This Saturday marked the historical feat of the first female head coach winning the D1 women’s volleyball NCAA championship! Congratulations to Coach Katie Schumacher-Kelly and Penn State, as well as Coach Dani Busboom Kelly and Louisville, without whom we would not have witnessed more history: the first championship between two female head coaches.
I was very excited that more female head coaches were getting recognition, and I wondered what the trend in female head coaches has been in the past 12 years. When running my numbers, I realized that we reached yet another historical landmark that no one seems to be talking about yet: this is the very first year a majority of the D1 women’s volleyball head coaches are women!
Here is the graph below:
In 2013, 45% of D1 women’s volleyball teams had female head coaches, but over the last dozen years, there has been a gradual, but fairly steady increase in the number of female head coaches. For 2024, my data show that 173 out of 344 D1 women’s volleyball teams (50.3%) had female head coaches!
The increase we see in the graph above is part of a broader trend towards more female head coaches in D1 sports. Historically, women have had a hard time breaking the glass ceiling in coaching, but things are changing. The Tucker Center at the University of Minnesota puts out an annual report on female collegiate coaches that highlights the barriers and challenges female coaches face, but also shows the increases in female coaching across sports at the D1 level.
Since 2013, the number of female head coaches leading top 25 teams is even more dramatic than the overall rise! Back in 2013 only five of the teams in the AVCA’s final D1 Top 25 poll had female head coaches. But over the last five years, the number of Top 25 teams led by female head coaches has nearly doubled–and this is the first season that the top two spots in the final poll went to teams with female head coaches.
The glass ceiling has been harder to break for female coaches in D1 and professional sports than at other levels of sport. We see many more female head coaches in other divisions of collegiate sports–like in D3 indoor volleyball.
Here is the graph:
Even in 2013, three-fifths (60%) of D3 head coaches in women’s volleyball were women, although that percentage has dropped from almost 65% to nearly 60% after Covid. D3 volleyball did not have to wait more than forty years for their first female head coach to win a championship, either. Coach Teri Clemens, the first female Head Coach to win an NCAA championship in D3, won her first of seven championships in 1989! The success of female coaches in D3 continues to the present day–Coach Heather Pavlik just led Juniata to their third straight D3 championship.
And while the proportion of female head coaches coaching the very top teams in D1 is only just now coming close to matching the ratio of female head coaches overall in D1 (and it still isn’t quite there), in D3, the share of female head coaches coaching Top 25 teams has generally matched or been higher than the overall share of female head coaches in D3 (see graph below).
Data Notes:
- The graphs above are from data I’ve collected on women’s volleyball programs from program websites, and the NCAA has the names of the Head Coach for each team for the past 12 years. I identified the gender of coaches first using a data science tool, and checked by hand all first names which are used frequently by both men and women, or which are rare enough that the package otherwise wouldn’t classify the name.
- I used the R “gender” package to do a preliminary assessment of the likelihood each coach’s first name is male or female. This package draws gender and first name information from the US Census and Social Security Administration over time. For any names which the package suggested that the name had a sizeable mix of both men and women using the name (names like Ali, Angel, Jamie, Kasey, and Taylor), I searched the web for a bio of the Head Coach to see what pronouns were used in the bio.
- I validated this method by comparing the numbers I got for D1 to those reported by the Tucker Center in their reports. My method generated numbers that were almost identical to the Tucker Center for prior years for D1.