Despite recent growth in women’s professional sport, women remain underrepresented in elite coaching positions. A key strategy for attracting, retaining, and advancing women in various leadership positions has been mentorship. Mentoring scholars across a variety of disciplines have advocated for the developmental network perspective as an alternative conceptual approach to traditional, dyadic mentoring models. Guided by the developmental network perspective, this study explored how multiple individuals shaped the personal and professional development of five professional North American women coaches, who averaged 14.2 years of experience across three different team sports including ice hockey, baseball, and soccer. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and relational mapping and analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results showed that coaches built relatively small but diverse developmental networks that extended beyond traditional mentoring. These networks offered a crucial foundation of career and psychosocial support, helping coaches navigate and overcome career-related barriers, including those shaped by gendered structures in sport. Collectively, these findings enhance our understanding of the career experiences and development of women coaches through the developmental network perspective, highlighting how coaching progression is shaped through relational systems embedded within gendered sport contexts. Future research could build on these findings by exploring developmental networks across diverse coaching populations and sport contexts to better understand how mentoring initiatives, sponsorship opportunities, and organizational support structures can be designed to enhance women coaches’ access to developmental relationships and career advancement opportunities.
Manning et al. (Wed,) studied this question.
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