Head coach tenure in college women’s soccer. Do race, gender, and career background matter?

Abstract

This study aims to analyse the tenure of head coaches in college women’s soccer in the USA and puts the focus on the influence of race and gender. The analysis includes individual characteristics of coaches (educational and professional background), team performance, institutional characteristics, and geographical differences (at the state level) from 1977 until 2015. The main results show that African American coaches and women have a significantly shorter tenure in these college institutions. Other factors related to the background of coaches and the characteristics of institutions also play a significant role. The findings are relevant for coaches from minority groups and athletic departments, who are interested in equity in sport. Future research may use an alternative approach to investigate the causes of tenure disparity in college women’s soccer.

Keywords:

• Discrimination
• education
• gender
• race
• tenure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. The research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Cornel Nesseler and Carlos Gomez-Gonzalez dedicated a substantial amount of time to this project while affiliated to the University of Zurich and the University of Castilla-La Mancha, respectively.

Notes

1 We use the terms soccer as in ‘FIFA football’ and football as in ‘American football’.

2 This article uses the terms from the US census bureau: White or White American and Black or African American to refer to coaches’ racial groups.

3 Coach tenure – defined as the years that a coach has been employed by a club or school – reflect the success of a coach and is a frequently discussed topic in men’s sports (e.g. Humphreys, Paul, and Weinbach 2016; Pieper, Nüesch, and Franck 2014).

4 The term ‘workplace’ refers to the whole sport environment, not being a specific tangible place where one works as an office. Coaches, athletes, agents, physical trainers, directors, and managers take part in the sport workplace.

5 Basketball is often associated with African Americans who predominantly occupy the roster of teams (Lapchick and Baker 2016). Other sports such as baseball are more representative for White Americans (Ogden and Hilt 2003). However, soccer is not strongly associated culturally to a particular race.

6 US women’s national team has a leading position in the FIFA Women’s World Ranking.

7 Before 1980, teams were not organized inside the NCAA system. For the analysis, we also use all available information from the previous 3 years.

8 Bhagat, Bolton, and Subramanian (2010) use a variety of measures for firm performance, i.e. return on assets or stock return.

9 LaFave, Nelson, and Doherty (2018) find historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) to be a significant determinant of coach tenure in college basketball, which diminishes the effect of race. In our analysis, we cannot include this variable as HBCU universities represent less than 1% of the sample.

10 Local coach dummy is a binary variable that distinguishes whether a coach received the education at the current employing institution or not.

11 A robustness check is carried out confirming that the results do not suffer from omitted variables bias. The approach follows Xu et al. (2019). The results of the robustness check are available upon request. Authors can be contacted if elucidations are needed.

12 Please note that if using e.g. the fourth regression (or any other subsequent regression), the number of observations is insufficient to show results in other seven states.