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 more than a year after being hired by coach Gregg Popovich.
Popovich, a five-time NBA champion, says he 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.
Bobby Marks, a former assistant general manager with the Brooklyn Nets who watched Hammon in the summer league, was impressed at how she commanded the attention of her players.
“When she’s talking, they’re looking at her,” Marks told the Washington Post, later writing on Twitter: “If I was running a team and had a head coaching opening, the first call would be to Becky Hammon.”
A little more than 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.
“This is about every woman and girl who absolutely loves the game of football and they haven’t had a place before,” Welter said. “Now they can see that there’s a future in football even for women.”
Just as Popovich has emphasised with Hammon, Cardinals coach Bruce Arians stressed that Welter’s appointment was made on merit.
“Coaching is nothing more than teaching,” Arians said. “One thing I have learned from players is, ‘How are you going to make me better? I don’t care if you’re the Green Hornet, man, I’ll listen.’”
Welter’s appointment, meanwhile, was followed on Friday by news that the Sacramento Kings of the NBA had hired Hall of Famer Nancy Lieberman to join head coach George Karl’s staff as an assistant.
Mary Jo Kane, director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, says she 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 which says ‘You must hire more women’ or that these appointments have been made because of pressure to be politically correct,” Kane said.
“If that were the impetus for these hirings, then they could check the ‘hired women’ box and then move on.”
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.
“You have the gold standard in coaching and the gold standard in players saying, ‘Come on down. Come on over,’” Kane said.
“If they are doing this, it’s not because they need a feel-good story or they need to generate some good publicity.”
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. “For me, a tipping point would be that it has opened the floodgates to create a critical mass of women who are coaching men’s sports, and at the highest levels, not just two or three women here or there.”
The recent appointments are also set against a backdrop of a wider trend which has often seen men filling coaching jobs of women’s college teams.
Title IX, the landmark 1972 amendment which led to equal opportunities for women in college athletics programs, had not created a dual career track for women coaches in the way it has done for men.
“Prior to Title IX, over 90 per cent of all head coaches in women’s sports were female, nationwide,” Kane said.
“Today it’s just under 40 per cent. That is a trend which has been going on for the last three decades and shows no signs of turning around.”
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Election pledges on migration
CDU: "Now is the time to control the German borders and enforce strict border rejections"
SPD: "Border closures and blanket rejections at internal borders contradict the spirit of a common area of freedom"
Petrarch: Everywhere a Wanderer
Christopher Celenza,
Reaktion Books
Klopp at the Kop
Matches 68; Wins 35; Draws 19; Losses 14; Goals For 133; Goals Against 82
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The End of Loneliness
Benedict Wells
Translated from the German by Charlotte Collins
Sceptre
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Leap of Faith
Michael J Mazarr
Public Affairs
Dh67
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
TEST SQUADS
Bangladesh: Mushfiqur Rahim (captain), Tamim Iqbal, Soumya Sarkar, Imrul Kayes, Liton Das, Shakib Al Hasan, Mominul Haque, Nasir Hossain, Sabbir Rahman, Mehedi Hasan, Shafiul Islam, Taijul Islam, Mustafizur Rahman and Taskin Ahmed.
Australia: Steve Smith (captain), David Warner, Ashton Agar, Hilton Cartwright, Pat Cummins, Peter Handscomb, Matthew Wade, Josh Hazlewood, Usman Khawaja, Nathan Lyon, Glenn Maxwell, Matt Renshaw, Mitchell Swepson and Jackson Bird.
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
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Name: Hassan Mohsen Elhais
Position: legal consultant with Al Rowaad Advocates and Legal Consultants.
The specs
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Power: 503hp at 6,000rpm
Torque: 685Nm at 2,000rpm
Transmission: 8-speed auto
Price: from Dh850,000
On sale: now
Fire and Fury
By Michael Wolff,
Henry Holt
MATCH INFO
Uefa Champions League last 16, second leg
Liverpool (0) v Atletico Madrid (1)
Venue: Anfield
Kick-off: Thursday, March 12, midnight
Live: On beIN Sports HD
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
If you go
The flights
Emirates (www.emirates.com) and Etihad (www.etihad.com) both fly direct to Bengaluru, with return fares from Dh 1240. From Bengaluru airport, Coorg is a five-hour drive by car.
The hotels
The Tamara (www.thetamara.com) is located inside a working coffee plantation and offers individual villas with sprawling views of the hills (tariff from Dh1,300, including taxes and breakfast).
When to go
Coorg is an all-year destination, with the peak season for travel extending from the cooler months between October and March.
