The U.S. women’s national soccer team has a new coach, one with plenty of international coaching experience and success.

But even before Tom Sermanni, a Scot in charge of the Australian women’s team, was hired Tuesday by the U.S. Soccer Federation, there were worries about a factor over which he has had no control.

His gender.

A few seasoned media observers of women’s soccer were grousing on Twitter about USSF president Sunil Gulati’s choice. Phil Hersh of The Chicago Tribune:

“Here’s the deal: Best choice would have been US woman; next, foreign woman; next, US man; last, foreign man”

When reminded by others in the women’s soccer community, including former national team captain and ESPN commentator Julie Foudy, about Sermanni’s qualifications and achievements, Hersh remained churlish:

“If @JulieFoudy likes Sermanni, that’s about the best endorsement he could get. But the best woman’s FB team in world should have woman coach”

Why? There is no explanation, of course. But for sheer outrage, USA Today’s Christine Brennan takes the lead, as usual, when her gender has apparently been besmirched:

“What happened today should never happen again for #USWNT. Time for major USOC, NCAA, NGB initiative.”

(I know I need to sign up for Storify if I’m going to keep doing this. Soon, I keep promising myself.)

And I know Hersh and Brennan well enough to pose this question, not just of them but also those of us who have a bit of history covering, and following, this sport:

Does anybody remember Anson Dorrance and Tony DiCicco?

Two coaches who were the architects of the U.S. women’s program, and who set a very high bar for the rest of the world to follow?

Two coaches who have devoted their lives to coaching women, and of helping develop the women’s game in so many other ways? Dorrance, with the North Carolina dynasty. DiCicco, on the fledgling professional level following his guidance of the 1999 Women’s World Cup championship team, first as an executive in the Women’s United Soccer Association, and most recently with the recently folded Women’s Professional Soccer.

Both authors of noted books on the nurturing of young soccer players, regardless of gender.

Two male coaches?

DiCicco vied to get back his old job, and was a finalist. After being told he would not be re-hired, DiCicco complained that he thought Gulati “thinks so little of American coaches. But it’s hard to say for me that he didn’t make a good choice. Tom Sermanni is a good choice and can – as so many of us can – win with this team.”

Isn’t that the whole point?

Those vested in the sport, and who want to see the American women continue the good work of Pia Sundhage, know that it’s not about whether an American woman is in charge. While it’s a good idea to encourage and cultivate women coaches who want to aspire to the national team level, developing that pool is going to take longer than it has to create the playing talent on the field. Women’s soccer is, like many women’s team sports, still in a developmental stage, in so many ways, and the coaching realm is no exception.

Brennan’s pre-emptive strike on all this, launched last week, is the perfect example of the thinking that has pervaded women’s sports activism for many years, centered more on the career prospects of adults and the symbolic value they convey than what might ultimately benefit female players:

“Encouraging U.S. Soccer to hire another female head coach is not about bowing to a quota system or some kind of feminist agenda. It’s about growing their game and the possibilities within it, showing every girl and woman on a soccer field that she can become a leader by seeing someone who looks like her coaching her team — and the U.S. national team as well.”

“Some kind of feminist agenda?” From a journalist who openly spouts Women’s Sports Foundation talking points as a matter of course, even while on official duty?

What she’s getting at here is an argument I know well from covering women’s college basketball for many years. In the early 1990s, there was a highly concerted effort to get athletics directors to hire women for plum jobs, even where male coaches with many years in the women’s game and plenty of qualifications were also being considered. Some guys didn’t get interviewed at all, as younger females were being touted by their elders as their heirs apparent.

Thankfully that conflict has largely been reduced, as ADs are hiring coaches, regardless of gender, race and other factors, who know how to win, above all.

Without the dedication and contributions of two men, U.S. women’s soccer would not be where it is today. To not even mention them by name, much less acknowledge their legacy, is more of an affront to American women’s soccer than the hiring of yet another man to lead them.

I had no sooner pushed the button on yesterday’s post on the issue of gender and coaching women’s basketball than ESPN The Magazine, as part of the Worldwide Leader’s flood the zone Title IX coverage, published “The Glass Wall” on the same topic, but that reached an entirely different conclusion.

Written by Luke Cyphers and Kate Fagan, a former basketball player at Colorado, this very long piece examines the dearth of women in the college coaching ranks, why so many more men are itching to coach women’s teams and what happens to women coaches who fight for gender equity.

