Female ADs Find It's Lonely at the Top

"In our society, traditionally starting families and raising children are things that will take females out of the athletic ranks," said Ned Sparks, executive director of the Maryland Public Secondary Schools Athletic Association (MPSSAA). "Putting in so much time is hard for anybody, but particularly for women who might be trying to do family things."

Covington waited until her children left for college before becoming an athletic director in the late 1980s. Loudoun Valley Athletic Director Janeen Schutte refused to even become an assistant athletic director until her children reached high school. According to Marlene Kelly, supervisor of athletics in Anne Arundel, six athletic director jobs have come open in the county during the last decade. No women applied.

"To my knowledge, the schools in this county now have never had a full-time woman [athletic director], and it's not because [school officials] haven't tried," Kelly said. "As much as you want to say this is a new world and things like that, there are many things traditionally that women still do. Women are still mothers. It would be very hard to do that and be an athletic director."

Said Donna King, who retired as athletic director at Chantilly on Sept. 1: "Sometimes women don't apply, and that's true. But there are still women that aren't being considered. There's still a gender bias across the country, especially in sports.

"Our football team might have been 0-10, but I don't recall calling any plays. What happened was parents said: 'Oh, there's a woman athletic director. She probably doesn't know football. That must be the problem.' "

Long before that, though, King said she felt mistreated as a female athletic director. During meetings dominated by men, King would sometimes make a suggestion to little response. A minute later, King said, a man would say something similar and suddenly the entire room agreed.

Many other women said they experience the same phenomenon: Respect, they said, is sometimes based less on knowledge and experience than on gender. "It takes some incredible balancing and decision making to be liked as a woman in this job," King said. "It's like walking a tightrope."

Carol Satterwhite, a former athletic director at Wilde Lake and the first woman to become an athletic director at an MPSSAA school, gave experienced male coaches more flexibility.

"You can't always tell them what to do," Satterwhite said, "because they might not listen."

Loudoun Valley's Schutte decided to direct all student complaints to coaches first. "I never want somebody to think I'm stepping on their toes," Schutte said.

Renninger developed patience at Sidwell Friends. She often deals with parents who discredit her because of gender, Renninger said. When that happens, Renninger bites her tongue and silently blames ignorance, not maliciousness. Sometimes, though, she'd like to scream.

"Parents think, 'Well, what could you know about football? What could you know about the locker room? What could you know about male coaches? '" Renninger said. "People don't think that a woman can do this job, so being a woman works against you. There's no question, when certain things come up that have to do with sports, people tend to think that men are the experts. It's too bad, but these things are hard to change."

So hard, in fact, that nobody is particularly confident there will be any improvement. At many schools, the coach of one of the highest-profile teams -- usually football or boys' basketball -- still becomes the athletic director almost by default, which means -- almost by default -- the athletic director is a man. College sports yield no reason for optimism. According to a poll conducted by the NCAA, only 7.9 percent of Division I athletic directors in 2003-04 were women.

The National Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association has spent the last six or seven years trying desperately to attract women to its national conference, only to be continuously disappointed with the results. Bruce Whitehead, executive director of the NIAAA, has helped design and run several workshops catered to women in leadership roles. The same people seem to come every time.

"It seems like the number of women has kind of plateaued," Whitehead said. "I've been here on staff for almost five years, and I haven't really noticed an improvement at all. It seems like it's pretty much stuck."

Said Covington: "I hope we get more women. I hope it gets better. Because the way things are right now is not very good."

Staff writer Jon DeNunzio contributed to this report.