Soobum Im, USA Today Sports
If there’s any one sports league that’s making a forward effort to break down the barrier between men and women in sports, it’s the NBA. From their employment of three different female officials to its recent “He For She” campaign, it truly holds the moral high ground for gender equality in major American sports, although that’s a bit like being the best player from the Philadelphia 76ers‘ bench. Still, it’s no surprise that the first full-time coach in a major sport comes from the NBA in the form of San Antonio Spurs assistant Becky Hammon.
After one year, Hammon has gained the respect of her peers around the Spurs’ organization, and all signs point to her being an outstanding assistant coach. The franchise she works for has had many of those; the list of Spurs personnel that has eventually landed head coaching positions could fill up the dead sea scrolls. As long as they keep winning, that trend will continue.
Hammon’s turn may come sooner than you think. She’s only 38 years old, but so is Brad Stevens of the Boston Celtics. She played 20 years of highly competitive basketball (combining her college and pro career) and has always had one of the higher basketball IQs in the game.
She’s a legitimate candidate for an NBA head coaching seat. After future Hall of Fame member Gregg Popovich retires, the Spurs may look to sign Hammon as someone with a great deal of experience with San Antonio basketball and the Spurs’ winning culture. It may be that another team gives her an enticing offer before that happens, and she’ll end up leading a squad elsewhere.
Regardless of where on the basketball map she ends up, Hammon’s impact on sports will be monumental. Male athletes are universally stereotyped as sexist, self-entitled jocks, and female athletes get most of their attention for sex appeal. The NFL has been forced to major damage control in the wake of multiple poorly handled domestic abuse cases last year, and even as people become more accepting of gender equality, most women’s sports — the ones that don’t involve sprinting across a court in short skirts or tight clothing — are more often-than-not viewed as irrelevant by an appalling majority of sports fans.
Hammon’s success story could evolve into a much larger series; a kind of female empowerment movement that hasn’t yet poured into the mainstream sports industries. The very aspect of having a female NBA coach validates the WNBA as a legitimate professional sports league (just as it should be seen) and it’s a safe bet to assume that will spread to other leagues as well.
In the end, Hammon is here for the same reason every other NBA coach is: because she loves basketball. That’s what makes it such a depressing albeit important issue; more women like Becky Hammon should’ve gotten these opportunities long before this year. It seems sports are unfortunately one of the last institutions to make progress when it comes to gender equality, and it shows in the way fans treat the WNBA as another vessel for their sexism instead of praising it for giving female athletes an opportunity to shine.
If Becky Hammon finds her way to the top of the coaching ranks for an NBA team, any NBA team, then she’ll open a window for changes that could propel basketball over the top as America’s most progressive sport. It seems likely too. After all, she’s already earned herself a spot with arguably the most respected sports franchise in the country.
