According to the NBA, there have been only 15 women assistant coaches since the NBA was created in 1946. It took many years after the inaugural 1946 season before a woman was given a chance to be an assistant coach for a team. In 2001, Lisa Boyer was the first-ever woman hired to be an assistant coach in the NBA. For the 2001-2002 season, she served as an assistant coach for the Cleveland Cavaliers. The decades she spent previously coaching women’s college basketball contributed to why the Cavaliers hired her.
However, Boyer was only an assistant coach for one season with the team. She went back to coaching women’s college basketball after her groundbreaking season with the Cavaliers. As seen on the NBA website listing all 15 of the women’s coaches that have ever coached in the league, it was not until 2014, with the hiring of Becky Hamon by the San Antonio Spurs, that the league would see another woman as an assistant coach.
Who is Becky Hammon?
In 2020, ESPNW (for women) wrote a piece about 10 of the only 11 women who held an assistant coaching position in the NBA at the time. Among them is the current assistant head coach of the San Antonio Spurs, Becky Hammon. Hammon has already broken several barriers for women coaches in the NBA. According to an article from Insider, Hammon became the first woman to become a full-time NBA assistant coach, the first woman to be named head coach for an NBA Summer League team, and the first woman to win an NBA Summer League title as head coach.
Aside from coaching in the NBA, she is a former college basketball and WNBA player, having been drafted in 1999 by the New York Liberty. In 2014, after retiring from professional basketball herself, she was hired as an assistant coach for the Spurs, working directly under Gregg Popovich and becoming the second female coach in NBA history.
Who Are the Women Paving the Way?
It’s not just Becky Hammon who has made her mark in the NBA. Women like Kristi Toliver, Lindsey Gottlieb, and Lindset Harding are just a few other women who have broken the barrier to becoming assistant coaches in the NBA. What Becky Hammon and these three women have in common is athletic experience. They all played college or professional women’s basketball, so they have a deep understanding and appreciation of the game. Women should not feel limited to only pursuing coaching in the WNBA. Rather if their ambitions are to establish themselves in the NBA, they should have the opportunity to do so.
These women are paving the way for little girls who aspire to be a coach in the NBA, also known as the best basketball league in the world. Many men are head coaches in the WNBA, which is viewed as entirely normal. At the same time, women are “breaking barriers” to become assistant coaches in the NBA shows how much progress there is still to be made regarding diversity and inclusion. We have come a long way (before 2017); however, we can do better. Hopefully, there will be a women head coach in the NBA in the not-so-distant future. Whether it’s Becky Hammon or not, the league and women all over the globe will benefit from it.
