Women Coaches Scarce in Pasadena Girls’ Volleyball

La Salle’s Varisty Coach, Tiare Tuitama. – Photo by Jacob Bigley

By Christian Romo

When the La Salle girls’ volleyball team hosted the opening round of the 2016 CIF playoffs, Lancer’s head coach Tiare Tuitama fell into a surprising minority.

In just six seasons, Tuitama has led the Lancers to four league titles and CIF championships in 2012 and 2013. She also owns and operates her own club, Forza1 in Pasadena, and coaches the La Salle boys’ team in the spring. Few women in the area coach more volleyball than she does.

However, it shocked her to find out how few women were currently coaching. When Tuitama stepped onto the court for her team’s playoff matchup against Ayala, she was one of only eleven women coaching a team in the Division 3 playoffs. The other nineteen head coaches were men.

“Those numbers…that surprised me,” Tuitama said. The low number of women coaching wasn’t limited to Division 3, either. In Division 2, women coached only nine of the twenty-seven playoff teams. In Division 1, only eleven of thirty. And in Pasadena, the numbers are even lower.

Of the ten high school girls volleyball head coaches in the city, only three are women: Tuitama, Pasadena High coach Ashley DiSalvo, and Blair coach Janel Coburn. The other seven schools, including girls’ schools Westridge and Mayfield, employ men to coach their girls’ volleyball teams.

Women coaches are underrepresented in girls’ volleyball, not just in Pasadena, but around the country. That much is clear. The reasons why, however, are not.

Dr. Mary Cruz-Stevens, a teacher and former student at Marshall Fundamental, coached the Eagles girls’ volleyball team for ten seasons, stepping down last year to finish her doctorate.

“When I came back from college, I wanted to be involved with my team,” Cruz-Stevens said, “and I wanted to do something to stay in touch with Marshall.”

La Salle hired Tuitama in 2011 after she assisted at East Los Angeles College and Campbell Hall thanks to her connections with then-Campbell Hall and current La Salle athletic director Anthony Harris. DiSalvo got the job at PHS out of college after beating out one other finalist, and Blair hired Coburn last year as the only lead candidate for the job.

Preferential treatment for men often explains a workplace gender gap, especially in athletics. But despite being the only women coaching in Pasadena, none of the three believe they faced any gender bias during the interview process.

“I wouldn’t say that I’ve seen it,” said DiSalvo, who thinks her gender may have even helped her get the job at PHS due to an issue the school had with a previous male coach. “Maybe men are getting positions over women, but I don’t know … I think there’s something bigger to it.”

Westridge athletic director Melanie Horn doesn’t believe employment bias explains the gender gap in coaching, either. “I wouldn’t say that I go out of my way to hire a female, but certainly if a qualified one is there, I’d be more than happy to hire her,” she said.

Horn, who has hired three alumnae currently on staff as assistant coaches, believes there aren’t enough qualified women applying for varsity jobs. “It bothers me that there aren’t more highly qualified female candidates,” she said.

Since athletics are still dominated by men, it isn’t strange that more men apply for coaching positions than women. But considering volleyball’s popularity with girls, and sagging interest with boys, the coaching gap there is stranger than in other sports.

DiSalvo tried to start a boys’ volleyball team at PHS recently, but lack of interest and funding from the Pasadena Unified School District sunk her cause. “Volleyball is much bigger for females than it is for males,” she said.

Of Pasadena’s eight co-ed schools, only four have a boys’ volleyball team. The popularity gap in high school widens significantly in college, with 247 NCAA Division I women’s volleyball programs, compared to only 23 for men.

And though the vast majority of college volleyball players are women, the gender gap in coaching appears at the college level as well. A 2016 report from the University of Minnesota’s Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport indicates that women coached only 35 percent of women’s Division I volleyball programs last fall, and only 41 percent of women’s programs overall.

The most popular theory explaining the gender gap involves family: women traditionally take care of the house and kids, and therefore have less time to coach, especially if a coaching position supplements their primary job.

Dr. Cruz-Stevens believes traditional gender roles steer women away from coaching positions. “Speaking as a professional, it’s hard to be able to coach and have additional responsibility if you’re the person that’s taking care of the kids,” she said.

DiSalvo responded similarly, saying: “My time is limited, I’m not going to stay somewhere for ten, twenty years.” Tuitama also connected her personal and professional lives, saying that she’s single and has “all the time in the world to coach.”

Horn, however, doesn’t believe societal roles fully explain the gender gap. “Some of the argument is, women are having families, or they’re pursuing higher education … men do those same types of things,” she said.

Horn and DiSalvo brought up other theories, like wage discrepancies between women and men, but neither could identify one predominant cause of the coaching gender gap. Though none of the coaches could explain why there are so few women coaching girls’ volleyball, they did all stress one idea: the importance of women on the sidelines, especially in their own sport.

Though she has only coached at Blair for one season, Coburn believes she can not only build a competitive program, but also inspire her players off the court.

“They don’t have a lot of positive role models,” she said of her players. “If I was a man, I wouldn’t be able to be that same kind of role model for them.”

“I think it’s important to have a female coach in the mix,” said Tuitama. In her experience, she has found that women push girls harder in practice than men do, and command respect easier as former players themselves. “Females that played high school can remember what it was like … and they can be a role model.”

Cruz-Stevens believes women can connect with girls more effectively than men on the court. “I’m not sure men are necessarily in tune with what girls need … you need to address girls emotionally before you can push them to do anything athletically,” she said.

And though she wants to build a successful program at Westridge, Horn finds positive leadership as important as winning. “I do try to find coaches that will play both roles,” she said, “a role model for our girls and also an exemplary coach.”

Even though there are only three women volleyball head coaches in the city, all of them stand out amongst their peers: Tuitama with her success, DiSalvo with her outspokenness, and Coburn with an opportunity to turn around a losing program.

But they also share challenges every day while coaching that their male peers don’t face themselves.

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