Hello everyone. My name is Fletcher Brown. I'm a graduate student at the University of Southern Maine and it's my pleasure to present my thinking matters presentation first. While I hope everybody's staying safe and staying healthy, especially during these uncertain times. So let's get into it briefly about myself. I am a head women's basketball coach at the University of Maine at Fort Kent. So this subject matter that I chose was something that I was passionate about and I thought could be a great benefit to the profession that I work in myself as a professional, just the, the overall basketball culture and society. So my presentation is going to cover a lot. It's pretty much about the alarmingly low number of female coaches that there are coaching the sport of basketball, specifically in the United States, or even more specifically at the division one level as well as professional levels. So what's the problem? The problem is that there's really not enough women coaches coach in college basketball. There's a few different obstacles that women face in trying to obtain positions. And I'm going to go through those throughout my presentation. But in a nutshell, not enough email coasts. So the purpose of this research was to explore exactly why they are known as female coaches. And as you can see here, I have the logos of the NC double a, the WNBA and the NBA. I just kinda get people at an exact idea of where and who were looking at. So why not? Why not? Why not more women coaches at the highest levels of basketball in the United States. Throughout the next few minutes, I'm going to talk about exactly why, based on the research that I did, It's details surrounding Title nine, a lack of female athletic directors, a lack of female role models, and perceived gender bias. So firstname title nine K, was enacted in 1972 to paraphrase it pretty much gave equality to everybody. And, and what is specifically known for is giving the opportunity to young girls and women to participate in sports just the same as any man or boy would. I gave female sports the same funding as male sports? So it also opened the door for women to pursue other professions. And some things that have come from Title 91 of the most surprising things is that the number of female coaches has actually dropped since Title Nine was enacted, which is which is surprising. I think that is because with title nine, as I mentioned, it gave the opportunity for women to participate in other professions outside of coaching. Towards the end of that, towards the bottom of that last slide, I noted that there's only one female coach in the NBA, which is the men's professional basketball association in the United States. Excuse me. There's two to coaches on NBA stats, but only one is notable. Only one is actually on the bench. And you can see during the game that's Miss Becky amine to the San Antonio Spurs. The other woman is more of a player development, sort of behind the scenes typed persons, that's Nancy labor, and with the Sacramento professional organization. So Title Nine, although it did give the opportunity for more women to participate in sports, it also showed that because women now have the opportunity to pursue other careers, there's there's less female coaches doing it then before titled Not so homologous reproduction. Hopefully I pronounce that word correctly. I've been studying this for 68 months now and I still can't get it right. What that is, is essentially the hiring of somebody else in your own models, soap, for example, myself being a white man, I'd be hiring other white men. This is pretty much all about athletic directors hiring. So hiring people who look like themselves. Because before Title nine, there were no female athletic directors. You know, it was it was very hard for women to obtain those positions and athletic administrators, therefore, you really don't see any female athletic directors or very few. The next thing that I came across in my research is a fear and discrimination of women and a gender bias. You know, a lot of female coaches are afraid to admit that they're publicly lesbian because there has been a number of coaches who have resigned or have been forced to resign because they came out as lesbian or gay. Most of them have won the lawsuit set they've filed. But there's still a fear amongst, amongst women in the coaching profession that no, if they come out as, as lesbian or gay or bisexual or whatever the case may be, that that sort of thing is frowned upon. So in 2017, there is only one publicly lesbian division one head women's basketball clubs. I was actually at the University at Vanderbilt. This is coordinate Graham, who was forced to resigned after coming out as gay. And she did win her lawsuit against Drake University, which is, which is a step in the right direction. So one of the other major things that came up in my research is a lack of female role models in coaching. Because there's not many female athletic directors. There's just not many female coaches or as many as there could be. One of the big things that, that kind of piggybacks off that idea is that there's so many men's basketball games on nationally televised programming, so many games on ESPN and CBS, and NBC and Fox. There's not that many women's basketball games. There's not as much opportunity for young girls and young women to see women playing and most importantly, coaching at the highest levels. There's just not enough, not enough role models to go along with the gender bias. And to sort of, sort of a by-product of the fact that there's not enough role models is the difference in salary, which I want to make sure I point out to in the Power Five conferences, which are the conferences that spend the most on their athletic departments. And the conference's who, you know, schools that we've heard about do Kentucky, UCLA, University of Texas, places like that. The average salary for a men's basketball coach was 2.5 million, or the average salary for a women's basketball coach was only $600 thousand or a little over $600 thousand, not even a million dollars. A couple of the interesting statistics, the highest paid division one men's basketball coach was Mike's shapes. Kiki made almost $9 million last year. And the highest paid women's basketball coach was actually a man. That's where I am at the University of Connecticut, who made $2.4 million. Keep in mind the winning is college basketball coach of all time, men or women is a female. That's