Sports

Commentary: If you want a good coach, don’t limit your choices to half the population

The Dimond Lynx are in the market for a new football coach. Nick Winkler is gone after three seasons and a 10-16 record, including a 1-7 mark this year.

The school shouldn't have to look too far for a replacement.

Heck, Dimond's administrators don't even need to leave the building. They can just head to Kathleen Navarre's classroom.

Navarre is Dimond's flag football coach, and in the 12 years since the sport has been played in Anchorage high schools, she has led the Lynx to six conference championships.

Why not hire her to coach the boys?

She knows her Xs and Os. She knows how to motivate athletes. She knows how to work with parents. She knows success.

Navarre likely will be mortified to read this, and she is just as likely to be perfectly content to remain the coach of Dimond's flag football team. And why shouldn't she? She has built a dynasty.

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The point is, no one blinks an eye when a man is hired to coach a girls' team. Yet here we are, more than 40 years after the landmark Title IX federal law forced public schools to provide girls and women with the same athletic opportunities available to boys and men, and the idea of a woman coaching boys in a sport like football is inconceivable to some people.

It shouldn't be.

Three women have cracked the NFL coaching ranks, most recently Collette Smith, an intern coach who works with defensive backs for the New York Jets. You can find a few working with college and high school teams too.

The Lynx are one of two Anchorage schools in the market for a new football coach. The other is South, which said goodbye to John Lewis after 14 seasons and three state championships.

Dimond hasn't had that kind of longevity, or success, from a football coach in years.

Chris Borst gave the Lynx six steady but mostly unspectacular seasons from 2010-2015, going 23-28 and making the playoffs twice.

When he was hired, he was Dimond's third head coach in four seasons. In the three seasons before his arrival, the Lynx were 8-17.

Winkler started strong with a 6-4 season that ended with a 2015 semifinal playoff loss to Chugiak. He was 3-5 the next year and 1-7 this year.

The Cook Inlet Conference is the state's toughest football conference. Dimond needs to turn things around if it wants to keep pace with teams like Bartlett, West and East. So why not at least consider what a woman might bring to the program?

Kodiak did that in 1995 when it hired 26-year-old Amy Rakers to coach its boys basketball team. In 2001, she orchestrated a 28-0 season that culminated with a 55-52 championship-game victory over mighty East High.

Dimond's flag football team routinely leads the CIC in participation. For the 2016 season, the Lynx had 105 players, by far outdistancing everyone else in the conference. The football team had 107, which lagged behind the numbers at Bartlett and East but were on par with the rest of the CIC teams.

The best football coaches surround themselves with quality assistant coaches, and Navarre has done exactly that with Dimond's flag football team. Her staff includes offensive coordinator Brad Lauwers, a Dimond High alum who used to be the Lynx quarterback way back when. He could fill the same role for a Navarre-coached football team, which might comfort anyone troubled — or heaven help us, embarrassed — by the idea of a woman deciding whether to punt or go for it on fourth-and-1.

Navarre is an algebra teacher at Dimond, but you don't need advanced math skills to understand that whether you need a football coach or a widget-maker, the odds of finding the best available candidate are much better if you don't limit your options to half of the population.

Because sometimes, the best man for the job just might be a woman.

This column is the opinion of sports editor Beth Bragg. Reach her at bbragg@adn.com.

Beth Bragg

Beth Bragg wrote about sports and other topics for the ADN for more than 35 years, much of it as sports editor. She retired in October 2021. She's contributing coverage of Alaskans involved in the 2022 Winter Olympics.

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