Why Aren’t More Women Coaching Women?…A Coach’s Perspective
One year, I was coaching my team at the NCAA Championships, and during the quarterfinals I looked around and realized I was the only female head coach out of the 8 teams still competing. It made me sad. I found myself wondering how many talented women had entered coaching because they loved the profession, only to leave somewhere along the way.
It turns out the numbers back up what I felt standing on that court. FIFA’s latest global benchmarking report found that only 22 percent of head coaches across women’s professional leagues worldwide are women.¹ Here in the U.S., the NWSL enters the 2026 season with four female head coaches out of sixteen clubs — and that’s actually progress, since there were only two the year before.²
College coaching is no different. According to the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, women coach fewer than half of women’s college teams.³ In women’s college tennis, only about 21.5 percent of head coaches are women.⁴ Meanwhile, 95 percent of men’s teams are coached by men.⁵ Those numbers don’t surprise me.
Coaching is an incredibly rewarding career, but it also asks a tremendous amount of the people who choose it. For women, those demands are often compounded by challenges that have little to do with coaching itself.
The Pay Ceiling
I remember sitting in my athletic director’s office asking for a raise after we had won our second national championship in three years. I hadn’t received anything beyond the standard annual increase in close to a decade, so I felt like I had earned the conversation. His response completely caught me off guard. He told me I had “had a good run,” but I was already the highest-paid women’s tennis coach in our conference.
He didn’t compare me to the other tennis coaches in the conference. He compared me only to coaches of women’s tennis, as though that was the appropriate benchmark for my value. I had achieved more success than many of the coaches of men’s teams around me, but they weren’t even part of the conversation. I remember thinking this was something I would have expected to hear in 1970, not during my own career.
The Assumption of Male Authority
Whenever I traveled with one of my male assistants, tournament officials almost always assumed he was the head coach. They would walk directly toward him to welcome our team before realizing I was actually in charge. Early in my career, I found myself offended by those moments. Eventually, I learned to simply step forward, shake their hand, introduce myself as the head coach and move on. It’s a small thing, but I did it more times than I can count, and I doubt my male colleagues ever had to.
Navigating Male Intimidation
Most of the men I coached against were outstanding colleagues and role models. But every now and then there would be someone who tried to control the environment by being louder, more confrontational or more intimidating than everyone else around him. I remember one match where an opposing coach spent the afternoon yelling after nearly every point, questioning officials and directing his frustration toward my players. When I finally asked him to calm down, he snapped back, “Don’t tell me how to coach.”
I didn’t engage further — I just made sure my players knew I’d handled it and moved on with the match. But it stayed with me longer than it should have. Not because men don’t get yelled at too. It’s that my players and I had to feel that intimidation in the first place, and his team never did.
Having to Prove Your Authority
Our courts at Emory were shared with the community, and every so often someone would wander into practice as though they were walking through a public park. When I explained that the women’s team was practicing and had priority, they would sometimes question me, argue with me or simply ignore me. These confrontations happened so regularly that dealing with them should have been written into my job description. What struck me was that I didn’t see the same thing happening during the men’s practices. My male counterpart’s authority over his courts seemed to be understood, while I routinely had to assert mine.
Being Pulled in Multiple Directions
College coaching asks an enormous amount of the people who choose it. Recruiting never really stops. Evenings and weekends belong to your team. The emotional investment is constant because coaching isn’t just about practices and matches; it’s about people. During the season there were plenty of nights when I came home physically exhausted while mentally still at work. I remember overhearing my husband joke to a friend, “Amy and I won’t talk again until June.” He was exaggerating, but only slightly.
I was also raising two boys during much of my coaching career, which added another layer to those demands. Research backs this up — mothers report significantly more guilt than fathers over work interfering with family.⁶ That finding resonates deeply with me. There were plenty of times when coaching required me to be somewhere for someone else’s child when I wanted to be with my own, and the guilt that came with that was very real.
Lessons Along the Way
Over time, I had to figure out how to make the career work for me, and I think that’s an important part of the conversation if we want more women to choose coaching and stay in it. The demands of the profession aren’t going away, but I got better at navigating them. Here are a few things I learned along the way that helped make a long career in coaching more manageable.
Integrate Work & Family
First things first. I learned to stop trying so hard to separate coaching from the rest of my life. I started bringing my boys to practices, NCAA Championships, and the office on sick days. My players came to my house. I wanted my children to grow up seeing women lead, and I wanted my players to see that coaching and family could coexist.
Learn to Delegate
My husband, who also worked, and I learned to divide responsibilities at home much more intentionally. He took over the laundry, and we alternated making dinner and doing the dishes, which took some of the daily pressure off me during the season. I also became much better at delegating at work, giving my assistants more recruiting and administrative responsibilities. I had to let go of the idea that I needed to do everything myself.
Be Yourself
Early in my career, I felt more pressure to always look and act like the person in charge. Some of that was probably my age and inexperience, but some of it was absolutely about being a woman in a profession where most of the people in positions of authority were men. I felt like I had to overcompensate — to always be confident, composed, decisive, and in control.
As the years passed, I became much more comfortable just being myself. My players saw me cry. They saw me lose my temper occasionally. They saw me coach an NCAA match in a fleece bathrobe after discovering Walmart didn’t sell a jacket warm enough for an unexpectedly cold California night. I stopped worrying so much about whether I looked like a head coach and became much more comfortable trusting that I was one.
Find Female Mentors—and Become One
I was lucky to have female mentors of my own along the way, including a coach from a rival team who took the time to guide me even though we competed against each other every season. Decades later, I still call her for advice.
One of my favorite memories came toward the end of my career. A former player and assistant coach, and current head coach, Bridget Harding, told me that much of what she knew about being a female coach came from watching me over the years. It was one of the greatest compliments I’ve ever received because it reminded me that coaching women is about so much more than tennis.
Final Thoughts:
I loved coaching. I loved mentoring young women. I loved competing, building teams and watching players grow into confident adults. I would choose the profession again without hesitation. My hope is that more women do the same.
Because the more women who choose to stay in coaching, the more young women will grow up believing there’s nothing unusual about seeing a woman leading from the sidelines. And perhaps one day, a female coach will look around the quarterfinals of a women’s national championship and see all female coaches competing against her.
Footnotes
FIFA, “FIFA Women’s Football Benchmarking Report Expanded to Offer Detailed Global Insights and Recommendations,” March 17, 2025, https://inside.fifa.com/womens-football/news/womens-football-benchmarking-report-detailed-global-insights-recommendations.
Asli Pelit, “Ted Lasso Accidentally Stumbles into Women’s Soccer’s Biggest Coaching Problem,” The Athletic, August 13, 2026, https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/7509031/2026/08/13/ted-lasso-women-soccer-coaching-issue/.
Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, “Tucker Center Releases 14th Annual Women in College Coaching Report Card,” June 25, 2026, https://www.cehd.umn.edu/tucker-center-releases-14th-annual-women-college-coaching-report-card.
Intercollegiate Tennis Association representative, verbal confirmation to author, unpublished statistic on women’s representation among women’s college tennis head coaches.
WeCOACH, “National Women Coaches Day,” accessed August 30, 2026, https://www.nationalwomencoachesday.com/.
Jessica L. Borelli et al., “Bringing Work Home: Gender and Parenting Correlates of Work-Family Guilt among Parents of Toddlers,” Journal of Child and Family Studies 26 (2017), https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-017-0693-9.
