On the day the women’s NCAA brackets come out, all I can think of is the coach who won’t be there. Her team will likely be a 2 or 3 seed, but she will not be coaching them, and she may never coach again.
Pokey Chatman resigned last week as coach of No. 10 LSU after leading the team to three consecutive Final Fours. Her resignation, coming as it did right before the NCAA tournament, was sudden and shocking. But the reason for it was even more so and it has shaken women’s basketball and its fans to their very cores.
Chatman resigned because she had inappropriate contact with at least one former player, according to reports in the Times-Picayune and on espn.com. Chatman’s apparent transgression damages not only herself and her career, but it damages the LSU program, the school and women’s basketball itself.
Chatman, 37, was one of the best and brightest young coaches, charismatic, a stellar recruiter and one of the few African-American head coaches of a Division I program. She’d spent her entire collegiate basketball career – nearly 18 years -- with the Tigers, as a player and as a coach. She moved up from assistant coach to interim head coach when LSU’s legendary leader, Sue Gunter, got ill with emphysema and helped take them to the Final Four. She took over when Gunter died – and took them to the Final Four twice more. She’d been coach of the year and was 90-14 as a head coach.
But all that has been shot to hell with the allegations that she had an inappropriate relationship with a player. It should be irrelevant that, if true, it was a female coach having a relationship with a female player. But it’s not. It would be just as wrong had it been male coach having a relationship with a female player, but it would not have the same negative effects on the game.
That it was a woman coach and a woman player feeds into all the negative stereotypes used to belittle the game. It gives the practitioners of negative recruiting all the ammunition they need to strike fear into parents and players, not to mention all closeted lesbian coaches petrified of having the most innocuous of contact with their players for fear they will be perceived as a threat. Don’t use this one case to paint lesbian coaches as predatory. They are no more likely to cross the line than anyone else.
Homophobia in sports is a pervasive virus that attacks all the vital organs. It locks players and coaches into a dark closet of lies and stunts their growth so that they cannot be who they truly are and live happy, open and healthy lives. The hypocrisy and homophobia that thrives in women’s sports as much as in men’s allows coaches such as Rene Portland of Penn State – who has stated that she will not have lesbians on her team – to survive amid honors and celebration while most lesbian coaches and players cloak themselves in lies fueled by fear.
I don’t know what did or did not happen between Chatman and the player(s). If there was inappropriate contact, she was right to resign. If she had not, she should have been fired. I can’t say what drove Chatman to do what has been alleged, whether it was plain old hormones and bad judgment or if it was the pressure of taking over a program amid the strain of losing a beloved coach and mentor or the stress of the impact of Hurricane Katrina on some players and their families and her own family. It doesn’t matter.
What matters is what LSU and its community does to support its women’s basketball program going forward. What matters is what the NCAA will do to look inside and find ways to root out the homophobia that hurts the game. What matters is that Chatman gets the help and support she needs. And what matters is women’s basketball will put this episode behind it, learn from it and that this tournament season will rise above it.