It’s a weird notion that men know more about sports than women. Any person who has knowledge and love of the sport can be a worthy coach. So if all that is true then why has it taken so long for women to be coaches in male dominated professional sports? Justine Siegal recently made MLB history when the Oakland Athletics announced she would serve as a guest instructor for their Instructional League club, making her the first woman to coach in big league history.

The NFL also procured their first female coach this summer when the Cardinals hired Jen Welter, a former collegiate rugby and women’s pro football player, to be the coach of Arizona’s inside linebackers.

The NBA also recently made history. The San Antonio Spurs have announced the hiring of WNBA star Becky Hammon as an assistant coach. Hammon is the second woman to work on an NBA coaching staff, but the first to be a full-time employee.

The times are changing. Living in the world as it is today it’s hard to find people who will publicly say they disagree with women teaching men a sport. Did you know that right now Elder has two female coaches?

Carrie Bushman coaches diving while Melissa Frampton is a soccer coach. Elder also had a history of hiring female coaches to lead all guys teams. “The 1^st one I didn’t hire myself,” said Athletic Director Dave Dabbelt.

“Tia Lonneman coached swimming from 1982-1984. Then in the ’90s when we first started volleyball we had a head coach named Sue Fishburn.”

Sue was a former Seton Volleyball state champion as well as a player collegiate player at Dayton. “She enjoyed the boys’ toughness and coach-ability. Sue was fierce she made them do a lot of running and I can recall times when she spiked the ball so hard on them at practice kids would dive out of the way.”

Elder has not been afraid to hire the opposite sex to coach, so why has it taken professional sports so long to catch up? We are still years away from seeing the first female head football coach, but the women’s sports has grown substantially in the past few years. This past summer about 25.4 million viewers on Fox tuned in to watch the Women’s World Cup Final against Japan. This was the most viewed soccer game ever in the U.S. men or women.

This shows that America as a nation is more accepting of women in sports, as they should be. Obviously no one I interviewed at Elder said they were against having a female coach. I did get some interesting quotes.

Senior Tyler Wuebbolt stated, “I wouldn’t mind being coached by a female. If a she knows what she’s doing then who cares?” The consensus around school was the same. Woman can be just as knowledgeable as men and no one has a problem being coached by them.

Don’t be surprised when the first female is hired as head coach of a major sport. Who knows, maybe this will lead to the first women playing pro sports with the guys.