The WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury employed Nate Tibbetts as its new head coach in October, after a number of years of turmoil and a season by which they completed final within the league. Mercury possession seems to be making an attempt to emphasize their funding within the franchise, and the hiring of Tibbetts as head coach is supposed to be one other signal of this dedication. Nonetheless, this information raised some troubling questions on pay fairness inside ladies’s sports activities, and the methods by which sexism and racism can bleed into areas even when they’re majority-woman and majority-Black.

Together with his rent, Tibbetts, a white man, reportedly turned the very best paid coach in WNBA historical past—a place that had beforehand been held by Becky Hammon (a white lady) when she was employed to educate the Las Vegas Aces two seasons in the past. (Tibbetts’s wage has not been made public, however Hammon earns $1 million per yr and unnamed sources informed ESPN that Tibbetts will make extra. When reached for remark, the Mercury declined to verify or deny these stories.) Tibbetts has spent a number of seasons as an assistant coach within the NBA however has no ladies’s basketball teaching expertise. For comparability, Hammon performed 16 seasons within the WNBA and spent eight seasons as an assistant coach of the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs; in her first two seasons teaching the Aces, the staff gained the WNBA championship. (Hiring a girl to educate is clearly not a fix-all; the Aces are at the moment below investigation for being pregnant discrimination and Hammon was suspended with out pay for 2 video games in Might after the WNBA found she violated the staff and league’s Respect within the Office coverage by feedback she made about Dearica Hamby’s being pregnant.)

So as to add insult to harm, the Mercury introduced this rent by adding that Tibbetts is a “Girl Dad” and likewise his dad coached ladies’s basketball, as if that in some way qualifies him to educate ladies’s basketball—a sport that has real, fundamental differences from the best way males play it. Have we realized nothing from the tire fireplace that was Derek Fisher’s time as the pinnacle coach of the Los Angeles Sparks? NBA expertise, as a coach or a participant, doesn’t essentially translate into the abilities vital to educate the WNBA, from each a technical basketball standpoint and a cultural perspective. As I’ve written earlier than, the concept males instantly care about ladies’s sports activities or ladies’s rights as soon as they’ve daughters is, frankly, a crock of shit. It shouldn’t take having daughters of your individual to see the worth in all ladies or to see that they deserve respect that they’re too typically denied. (Think about if “Boy Mother” was used as a qualifier for a head teaching place within the NBA.)

Unsurprisingly, the ladies’s basketball neighborhood had some robust reactions to this rent. As former Notre Dame ladies’s basketball coach Muffet McGraw said on X, formerly Twitter, “Breaking information: white man hires white man to educate WNBA staff AND makes him the very best paid coach within the league. Gender bias is actual.” (The primary white man McGraw is referring to is probably going billionaire mortgage lender Mat Ishbia, who purchased a majority stake in each the Mercury and the NBA’s Phoenix Suns in February.)