At the 2019 NCAA Women’s Division I basketball Final Four, Notre Dame women’s basketball coach Muffett McGraw expressed her displeasure with the low number of women in positions of power in this country.
That includes head coaches.
“Less than five percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies are women,” McGraw said at the time. “When you look at men’s (college) basketball, 99 percent of the jobs go to men. Why shouldn’t 99 percent of the women’s basketball jobs go to women? Maybe it’s because only 10 percent of the athletic directors in Division I are women. People hire people who look like them and that’s the problem.”
That has left millions of girls who play sports across the country without enough female role models to look up to, McGraw said.
“We’re teaching them great life skills but wouldn’t it be great if we could teach them to go watch women lead,” said McGraw.
Flash forward to the present and the Naismith Memorial and Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame coach will continue to address the topic of gender equity as the keynote speaker at the fourth annual Pass It Forward women’s clinic at Augusta’s Cony High School from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 14.
The clinic has been expanded to include all sports, not just basketball. The former Notre Dame coach will open the morning session with a question-and-answer segment.
Highly-successful University of Maine women’s head basketball coach Amy Vachon feels just as strongly as McGraw about women in leadership roles.
The Pass It Forward clinics were created by Vachon four years ago after she learned that just 21.1 percent of the varsity high school girls basketball coaches in Maine were women. There were 28 among the 133 schoolgirl programs.
“I was shocked,” said Vachon in May, 2020. “That really got to me. That number concerned me.”
A month later, after Vachon reached out to five of her closest female friends in the coaching community and formed a panel with them, she held a virtual Zoom workshop for current and former coaches or women who are interested in coaching at any level.
Vachon said the Pass It Forward movement is making progress.
“The number of female coaches has improved. It’s gone from the 20s to the 40s and 50s,” Vachon said this week. “Our group has made connections and we’ve been networking where people can reach out to other females who may be having issues or questions or that kind of thing which is really cool.”
She is hoping that opening the clinic up to any sport for females will be an impetus for women to start applying for jobs and landing more jobs in their particular sport.
“We’ll keep plugging away. It’s a never-ending fight and it’s one we have to keep working on and we will,” said Vachon, who has been pleased by the number of attendees who return every year.
Vachon said Thursday that she is “super excited” to have McGraw headline the clinic.
“We are so thankful she is willing to come up to Maine for the weekend and spend some time with females in Maine who coach or who want to coach any sports, not just basketball,” said Vachon, who sent McGraw an email to inquire whether or not she would be interested.
“She was really intrigued with the work we were doing here and wanted to be a part of it,” said Vachon, a five-time America East Coach of the Year in her seven seasons as the head coach in Orono.
“She has so much experience. She really feels strongly about young girls having female role models to look up to,” said Vachon. “To have a Hall of Fame coach and a (two-time) national champion like Muffet McGraw come to Maine is really exciting.”
McGraw, who is currently teaching a sports leadership course at Notre Dame and is a basketball analyst for the ACC Network, is the seventh winningest college women’s basketball coach of all time.
She registered 936 wins in 38 seasons which included five at Lehigh and 33 at Notre Dame.
Her lifetime record is 936-293.
She is a three-time National Coach of the Year and she coached 20 WNBA players.
In 2023, a statue of McGraw was unveiled on the Notre Dame campus.
After McGraw’s question and answer session, Maine Basketball Hall of Famer Adrienne Shibles, associate director of athletes at Bates College and former Bowdoin College basketball coach, will discuss building team culture and team chemistry.
Dr. Anne Beethe, the director of peak performance for Colby College, will conclude the morning session with a talk about holistic development of student-athletes.
After lunch, the clinic will head to the basketball court where UMaine associate head coach Courtney England will discuss situational coaching and Maranacook High of Readfield coach Karen Magnusson and Falmouth High girls coach Katie Stannard will demonstrate offensive and defensive skills and drills.
The cost is $40 to attend the morning session and $80 for both sessions including lunch. It is $25 for female college student-athletes. Registration is open.
