Padecky: Wisdom flying solo
ROHNERT PARK - Sonoma State’s Natalie Wisdom is entering the void, smiling. Yes, smiling and grinning and laughing and for a moment there you’d think she forgot where she was and what she was doing. She’s a college basketball coach going solo, really solo.
Wisdom can’t call Duke or Kansas or Kentucky for advice because there’s not a female assistant coach for the men’s team at Duke, Kansas or Kentucky who can help her. In fact, there’s not a men’s woman assistant anywhere. She is alone, the only female assistant coach for a men’s team in NCAA basketball at the Division I or Division II level.
So Wisdom, 25, should fidget. A leg should be bouncing up and down. Her answers should be short and clipped. She should be a mass of staccato energy, giving off enough electricity you could run a toaster oven off her charge. Instead, you get this ...
“The men’s game is the same as the women’s,” Wisdom said. “OK, the men play above the rim, the women below it.”
Wisdom paused, saw the opening and charged through it.
“Oh, wow! These players can dunk! Can we really do that?”
Wisdom sat back, laughing. A little self-deprecation goes a long way. Wisdom is aware of her singular status and how it might feel like a crushing anvil on her back. Which it might be if she was the only SSU coach possessed with the gift of humor. She’s not.
“Look,” said Pat Fuscaldo, SSU’s men’s head coach, “if Natalie can handle my three Jack Russells, she can coach men’s basketball.”
Yes, you got it - Pat Fuscaldo hired his dog sitter to coach his men.
Only in the small, quirky world of Sonoma County could we somehow connect Jack Russell terriers to men’s college basketball through a young woman who once was coached as a fifth-grader by Fuscaldo’s wife, Molly Goodenbour, the legendary Stanford All-American who also once coached the women at SRJC - where Wisdom was team captain her two years there.
Stop me if you read that previous paragraph before.
Of course you haven’t.
And I bet you never read the next paragraph, either.
“Once I heard how well Natalie handled those Jack Russells,” Fuscaldo said, “that sealed the deal for me.”
Goodenbour had gotten to know Wisdom through youth basketball camps Goodenbour had run. Fuscaldo in turn had gotten to know Wisdom through the many recruiting trips he made to SRJC to see the men’s team. Fuscaldo also became good friends with Lacey Campbell, SRJC’s women’s coach.
Fuscaldo and Goodenbour would go on vacation and ask Wisdom, who starred at Rincon Valley Christian, to take care of the hyperactive Jack Russells. A connection was cemented. Beyond finding a doctor and a mechanic, nothing relaxes a couple more than finding someone they can trust to take care of their animals. So when Wisdom approached Fuscaldo this summer, Wisdom grabbed his full attention.
Fuscaldo had just lost an assistant, Zach Zapponi. What about me, Wisdom asked.
“I really want you to think this over,” Fuscaldo said to Wisdom. It wasn’t meant to discourage her. It was meant for Wisdom to think it through. Wisdom really needed to know where women stood in men’s college basketball.
Nowhere, actually. According to a USA Today article in 2013, only three women have been paid assistants at a men’s program. It was in the early ’90s and the women lasted a very short time. Possibly even more significant was the number of women in college coaching today.
In 1974, 90 percent of all women collegiate athletes were coached by women. In 2013, the same college that did the original research - the University of Minnesota - found only 38 percent of all women collegiate athletes were coached by women.
“So there is gender bias,” said Marlene Bjornsrud, executive director of The Alliance of Women Coaches. “So what Natalie is doing, you can call her courageous and brave. It is very different to be the only woman in the room.”
Wisdom shrugged at being brave or courageous.
“I mean, what have I done?” she said.
True, the SSU men completed just their first week of practice Wednesday. Games haven’t even started yet. But athletes ? contrary to popular belief - are very intuitive people. They can smell baloney from a mile away. If a coach is a hood ornament or a political appointee or just a gasbag, players will reject and ignore.
“We look at all of it as information,” said team captain Mike Harris, a forward. “We listen to what our coaches have to say and apply it to our performance. We don’t treat her any less or more seriously than the other coaches. I don’t care who they are, as long as they know what they are talking about.”
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