Women coaches breaking into US sport

A handful of female coaches are blazing a trail for women after landing jobs in men's professional sport but the jury is out on whether the flurry of appointments represents a tipping point or a statistical blip. San Antonio Spurs assistant coach Becky Hammon made worldwide headlines earlier this month when she guided the NBA team to a summer league championship in Las Vegas, just over a year after being hired by head coach Gregg Popovich.

Popovich, the five-time NBA champion, believes it is only a matter of time before Hammon is appointed as a head coach with an NBA franchise. "I don't even look at it as, well, she's the first female this and that and the other. She's a coach, and she's good at it," Popovich said in a recent radio interview.

A little over a week after Hammon and the Spurs clinched victory in the NBA summer league, the Arizona Cardinals made history by announcing the appointment of Jen Welter as an assistant coach. Welter, hired for training camp and preseason to work with inside linebackers, is believed to be the first female coach of any kind to work in the National Football League.

Mary Jo Kane, director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, believes the appointments represent "important milestones" as they owe little to political pressure. "What I am most hopeful about is the fact that I don't believe the NFL and the NBA are responding to pressure that says 'You must hire more women' or that these appointments have been made because of pressure to be politically correct," Kane told AFP. The fact that Popovich and Arians, as well as several professional athletes, had given both Hammon and Welter ringing public endorsements was also significant, Kane said. Kane is cautious, however, on whether the appointments of the likes of Hammon, Welter and Lieberman will be seen as a tipping point. "I think it's too soon to tell whether it is," she said.