Now, Lieberman-Cline said, "If you can play, you're going
to get a scholarship to college or a paycheck from the WNBA."
She described the WNBA as a "safe haven" for women of color.
Teresa "Spoon" Weatherspoon, the New
York Liberty point guard and an African-American, agreed
that WNBA offers tremendous opportunity. It shows "our young
ladies there are no limitations."
Her teammate Rebecca Lobo, a power forward, added that
the long struggle of women athletes for opportunity has
diverted attention from other potentially divisive issues.
"Women athletes have been fighting a battle for so long
just to get equality, they didn't even focus on their diversities,"
she said. "Sports puts you in that environment. Because
we have that common goal, that base common denominator of
basketball, it breaks down what could be considered 'barriers'."
Lobo has been rooting on Liberty teammates from the sidelines
for the past two seasons while a knee injury heals. She
is a quarter Hispanic and three-quarters Caucasian, which
makes her a minority in the WNBA. Race is a different issue
in men's basketball than it is in women's, she explained.
Male leagues have an even lower percentage of white players
-- 20 percent or less-- and the coaches are more than 60
percent white.
While this appears to be similar to the WNBA, where 75
percent of the coaches are white, there is greater diversity
in the women's teams, which have a 60-to-40 ratio of black
players to white. On the WNBA's coaching staff, the ratio
of men to women is 5 to 3 and, of course, no women coach
NBA teams. Perhaps the WNBA is less racially fraught, Lieberman-Cline
believes, because it was created amidst the NBA's efforts
to diversify.
Not so in the collegiate arena. While the NBA/WNBA has
been lauded for its equal opportunity hiring practices and
for placing minorities in high places, "You're dealing with
a whole other animal in colleges," said Lieberman-Cline,
who was until last year acting president of the Women's
Sports Foundation.
As Lapchick explained, "You can look at all of the positive
strides that women have made in the world of sport and they've
been enormous, but women of color have, to a large degree,
been left behind. Opportunities are better for women in
men's professional sports than they are in college athletic
departments. There's not one single African-American woman
athletic director in Division I."
According to other statistics Lapchick has gathered, only
two percent of women's basketball Division I coaches are
African-American females. Overall, throughout all colleges,
there are no more than 9.5 percent.
In a time when blurring racial divides has seemed so successful
in the professional arena, there are few models at the college
level. One of the standouts is Rutgers' head coach Vivian
Stringer, a recipient of multiple women of color coaching
awards. She is also the first coach -- men's or women's
-- to lead three different schools to the NCAA Final Four.
She is the third women's basketball coach to win 600 games
and soon will be inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall
of Fame. Stringer was not available for comment.
Who
Gets The Ball?
