This Woman Is on the Verge of Breaking Down One of the Biggest Gender Barriers in Sports

Becky Hammon is interviewing to become the first female head coach in the NBA.

Lukas Schulze/DPA/Zuma

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

The National Basketball Association just got one step closer to breaking down a big gender barrier.

There has never been a woman head coach in men’s professional basketball. But ESPN reports that the Milwaukee Bucks are interviewing Becky Hammon for their top coaching job, making her the first woman to be interviewed for an NBA head coach position. 

Hammon is already the first woman to serve as an assistant coach in the NBA. She became an assistant coach for the San Antonio Spurs when she retired from her 14-year playing career in 2014. In 2015, she proved critics of the Spurs’ hiring move wrong when she led the team’s summer league to a championship.

A New Yorker profile last month catalogued the barriers and sexism Hammon faces on the sidelines—especially from talk show radio and social media. A reporter asked Hammon at her first press conference about “an anonymous e-mail that called [her hiring] a publicity stunt, and suggested that the only thing the players had to learn from her was advice on baking cookies.” Hammon responded, “At the end of the day, you have to say, ‘So what’s the truth in that? Is that true? No, it’s not.’ So I have no comment to that—other than, I make good chocolate-chip cookies. That’s a fact.”

The NBA has seen plenty of instances of sexism and alleged sexual violence that hint at how far it still has to go, as The New Yorker documented:

In October, 2016, the former Chicago Bulls point guard Derrick Rose, now with the Minnesota Timberwolves, was tried and cleared in a rape case. Rose testified that, at a 2008 N.B.A. rookie-orientation program, he was told not to leave behind used condoms, reportedly saying, “You never know what women are up to nowadays.” (A spokesperson for the N.B.A. said that players were instructed on how to dispose of condoms, but not because of concerns about exploitation by women.) In February, more than a dozen current and former Dallas Mavericks employees told Sports Illustrated that it was an “open secret” that the team’s former president sexually harassed employees and that the management tolerated sexual harassment and domestic violence. (The former president has denied the allegations.) In response to the article, the Mavericks announced that they had suspended one employee, terminated another, and hired outside counsel to investigate the allegation.

Asked for her take on the Mavericks allegations, Hammon told The New Yorker, “The culture of sports has been ‘He’s acting like a boy.’ What does that mean? You’re acting like an animal? There needs to be boundaries. There needs to be an environment where everyone can succeed.”

According to ESPN, Hammon “isn’t considered a frontline candidate on a Bucks list that includes at least 10 possible candidates.” But as The New Yorker reported, many basketball observers expect her to become the NBA’s first female head coach sooner or later.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate