Black female athletes: Having Black female coach is crucial

South Carolina senior guard Brea Beal knew she could trust DawnStaley before she even suited up for the Gamecocks.

It wasn’t just Staley’s coaching accolades, which includefueling South Carolina’s meteoric rise in women’s basketball, thatsold Beal. Beal knew that Staley — a Black woman like her — wouldbest understand how to guide her as she navigated both life andplaying basketball on a big stage.

“People that were telling me what this community was about, Iknow it’s somewhere I wanted to be,” Beal said. “As soon as I gothere, she definitely led me down a journey so I could find out whoI am.”

Black female representation in the coaching and sportsadministrative ranks has existed on a minute scale — even in asport like basketball, which along with track and field has thehighest concentration of Black female college athletes. Blackfemale players who have been coached by a Black woman told TheAssociated Press that it was crucial to their development.

“There are some coaches who will just have all guys with nounderstanding that there are sometimes things that a young womanmay need to talk to another woman about,” said Kiki Barnes, aformer basketball player and jumper at New Orleans and current GulfCoast Athletic Conference commissioner.

While the number of women coaching women’s sports has increasedin the past decade, Black women continue to lag behind most othergroups. During the 2021-22 school year, 399 Black women coachedwomen’s NCAA sports teams in Divisions I, II and III, compared with3,760 white women and 5,236 white men.

In women’s NCAA basketball, a sport made up of 30% Blackathletes, Black women made up 12% of head coaches across alldivisions during the 2021-22 season, according to the NCAA’sdemographics database.

Fourteen Black women led women’s basketball teams across 65Power Five programs this past season — up one from 2021. That’sless than 22% of the total in a sport that was played by more Blackathletes (40.7%) than any other race in Division I, according to areport with data from the 2020-21 season.

For the first time in a decade, four Black coaches advanced tothe Sweet 16 of the women’s basketball tournament, includingStaley, who said she believes it’s more popular to hire a woman at“this stage of the game.”

“And it’s not to say that I’m going to sit here and male bash,because we have a lot of male coaches who have been in our game fordecades upon decades,” said Staley, who will lead her team into theFinal Four this weekend. “But I will say that giving women anopportunity to coach women and helping women navigate through lifelike they have navigated through life will allow yourstudent-athletes a different experience than having a malecoach.”

For years Staley has been an advocate for hiring more femalecoaches — especially minorities — in college basketball, but WNBAplayer Angel McCoughtry said Black female coaches as successful asStaley are still too few and far between in the sport.

“When I was getting recruited in high school, I don’t rememberhaving a Dawn Staley to look up to,” said McCoughtry, who played atLouisville from 2005-09.

McCoughtry also named Carolyn Peck, the first African Americanwoman to coach her team to an NCAA women’s basketball title in 1999with Purdue, as another example of representation in the sport.

“So there’s one or two every decade,” McCoughtry said. “Whycan’t we have 10? There’s 10 Caucasian coaches every decade.”

McCoughtry, a former No. 1 overall pick by the WNBA’s AtlantaDream, got used to being around people who didn’t look like orunderstand her. She is Black. Her AAU and high school coaches wereBlack men. Her college coaches were white men. Marynell Meadors, awhite woman, was her first coach in Atlanta.

She has fielded frustrating questions from white peers, coachesand owners — like how often she washes her hair, or whether herpassionate play was because she was from Baltimore.

“There’s just a disconnect in understanding things,” the36-year-old said, adding: “We need more coaches to protect us.”

McCoughtry has never had a Black female head coach but did havethe impactful guidance of Michelle Clark-Heard, a Black woman whomJeff Walz brought on as an assistant when he took over atLouisville in 2008.

She also leaned on Tim Eaton, a Black assistant coach who shesaid advocated for her in her freshman year, when then-coach TomCollen wanted to send her back to Baltimore because she was late toone of her first practices. Similarly, McCoughtry said, she feltshe had less room to make mistakes than white teammates. When shequestioned a coach, she was labeled a troublemaker; when she gotfired up about a play, she was told she had a bad attitude.

“We just never had any inch to be human, like our Caucasiancounterparts,” she said, adding: “But who understands that? OurBlack coaches. Because they went through everything we wentthrough. They have a story, too.”

Part of the reason for the lack of Black female coaches isbecause of who ultimately holds the power to hire, Barnes said.That’s often athletic directors, a level where there is an evengreater lack of diversity — 224 of 350 in Division I are white men.Plus, she added, there are changing requirements for what it takesto get leadership opportunities.

“And now the system has changed to where now you’ve got to knowsearch firms because now search firms are the ones that aremanaging and determining who gets these opportunities,” she said.“Every time we understand how to get in the room and what it takesto be prepared, it’s like the rules change.”

Barnes played high school basketball in her hometown of Minden,Louisiana, where she had an assistant coach who was a Black woman;Barnes still refers to her as “Coach Smith.”

“For her, it wasn’t just about basketball. It was about who Iwas as a young lady,” Barnes recalled, adding, “I would say it’ssimilar with a young woman wanting to talk to a mom about womanlythings. It’s not that a man couldn’t do it, but I wouldn’t feel ascomfortable talking to either my dad or any other man about womanthings.”

Priscilla Loomis, a 2016 Olympic high jumper who is Black, saidshe became a coach to provide kids that look like her therepresentation the sport has lacked. NCAA track and field numbersmirrored women’s basketball numbers in 2021-22: 5% of head coacheswere Black women, while 19% of women’s NCAA track and fieldathletes are Black.

“They want so badly to feel seen and to feel loved and to begiven guidance,” Loomis said. “And so that’s why I always say it’simportant to get women of color, men of color to the starting line,because a lot of times we’re so many steps behind.”

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AP Sports Writer Pete Iacobelli and AP Basketball Writer DougFeinberg contributed to this report.