For the first time since 1982, all teams headed to the women’s NCAA Final Four are coached by women. Tennessee has Pat Summitt (who has coached four championship teams), Stanford Tara VanDerveer, Notre Dame Muffet McGraw and Old Dominion Wendy Larry. Women now also make up 64 percent of the head coaching jobs for women’s teams, an eleven percent increase over the low 58.5 percent in 1988. Basketball is one of only seven sports in the NCAA in which women coaches make up more than 51 percent of coaching positions, in all divisions women make up approximately 2 percent of coaching jobs in men’s sports. Notre Dame’s McGraw recently noted that the progress of women coaches in basketball reflected an overall phenomenon regarding women’s play, “The way the women’s game has gone now, playing in front of sellout crowds, making big money _ five or six years ago, we craved all that. We used to think, wouldn’t it be great if we had 10,000 people, if coaches made $100,000 and we had shoe contracts. Well, we do have that, now.”
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