Here’s Janet Kittel, an undergrad at Michigan, digging through the campus’ women’s building basement for some lacrosse sticks. She was cast here by the Michigan athletic administration, enamored with the crazy notion that women could field a lacrosse team in 1968. Find some support, the athletic director told her, barely keeping in his laughter.

Well, she found support, 75 other women who wanted to play, just like her. So she trudged down to the basement and found some old wooden sticks, in such dilapidated condition that she’d have to repair most of them. And when she was done, the administration told them they couldn’t have their team.

It was moments like this – like driving herself and other teammates to Ohio State and Michigan State for field hockey games, like being coached by a football player in field hockey – that would shape Kittel’s view and trailblazing career.

Now here’s Kittel 35 years later, sitting behind her desk as Syracuse associate athletic director. She has to make a decision, a decision every bit as frustrating as it is difficult.

This summer, with April Kater freshly departed from the head coaching spot of the Syracuse women’s soccer team, Kittel had to find a replacement. After scouring the country for qualified women, she found none that could match the credentials of Patrick Farmer, a man. It would be the second time that Syracuse had come up empty in finding a woman to coach women in a year, after SU women’s basketball coach Keith Cieplicki replaced the departed Marianna Freeman two years ago.

This mini-trend at SU underscores a larger, nationwide issue: Female coaches are becoming fewer and fewer, and more men are coaching women’s sports.

‘We are losing women in this profession,’ said Kittel, who serves as vice chair of the NCAA committee on women’s athletics. ‘This is a topic of incredible concern. The candidate pool for jobs in athletics is clearly outweighed by men. I guess when you look up and down the hallway, even with a supreme effort to hire women, your majority is going to be men.’

If anything proves that point, it’s that Kittel, someone who’s made a career out of championing equality for women in sports, has twice in a row hired men to coach to women’s sports.

It’s also her background that made her know her decision, while difficult, was the right one.

‘It made me be extremely confident that there was not anyone better out there,’ Kittel said of hiring Cieplicki and Farmer. ‘It made me dig and search even harder for a woman whose candidacy would be similar, and it made me go through all sorts of rigmarole to prove to myself that they were the right folks for the job.’

So far, she’s been proved right. Despite a rocky 6-22 debut season, Cieplicki has already landed two top recruiting classes and is quickly rebuilding the Orange. Farmer’s credentials immediately wowed the women’s team.

But for all that success on the field, the bigger success would have been finding a more capable woman for the job.

‘We do wish there were more women that were involved in the process who were qualified candidates for the positions,’ said outgoing Syracuse athletic director Jake Crouthamel. ‘We found nationally the pool needs to be expanded. It’s really unfortunate. Personally, I would like to try and hire women for these teams.’

Problem is, Crouthamel stressed experience when hiring the coaches, and Farmer and Cieplicki had a large advantage over female candidates. Naturally, most schools favor experience over inexperience when hiring coaches.

So another problem arises: The pool of female head coaches is small, so more women need to be hired. But few have been head coaches, so there’s no experienced candidates to hire.

Syracuse has taken strides to break that cycle in the past decade, hiring three women to start new programs in women’s lacrosse (Lisa Miller), softball (Mary Jo Firnbach) and women’s soccer (Kater).

‘We took a chance with them,’ Crouthamel said. ‘That’s exactly what it takes. You gotta take chances in the pool, because the pool isn’t that deep.’

In another effort to deepen the pool of candidates, the NCAA has begun conducting coaching seminars for women.

Kittel feels another drawback keeping women away from coaching is the lack of awareness that coaching is indeed a viable career option for a woman.

‘Young women have had a chance at full athletic scholarships for so much shorter a period of time that they often have set their goals at obtaining an athletic scholarship to college,’ Kittel said. ‘They get that when they’re 17, and they don’t reset their goals. We need to learn how to help them reset their goals. We need to help them learn how to make that transition.’

There are signs that the lack of women in coaching is starting to turn around.

While he was looking for a job, Farmer said he would often leave interviews hearing, ‘You’re our most qualified candidate, but we want to hire a female.’

‘A lot of athletic directors are either under pressure or are creating their own philosophy as to why they should hire a female,’ Farmer said.

Players seemed equally ambivalent as to which gender coaches them. Some of that is eased by the fact that Syracuse concentrates on providing a diverse staff in age, race and gender. For example, Shire Hicks, a part of SU’s track and field staff, is the nation’s only female black throws coach, Kittel said. Plus, each of the staffs of women’s teams headed by men at SU are peppered with female assistants.

While this support is nice for the sake of having role models to relate to, players tend not to care if a man or a woman is coaching them. Actually, the women’s soccer team practically pleaded for Farmer, a widely known commodity in the world of women’s soccer.

When Crouthamel met with the team over the summer to tell them he was leaning toward Farmer, he expressed some hesitancy about replacing a female with a male and any backlash he might receive. Crouthamel explained the team told him, ‘If you get any complaints, we’ll respond and our parents will respond.’

The transition from a gender standpoint has gone equally smooth for the women’s basketball team.

‘I think every coach has their own style,’ said SU senior center Chineze Nwagbo, whose first female coach of her life was Freeman. ‘I don’t think I ever looked at it in terms of gender. It’s been the same for me. Every person is a different person. I don’t think it has to do with the context of male-female. You’re always going to have that outside interpretation. That kind of stuff just doesn’t apply when you step on the court.’

‘I’ve had female coaches who weren’t afraid to get in your face, really animated,’ said SU junior forward Jill Norton. ‘And I’ve had male coaches who were laid back, wouldn’t get in your face. There is a stereotype, but in my experience it hasn’t played out.’

Both Farmer and Cieplicki echoed that idea in relation to coaching females as opposed to males.

‘I probably don’t take into account the general differences people see as much as most coaches,’ Farmer said. ‘A lot of the stuff I coach is very similar. There are different tactical parts – a lot of females can’t hit it as far as the guys, and so on.

‘Everybody wants to think that the guys will be more tough, that you can say more stuff to them, that you can ask more of them, but I don’t think that’s true. The hardest competitor I ever had was this professional woman from Norway. If there was a knife fight in the alley and you wanted to pick who to get in there with, you’d certainly consider her.’

Farmer’s views come from a unique athletic background. Growing up in Vermont, Farmer competed on a ski team and trained with women – some who routinely beat him down the mountain. From a young age, he’s known competitive women, which has allowed him to coach the game – not men or women.

Cieplicki never thought he would end up coaching women after he was drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers, but the right opportunity arose with an open assistants spot at Vermont, and he’s been coaching women ever since.

‘I think it’s important for people in general to try to correct them more on an individual level than on a team level,’ Cieplicki said. ‘Just the way the world is now and the socialization and the sensitivity to people, I just try to be careful.

‘When I first started coaching, a male women’s coach said to me, ‘Coach ’em just like the guys.’ I’m not sure that was great advice. I’ll just stick to the fact that it comes down to getting to know each player.’

Published on February 8, 2005 at 12:00 pm