pass Summit with over 1000 career wins. Photographs, so geno RAM on the left and my chef scheme on the right. So a little bit more about the gender bias. One can say that men's sports generate more funding than female sports, which is true. But at the end of the day, you know, salaries and whatnot should not be judged on how much people are generating. It should be, it should be based on, you know, the, the statistics, the wins, the losses. It should be based on the impact that a coach can make on a young student. Athletes live, you know how much they're mentoring them to succeed athletically as well as academically, and how much better they've seen that student athlete grow. But you know, for they came to college and when they're getting ready to graduate, that's what it should be, based on my opinion, but that's just me. So this was a qualitative study where I used the research review, the literature review, as well as interviews with coaches, college basketball coaches, this male Division One women's basketball coach. He noted that, you know, essentially the, the idea of homo, religious, homologous reproduction is super, super big deal. And it's very noticed by college coaches all over the country. This was a female Division One women's basketball coach. Her statement was it was along the same lines. She wishes she could be in a position to hire more women, but she'd rather be coaching than being an administrator, which was, I thought, an interesting point that she made. She believes that women should see, should receive the same recognition as men when it comes to being in positions of power. This research based from the interviews was, was right on live with much of the research and the data that I've found from the literature review, that domino effect from a lack of female athletic directors just, just carries on through coaching. A lot of the research that I've found are the data that I found from the interviews had to do with the lifestyle of a coach and the fact that the lifestyle of a coach at the younger levels is just not very conducive to, to a young woman that a lot of young women, they'd rather raise a family or, or do something that has a little bit of a better work-life balance. The next few slides are quotes from a number of men's and women's, both male and female coaches, who kinda touched on the lifestyle of a coach. They all said similar things, that it's not for everybody. You know, at the end of the day, you really have to be passionate about coaching. You really have to be passionate about helping people. And you know, you're going to spend a lot of time doing laundry in and now, you know, driving vans and driving buses and do everything yourself at the lower levels. You know, it takes a long time to get to the Division one or the professional level of Coke. So it's, it's not for everybody. Feel free to stop or pause this video at any time to look over the slides a little bit more in depth. One thing I'd like to point out here is a photograph of Miss Pat Summit, headwinds basketball coach for a very long time at the University of Tennessee, who once again, as I mentioned earlier, is the winning ust, a college basketball coach of all time with over 1000 career wins. So it was, it was interesting that most of what was found in the literature review was backed up by the interview day, which I was really encouraged by one piece of information that was different or that was that I found in the interviews that I did not find in the literature was that there needs to be, or that a lot of coaches think there needs to be more women on men's basketball teams? Are men's basketball coaching staffs. The male Division One women's basketball coach, who had a lot of contributions to the interview process, who I quoted earlier said that, you know, essentially when you take these boys at 17 or 18 years old, do you take them away from mom and grandma for the first time? They need to have a prominent female figure in their life. He said, he said that there's only one woman on a men's division one college basketball staff. That woman has an ASU carry at the University of Maine basketball staff under head coach Richard barium. So that's a step in the right direction, but it's not where we want to see it quite yet. The demographic and background data, the interview candidates were chosen simply on their qualifications as being a college basketball coach or university athletic director. Everybody that I interviewed who worked at the division one level, except for one person who worked at the Division three level. Unfortunately, no professional coaches accepted an invitation to be interviewed. There were some limitations to this study. One of the most glaring ones was the inability to interview a professional coach. The other one that was sort of a setback for me in my research was that there's no one single database or one single informative source. First, statistics on who's coaching where and who they are. I think that's because there's such a high turnover in the coaching profession, it's constantly changing, especially during this time of year when that basketball season is wrapping up. No, March, April, May, June, a lot of people are getting hired and fired and it's hard to exactly pinpoint who's where and where they'd been. So that was, that was a limitation. In conclusion, women deserve to be leaders just as much as men. They are just as qualified with more women and girls playing basketball since Title nine, since the creation of the WNBA, there needs to be more women in coaching. I didn't find one single answer or solution, but I did identify a number of obstacles and a few potential, potential solutions were created. My advice to a young woman who wants to be a coach is just like you would in coaching, just like you would in preparing for an opponent for a upcoming season. Got understand your strengths and your weaknesses. Got to understand the strengths and the obstacles that the other team can face. In this case, it would be athletic directors and gender biases and things of that nature. You gotta come up with a straw and game plan and now hopefully put yourself in a position to succeed. So I don't see a sudden influx and female coaches happening overnight, but slowly but surely, I see us taking steps in the right direction. Once again, I thank you for your time. Please feel free to stop or pause this video at a time to read a little bit closer on those quotes and thanks again.