As I Tweeted upon first reading this, I thought this was a crock, and at so many levels. After several more closer readings, it is sadly nothing more than the dogma of recycled, decades-old cultural grievances from a handful of women’s advocates. Cyphers and Fagan have provided an updated shine, designed to give the impression that the professional prospects for women coaches are grimmer now than ever.

This claptrap has been peddled by women’s advocates since the demise of the AIAW in the early 1980s. It is less about the development of women’s sports than the careerism of adult women, whose interests and desire for power have always been more paramount than the athletes under their charge.

There is quote after mournful quote of women coaches, administrators, academics and even NCAA officials about how it’s unthinkable that women will ever have a chance to coach men as they watch men easily cross the line in the opposite direction.

Cyphers and Fagan “report” these disparities with skimpy “research” conducted by advocates who have an axe to grind. It is astonishing in its willingness to swallow whole a fallacious ideology, and even more astonishing for the serious journalistic questions it does not pose.

It wasn’t until the 43rd paragraph — the 43rd! — that I finally came across the lead, as we say in the journalism business. Here it is in full:

“Athletic directors who spoke with espnW for this story say they consistently receive significantly more applications from men for all coaching vacancies. ‘There isn’t a job that’s not dominated by male applicants,” says [former Notre Dame and Northwestern women's basketball coach Mary] DiStanislao.’ “

The writers try to explain this away, blaming long-standing sexism and homophobia in an intolerant male sports culture as the real culprit for the lower-than-desired numbers. To prove their point, they simply quote the aggrieved, with no other point of view evident or even possible. Here’s Helen Carroll of the National Center for Lesbian Rights:

“When you look at the decline in the percentage of women coaches, sexual orientation has a lot to do with it.”

What else is she going to say?

The poster child of the persecuted woman coach in “The Glass Wall” is former Oregon women’s basketball coach Jody Runge. The story severely downplays the fact that Runge was a polarizing figure within the Oregon athletic program, and within her own team, for many more reasons than pushing for better support for women’s sports. There’s an excellent book on the subject that illustrates the complexities of her time there. To hoist her as a victim of a female-unfriendly environment is misleading, at the very least.

This story’s treatment of gender equity issues at Fresno State also does not tell the full story, some of which I wrote about last summer. While there certainly was a high degree of gender-based hostility within that athletic department, this is not a one-way street. There was too much mistrust and animosity going back and forth to blame one side as the source of the problem.

Curiously, none of the women coaches quoted by Cyphers and Fagan talk about whether they’ve expressed an interest in coaching a men’s team, or even applied. Surely the writers should have known that Stanford women’s basketball coach Tara VanDerveer’s name was bandied about in the early 1990s for men’s openings. Did they bother to ask her about it?

Here’s another glaring omission from this story: In women’s basketball, men are quite often more willing to take a job at a mid-major or small-conference program and work their way up. While an increasing number of women are doing the same thing, those women touted as the “hot young coaches” are primarily top assistants at BCS-level programs, usually in charge of recruiting and waiting for their first head coaching job, ideally at another major school.

Cyphers and Fagan can’t be bothered to question this further, nor to mention that the percentage of male coaches abounds most notably at the lower college, high school and AAU levels. Are more women not willing, or just not interested, in starting out at the very bottom? Have they been encouraged by women’s sports leaders to aim higher before they may be ready? Are they being properly prepared for the rigors of contemporary coaching by their mostly female mentors? These questions also do not seem to have been asked.

During the 1990s there was a concerted effort to hire women as much as possible. Starting in the last decade, athletics directors have been hiring coaches, regardless of gender, who they believe will win. It’s a cold bottom line, but it’s a trend that figures to escalate.

To continue to blame the same old bogeymen for the changing nature and demands of the coaching profession is to continue to fight the past. “The Glass Wall” perpetuates a narrative of unwarranted victimology that ESPN, with its earnest diligence to chronicle “The Power of IX,” has gotten badly wrong.

The moves of Wisconsin-Green Bay coach Matt Bollant to Illinois and Bowling Green’s Curt Miller to Indiana this week raised a different set of eyebrows than they might have a decade or so ago.

