The National Hockey League's Arizona Coyotes announced that they hired Dawn Braid as their Skating Coach, making her the first full-time female coach in NHL history.
Dawn was a figure skater and started to coach skating for her father's junior hockey club when she was just a teenager in Ontario. She went on to become a consultant for a number of NHL teams, and worked as the Director of Skating Development at the Athletes Training Centre in Mississauga, Ontario for seven years.
John Chayka, the General Manager of the Coyotes, said of the team's decision to hire Braid: "[she is] at the top of her field so we thought it was imperative to hire her. She's got a great personality and the players work hard for her and respect her knowledge."
The lack of female coaches in the NHL mirrors a larger trend among professional sports leagues. The NFL had its first female coach when the Arizona Cardinals hired Jen Welter as a training camp assistant coach in 2015. Then in 2016, the NFL saw the Buffalo Bills take on Kathryn Smith as their quality control-special teams coach.
The Oakland Athletics hired Justine Siegal, the MLB's first female part-time coach, as the team's guest instructor for the club's 2015 instructional league. Nancy Lieberman was the NBA's second ever female assistant coach as of 2015 for the Sacramento Kings—Becky Hammon being the first female assistant coach in the NBA for the San Antonio Spurs in 2014.
The National Women's Hockey League, which began in 2015, is made up of four teams and, although the ratio of female-to-male coaching staff is better than the NHL's, there still seems to be more men in head coach positions.
The Boston Prides have a male head coach, associate coach, and goaltending coach (Bobby Jay, Dave Jensen, and Todd Lampert) and a female assistant coach (Lauren McAuliffe). The Buffalo Beauts have two male head co coaches, Ric Seiling and Craig Muni. The Connecticut Whales have a female head coach and assistant coach, Heather Linstad and Lisa Giovanelli. The New York Riveters have a male head coach, Chad Wiseman, and a female assistant coach and goaltending coach (Sis Paulsen and Rebecca Ruegsegger-Baker). Men have been getting hired to coach women's hockey and notably without making gendered headlines, but women have not been getting hired to coach men's hockey, until the exception of Dawn Braid in the NHL's 98 year history.
Braid said of her hiring, "It's something that I've wanted to see happen," continuing that "the fact that they respect what I do enough to name me as a full-time coach, or to name me as the first female coach in the NHL, I take a ton of pride in that. I've worked very hard for this opportunity."
In summary, the NHL should take a page from the NWHL's book in terms of gender equality. Actually, more than a page. Maybe a Paige and a Caroline and a Donna and a Nicole and any other women who want to work in the league.
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