WTA plans to expand program to find more female coaches

LONDON — On the day of the Wimbledon singles draw, Billie Jean King and other founding members of the women’s professional tennis tour gathered 5 miles away at a London hotel to mark the 50th anniversary of a meeting that led to the formation of today’s WTA.

That long-ago moment was prompted by frustration at being paid far less in prize money than the sport’s male athletes. For all the progress since in that area, there remains an aspect of tennis in which gender equity is nowhere near being achieved: coaching.

Of the 128 women in the singles bracket at Wimbledon, which ends this weekend, just six work with a female coach — roughly 5%. All of the coaches for men were men.

“Terrible. Extremely disappointing,” King, the International Tennis Hall of Fame member and rights advocate, told The Associated Press when asked about the scarcity of female coaches. “It’s about society, absolutely. You have to see it to be it. So if you don’t see a woman up there as a coach, it doesn’t even cross your brain. How do we get the top players to hire them? We’ve got to solve the problem.”

King and others in the sport consider that a reflection of the same sort of entrenched bias that has prevented women from advancing in all manner of other fields, and the WTA is making efforts to change that through an initiative that pairs aspiring coaches with established ones.

Only 13 of the women ranked in the top 200 have a female coach, according to the WTA; of those, four are the mother of the player.

“We’re all about equality, and I’d like to see an equal amount of male and female coaches out there,” WTA chairman and CEO Steve Simon said. “To say, ‘We should have all female coaches,’ isn’t what we’re looking for either. … In a perfect world, we’d have balance.”

That is why the WTA created a Coach Inclusion Program, which is in its first full year after a smaller pilot run in 2022. Ten applicants were chosen out of 30 applicants to take classes and be paired with veteran coaches. Five shadowed coaches and players at a tournament in Charleston, South Carolina, in April; others will get that opportunity at events in Montreal and Cincinnati in August. The WTA plans to expand the program in 2024.

“A lot of these women taking part have the same level of qualifications as a lot of the coaches that are out on tour, but they have no idea how to actually put themselves out there and break into it,” said Mike Anders, the program’s director. “A…