In the eight team PWHL, there are only two women serving as head coaches. It's an example of the underrepresentation of women in elite coaching roles, particularly in hockey. For a league built on the premise of promoting women to higher levels of professional hockey both on and off the ice, it's a stark issue.
As researchers have claimed for decades, "while the participation of female athletes has increased, the percentage of female coaches has remained extremely low."
In the PWHL, it's a short list including PWHL Coach of the Year Kori Cheverie and Ottawa Charge bench boss Carla MacLeod.
This offseason, three PWHL teams hired new coaches. Each team chose a man to take over the role, both - Boston's Kris Sparre and Seattle's Steven O'Rourke - with zero experience coaching women's hockey. It's not that either is a bad coach or a bad candidate, it's just that there are many equally or more qualified women coaching outside the PWHL. As well, Sparre has never been a head coach at a high level, and O'Rourke has only 30 games of head coaching experience in the last decade. His last head coaching job prior to this was a U-15 boys team. It's not a critique on the people hired, nor the people who did the hiring. But the issue remains: there is a vast underrepresentation of women coaching professional sport, and the PWHL has become a poster child for this.
It continues the trend that scholars have described, placing women as the "minority" in coaching, causing women to "remain peripheral figures at all levels in coaching, particularly in high performance sport, where masculine approaches to coaching, and recruitment of male coaches often prevail."
Representation Lacking For The Next Generation
The PWHL has rolled out the platitude of "if you can see it, you can be it" many times. When it comes to coaching, that gap remains, despite the presence of two women in head coaching roles. Where the league has succeeded in representation is at the general manager level where the numbers are flipped with women leading organizations in Boston, Montreal, Toronto, Seattle, Minnesota, and Vancouver. While six of eight coaches are men, six of eight general managers are women.
But GM roles are often invisible to the eyes of young fans, and are less visible to players. As Jessica Campbell, the first woman to serve as a full-time on-bench assistant coach says, seeing women in coaching roles is crucial.
"I never saw the representation of females coaching in the National Hockey League or I didn't really anticipate that my route or my path would go into this side of the game, but I guess what you don't see, you don't know, right?" Campbell told the CBC.
This season, seven of the WNBA's 13 head coaches were women. Four of six new coaches to the league this season however, were men. The WNBA remains ahead of the curve however as the NWSL sits at an even lower percentage than the PWHL with only two of 14 coaches being women.
What can be done to close the gap?
There are programs available to women in the hockey world. Recently, Hockey Canada completed a high-performance course for women only, helping to grow the group of available elite coaches in the country, but the need is hundreds, or thousands, of coaches to take on the roles.
Current Ottawa Charge general manager Mike Hirshfeld knows of another program first-hand as he spent seven years working with the NHL Coaches Association, including running the NHLCA Female Coaches Program, "an initiative that aims to support women in several areas including skills development, leadership strategies, communication tactics, networking, and career advancement opportunities."
The issue remains, however, that unless organizations are willing to hire women in high-level coaching roles, no number of mentorship and training programs will themselves close the gap. In this way, the issue remains larger than sport, as views on women in leadership and coaching roles, including in a women's professional league, persist.
As Levi et al found, "the hegemony present within our wider society permeates the institution of sport, where it is continually produced and reproduced."
They continued by stating that "Despite recognizing positive shifts that have been made toward gender equality in recent years...parity is yet to be reached" due to "ingrained traditional views around women and gender."
Perhaps one of the biggest problems when it comes to recruiting PWHL head coaches is that the salary is significantly lower than many NCAA coaching positions. It's hard to lure the best coaches when they're paid better elsewhere.
There Are Plenty Of Candidates
Calling men who have only served as assistant coaches due to the fact they've worked in the ECHL, AHL, OHL, WHL, or QMJHL ‘more qualified’ than women who have directly served as head coaches is a perplexing stance that devalues the many qualified, experienced, and talented women in coaching.
At the NCAA Division 1 level, 24 women serve as head coaches, while 21 men hold the role. That number grew slightly this offseason as former Minnesota Frost assistant coach Mira Jalosuo took over the head coaching role at St. Cloud State from Brian Idalski, who was hired by PWHL Vancouver. The woman who hired him, PWHL Vancouver general manager Cara Gardner Morey, recently stepped away from her role as the head coach for Princeton's women's hockey program, where she was replaced by now-former Boston Fleet head coach Courtney Kessel.
Looking at the U Sports level as well, there are dozens of talented coaches who are also involved in the NHLCA program including the likes of Vicky Sunohara, Rachel Wiebe, Jessica Turi, Kelly Paton, Sarah Hilworth, and Stacey Colarossi, among others. Dozens of women in the NHLCA program have a wealth of experience. Sunohara is a three-time U Sports coach of the year, challenged recently by Concordia head coach Julie Chu, who has now earned the award in back-to-back seasons.
‘If you can see it, you can be it’ has been a rallying cry for representation in the PWHL on the ice. Behind the bench, there is work to be done.