."

Now in her second season as a Northeastern coach, Schuler says, "The rewarding part is seeing when my kids are successful. When they buy into something and it works for them. I always tell my kids that hockey is like poetry on ice. It's so beautiful when everything works and you believe."

Schuler's mentor was Shannon Miller, former Canadian national team coach, now head coach at the University of Minnesota–Duluth. "I wanted to be her," Schuler says. "I always looked up to her. She was just so inspirational. When I was a player, she made me find energy I never knew I had—that extra energy to be the best you can be."

Another mentor is Northeastern men's hockey coach Greg Cronin. "If I have a quick question, his door is always open for me to come in and chitchat with him. That's what I did last year with [former men's coach Bruce] Crowder as well. I feel privileged to have had two guys who've been in the NHL to ask questions of," says Schuler.

Unlike women's basketball and field hockey, two established NCAA programs, women's ice hockey is still setting down roots. Owing to a scarcity of girls' programs, earlier generations of players—even many current players—played on boys' teams at some point in their athletic careers. But the women's sport is growing quickly. Today, there are thirty-three Division 1 teams, up from nineteen in the 2002-2003 season—a 74 percent increase.

Schuler knows she's at the forefront of women coaching collegiate ice hockey. "There are only seven women head coaches in Division 1 hockey," she says. "I feel very privileged to be a part of that."

Step one: "Separate but equal"

Yet, even as they land plum spots, all women coaches are aware of how covetously men are eyeing the women's teams' head-coaching jobs. And how often they get them.

It's a bit of a post–Title IX Catch-22. Women athletes today are half as likely to have women coaches as they were before 1972—despite the fact that there are now ten times more women athletes.

To reverse the decline in women coaches, the 2005 CAGE report suggests that schools follow two guiding principles. One is the concept of "integration," a long-term goal of creating "a situation where student-athletes, regardless of gender, are equally likely to have a woman or man as their coach." Researchers point to the relatively gender-blind attitudes in the legal and medical fields as a model for athletics.

And for the short term, the CAGE report recommends a "separate but equal" approach, where women typically coach women's teams, and men typically coach men's teams.

Though Title IX permits the gender segregation of athletic teams, this allowance currently does not apply to coaches and administrators. So the CAGE researchers are recommending a significant change here: allowing gender-based hiring decisions to correct the present imbalance and set up more women as role models, which would attract even greater numbers of young women to coaching.

"Women should be able to move into positions of leadership, and they need to have role models to do that," Drago says.

Like White and Murtagh, Schuler believes it's important for women to be coached by women. "There should be way more women coaches coaching our game," she says. "You're putting these women in positions of authority and power. And it's good for young women to be able to look up to these women and say, 'I can one day be in that kind of position,' and know they can do the job."

Back in the locker room after the Huskies fall to the Terriers 4-2 on that October night, the players look dejected and tired. Mistakes were made, and Schuler isn't pleased. She is direct in her comments about what went wrong and what needs to happen at the next practice.

But Schuler has sat where her team is sitting now, so she ends her postgame speech on a positive note. "Other than that, we played well, we hustled," she says. "Back to the drawing board."

She goes around the room and shakes each player's hand.

"See you tomorrow, girls."

Liz Matson is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism.

  Iliustration by Laurie Luczak
  Photography by Jorg Meyer