In leaving established, NCAA-successful women’s mid-major teams for long-downtrodden Big Ten programs, Bollant and Miller represent the kinds of hires some athletics directors are favoring these days: Individuals with demonstrated success as head coaches at a different level of the sport.

This hasn’t completely replaced the trendy practice of hiring top assistants — notably recruiters — at elite programs but who haven’t been head coaches. That approach worked at UCLA, which hired then-Tenneseee assistant Nikki Caldwell three years ago, and at LSU, which in turned hired her away from Westwood last spring. All along, her name has been in the conversation of who may become Pat Summitt’s eventual successor.

Miller, who took Bowling Green to the Sweet 16 in 2007, is getting an annual base salary of $275,000 at Indiana, which frankly hasn’t seemed very committed to women’s basketball. His press conference on Wednesday, at the Hoosiers’ splashy new basketball practice and office complex with his new team in attendance, appears to signal a significant change in emphasis in a basketball-mad state.

As Graham Hays of ESPN/espnW notes, there’s also the subject of gender, as two males are replacing females:

“There is a larger systemic problem in American sports when it comes to women and coaching. As an example, consider the world of Division I college basketball. An aspiring male coach coming out of college has more than 600 head-coaching positions theoretically available to him down the road — all of those in both men’s and women’s basketball. Given that we don’t seem any closer to women coaching men’s basketball, an aspiring female coach coming of college has half that number of opportunities when she looks into the future.

“Aspiring female teachers aren’t limited to all-girls schools. Aspiring female doctors aren’t limited to practices that see only women. But when it comes to basketball, it’s accepted as a societal norm that aspiring female coaches will work only within their gender. In turn, that reality creates understandable pressure within women’s basketball to promote, literally and figuratively, women coaches. If only half of the coaching positions available to women in the first place are actually held by women, what incentive is there to go into coaching?”

During the 1990s, it would have been extremely difficult for Bollant or Miller even to be interviewed for these jobs. Back then, aspiring assistants like Tom Collen at Arkansas and mid-major head coaches like Bill Fennelly at Toledo wondered if they would get a fair chance to move up.

This was a time of highly-charged Title IX litigation that reached the U.S. Supreme Court and the publication of books alleging that macho football was a hindrance to women’s progress in sports and a menace to women in society. Sentiments were running high that women needed to be considered for virtually every major opening, to seriously begin cracking “the glass sneaker.”

Collen eventually led Colarado State to an Elite 8 (with Miller as an assistant), then moved to Louisville and this season guided Arkansas to the NCAAs. Fennelly also moved up, to Iowa State, which was an atrocious job when he arrived in 1995 but he has since taken it to multiple NCAA tournaments and crafted a national attendance leader.

While Hays makes some good points about the limitations on women in coaching, there are a few other factors involved. I can think of a few young women who played the game at major programs, got into coaching and left the business. One simply wanted to go into private business, and while she attends the Women’s Final Four and keeps close ties to people in the sport, she hasn’t looked back. Another was a star on a Final Four program, was given the heady responsibility of recruiting, but she also left for the private sector. She wanted to get away from the hectic lifestyle of constant travel and relentlessly chasing after high school players.

Another young woman played at a BCS school and became a recruiting coordinator at a conference rival, helping it reach the national elite, before crashing out a few years ago. She now coaches a high school girls team, but as she started out she embodied everything women’s sports leaders prized in a future coach.

Coaching burnout in the women’s game is becoming a more prevalent topic, especially with the resignation of Gail Goestenkors at Texas. Various reports last night indicated that former Longhorns assistant Karen Aston, who’s been at Charlotte and now North Texas, has interviewed for the position. Her Texas connections are seen as a plus, something Goestenkors didn’t have and which cost her in recruiting.

While there will be those who grouse that there aren’t more women coaching, athletics directors who invest millions in a money-losing sport want at least to get something of a return on that investment by hiring coaches they think will be the right fit. Whether it’s male or female, black or white, mid-major or BCS assistant, the choice generally comes down to some very bottom-line factors: Will this person win? Will they represent what we want to embody?

I’ve long believed that the game needs all of the very best coaches it can get. So many men like Bollant and Miller have worked in dedicated obscurity in women’s basketball for so many years. Now they’ll get their chance to show what they can do at the top level.

If they’re as good in the Big Ten as they’ve shown elsewhere, this can only be a good thing for the sport.