Hunters Lane High School in Nashville, Tennessee, has hired Katrina Carter as its new head boys basketball coach. Carter reportedly is the first woman in Nashville history to coach a high school boys basketball team.
“I am delighted that Coach Carter has accepted this important position. She is the perfect candidate to lead our boys to success,” Susan Kessler, Hunters Lane’s executive principal, told The Tennessean. “She is an outstanding classroom educator and a strategic powerhouse in the game of basketball, and I am very optimistic about where Coach Carter will take our boys’ varsity team.”
Men Coach Women At All Levels, Why Not The Reverse?
The hiring of Coach Carter hopefully will start normalizing this issue in the archaic world of sports.
It’s 2023 and in most every walk of life, men have women as bosses; there is no need for that reality to be a taboo one in sports.
Carter’s gender should be irrelevant. What matters is, can she coach? Is she the right person to mentor, guide and direct these young boys?
Obviously the officials at Hunters Lane believe that she is.
“I live by the quote of Chadwick Boseman and will apply it throughout my time coaching,” Carter said in a statement. “And the quote states, ‘Fearlessness means taking the first step, even if you don’t know where it will take you. It means being driven by a higher purpose, rather than by applause. It means knowing that you reveal your character when you stand apart more than when you stand with the crowd.’ I look forward to the impact that I will have on preparing and shaping these young men’s lives.”
Who Is Katrina Carter?
It’s clear Carter believes she’s the right person too.
Carter played college basketball at The University of Akron and upon graduation returned to her alma mater, Hillsboro High School in Tennessee as the girls basketball coach. She led the Burros to a 35-1 record and the Class 3A state championship in 2008-09. Carter also coached at Pearl-Cohn and Whites Creek.
We are seeing more and more women assistant coaches in the NBA and men have coached women forever at all levels of sports, so we should normalize the reverse.
Becky Hammon, head coach of the reigning WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces, was long thought to be the first woman who would end up coaching an NBA team. While she made the jump to the “W” she still believes that a woman can lead a men’s team.
“I hope women continue to get these opportunities because … it’s important for little girls to see that, but it’s also important for little boys to see that,” Hammon said during her introductory press conference in January 2022. “If we’re gonna talk about changing minds, you have to change it generationally, which means my two little boys need to know what it looks like to be a leader.
“We can start peeling back the layers of society and what is viewed as [a leader] … and start hiring people based on what they bring to the table — based [on] their basketball knowledge. I mean, there’s so many great women coaches out there that should be leading their own teams and given those opportunities.”
Carter’s first game on the Hunter’s lane sideline will be in the 2023-24 season.
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