The Effect of Gender and Coaching Success on Players' Preference for a Coach in High School Girls' Basketball.

This study was conducted to investigate factors that might assist in understanding perceptions about women in coaching; contribute to an understanding of the decline of women in coaching; and examine possible differences in the preferences of coaches by players exposed to a gender socialized version of the same game, namely 5- and 6-player basketball. Subjects (N=234) were female varsity basketball players from 21 high schools throughout the state of Iowa. High schools were randomly selected based on the sex of the girls' basketball coach and the team's success. Materials consisted of two coaching philosophy statements, a series of semantic differential rating scales, and a preference question which required subjects to select a preferred coach after reading a description of the coach's philosophy. Results, inconsistent with the literature, indicate that female players from both winning and losing teams tended to choose a hypothetical female coach over a hypothetical male coach; the hypothetical male was preferred over the hypothetical female only when the choice was between a high status male coach and a low status female coach. Findings therefore fail to help explain the small number of women coaches in Iowa. (Contains 34 references and 5 tables.) (LL)