Basketball Australia hall of famer Carrie Graf has been left "gobsmacked" by a decline in elite female coaches and says shattering gender biases is crucial to the rapid development of women's sport.
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Graf was among scores of female coaches, players and administrators at a women's high performance coaching forum held by the Australian Sports Commission at the AIS on Thursday.
The spotlight is on women's sport's remarkable rise but the declining number of females in high performance coaching positions has been identified as a major "cause for concern".
Graf admits she "coached how I thought you should coach" when she made her first foray into coaching - and how she thought she should mentor players was "maybe a bit like a man because that was all I had been exposed to".
It took her some time to realise she had to forge her own identity as a coach and soon enough Graf had led the Capitals to six WNBL championships.
But almost a decade on there remains a major gulf when it comes to female coaches in the high performance space, and Graf says it is vital to break down gender biases and capitalise on the women's sporting movement.
"There is still a lot of the people that are making decisions on coaching positions are, I’m going to say, old white men," Graf said.
"I’m oldish, 50, but a lot of people that are on the coaching panel and making appointments are all white and all men. It’s not diverse, you’re not going to get a diverse response.
"AFLW, 10 teams and there is not one female head coach. The inaugural [female] head coach Bec Goddard wins the championship, where’s she? It’s gobsmacking to me. She’s proven, she can coach, they win.
"Those are glaring concerns. Women can coach, women are bloody good coaches. They bring a skill set that can sometimes be unique. I don’t think coaching has a gender. Coaching is coaching, and different people bring different things in their coaching skill set.
"...We need balance and right now there is no balance. We need it at the grassroots level and we need it all the way through to the high performance pathway.
"Some female athletes get to the high performance level and they have never been coached by a women. We’ve got some highly skilled women that should be in the high performance pathway and they’re not."
Australian Sports Commission chief Kate Palmer has previously stated only nine per cent of accredited high performance coaches at the 2016 Olympic Games were female, which fell from 12 per cent at the London 2012 event.
Swimming great and AFLW head of football Nicole Livingstone hopes Goddard - who left her post at the Adelaide Crows to continue in the Australian Federal Police - will one day return to the AFLW given she has been "a trailblazer for women in football".
Goddard is an assistant coach of the Canberra Demons NEAFL team and her exit from the AFLW has left the league with 10 teams and 10 male coaches.
"Hopefully that door is still open and she may return one day into coaching an AFLW team," Livingstone said.
"Something probably would need to change and that is the economic environment of AFLW. It is a part-time industry right now until it evolves a little bit more and for Bec, who has a very successful career with the AFP, it doesn’t compare financially.
"To get us to a point where our staff and our players are paid well is certainly the long-term goal, it’s just not quite there yet.
"It’s going to take time to get there but I think we are making steps in the right direction and I think together we can do some heavy lifting here which is good."
Livingstone says sports need to shatter the perception "it is better to have a male coach than a female coach" through athlete education while avoiding the pitfall of pigeon-holing female coaches into women's sport.
