March 11, 2010, - 6:30 pm
This is Civil Rights?: When Coach is a Chick, the Sequel
Washington, DC’s Coolidge High School is bragging–to a lot of press gushing–about its choice of a woman, Natalie Randolph, to coach its boys’ football team. But the fact that a woman will be the varsity head coach of high school boys is an utter disappointment, not cause for celebration.
Real Life . . .
Male Role Model?: Natalie Randolph Coaches DC Boys High School Gridiron
. . . Is Nothing Like Hollywood Fantasy
Nearly nine years ago, I wrote about Geraldine Fuhr, a female suburban Detroit high school basketball coach, who sued in federal court and won the right to coach the high school boy’s basketball team. She was a terrible coach, who coached the girls’ basketball team, and coaching the boys didn’t involve a change in pay. It involved asserting feminist in-your-face tactics.
After Fuhr won the job, the boys team at Hazel Park High School lost more and more games under her coaching, proving my point–a point I correctly predicted when I debated the issue on ESPN’s “Outside the Lines,” just after 9/11: that boys not only won’t win for female coaches, whom they simply don’t respect as much, but that female coaches deprive boys of what–especially today with so many single-mother dominant housholds–will probably be their only male role model growing up. Here’s just part of what I said on ESPN (read the whole transcript):
The problem is that boys in today’s society have less and less opportunities to be boys and to learn how to be men. And to have bastions of maleness, and sports was one of those last bastions. But now we have this agenda of feminist groups and feminists coaches wanting to coach men. They are going to try to take that away, too.
And we have to get away from this desire to feminize and Oprah-fy every single segment of society. We have to let men be men. That’s one of the great things that has come out of this tragedy that happened in this country a month ago [9/11]. Men are starting to be men again, and we don’t need to subjugate that with more female head coaches coaching men. There’s no need for it.
This is especially important in Washington, DC, where some statistics say that 80% of kids are born to single mothers and even more are raised by them. That means these kids who play football at Coolidge High will never have a positive male figure who teaches them how to be men and how to treat women. And we wonder why boys coming from the inner city have such a low collegiate attendance rate and such a disproportionately high propensity to commit crimes. Having a female coach won’t help. They already have female coaches at home: mom. They need a male one. It’s not just what they learn on the field, but the life lessons on the sidelines and off the field that are far more important and many of which boys and young men can’t and won’t learn from a woman.
The bigwigs and press flacks of the District of Columbia school district think this is a good thing. But they’re wrong . . . even if, judging by pretty much any academic measure or standard, it’s the only thing they can dare brag about.
It’s not like the Hollywood version, as in the 1978 movie, “Coach,” in which the guys on the high school basketball team win all their games because they want to sleep with their sexy coach, Cathy Lee Crosby. The same fantasy story was repeated in 1986’s, “Wildcats,” with Goldie Hawn as the coach of male high school football players. Puh-leeze. That’s just not real life. This coach won’t be successful . . . not compared to her male predecessors or colleagues at other high schools. It’s just the way it is–human nature.
And feminist encroachment on male sports via head coaching positions won’t change that.
Read my original column on this, “When Coach is a Chick.” And tell me if you agree.
Tags: chick, chick coaches, civil rights, coach, Coolidge High School, DC, female, Feminism, feminist, head coach, male role model, male role models, varsity head coach, Washington, When coach is a chick, Woman
Maybe we should wait and see before you jump to dumb conclusions based on something that happened almost a decade ago.
Nak on March 11, 2010 at 7:03 pm