When Becky Hammon took on coaching duties for a team fielded by the San Antonio Spurs, the NBA Las Vegas Summer League had as many female head coaches as the National Women's Soccer League.
So perhaps Seattle Reign FC coach Laura Harvey can win more than a championship this week.
Seattle's success the past two regular seasons -- a level of dominance obviously unprecedented in a league just three years old but also in any of the previous iterations of women's professional leagues in this country -- has been built on strong pillars. Hope Solo is the best goalkeeper in the world. Kim Little might be the best player in the world, period. And while Megan Rapinoe's style and flair earn her legions of fans, particularly in the same Pacific Northwest in which she excelled for the University of Portland before national team fame, there is also plenty of substance to the World Cup star's game. The Reign have good players.
But even if Seattle's talent is so superior to the competition as to explain its 29-5-10 record the past two seasons, then surely the person who assembled it deserves a prominent place in the distribution of credit. And if it isn't talent alone, then surely the person who fit the pieces together and devised the strategies by which they so consistently win deserves equal credit. In Seattle's case, of course, it is the same person.
Harvey knows which players she wants, knows what she wants them to do and knows how to get them to want to do it for her -- like most great coaches with a say in personnel.
"Tactically, Laura is a mastermind," captain Keelin Winters said. "I think she's the best coach I've ever had, and I don't think that I'm the only one who thinks that. I think there are probably quite a few players who think she's one of the best coaches in the world at the moment."
Among those who would echo that sentiment is defender Stephanie Cox, who played in the 2007 World Cup and 2008 Olympics for the United States and has returned to what might well be world-class form with the Reign after having a child. Harvey fiddled with the back line this season in an effort to maintain its defensive solidity without diminishing the role of someone like Cox pushing forward. But it isn't the tactical success, at least not in isolation, that Cox cited as the root of her loyalty.
"I know personally the way that she relates to me and my daughter means the world to me," Cox said. "And [it] makes me want to play for a coach like that, who cares about you and believes in you and invests in you. I think in a lot of environments, especially like the national team, there's always, kind of, doubts or questions, but I think in this environment with the Reign, she just instills a lot of belief in you and confidence."
What we're left to wrestle with is whether the particular pronoun is important.
Should Seattle complete what was left unfinished a season ago and win the championship, Harvey will become the second female coach in the league to do so. Yet at the moment, she is also the only female coach among the league's nine teams. In addition to Harvey and Cindy Parlow Cone, who was the coach of the Portland team that won the league's first title, only one other woman, Lisa Cole, ever held the position on a permanent basis during the league's first three seasons (when fired by the Boston Breakers late in 2013, Cole was replaced on an interim basis by Cat Whitehill, then still also an active player for the team).
Nor is this a case of a small sample size producing an anomaly.
The ACC and Pac-12 are the two strongest conferences in women's college soccer. Of their 26 coaches at the moment, only seven are women -- and just four of those women were hired within the past 15 years. Using national championships as a measure is difficult in college soccer because of the Anson Dorrance factor, i.e., few people of either gender interrupted the North Carolina coach's run of dominance over the sport, but when UCLA won it all in 2013 under first-year coach Amanda Cromwell, she became just the second woman to win a Division I national championship and the first former Division I player to do so.
It's not just the power conferences. Even in the Ivy League, six of eight head coaches are men.
It is against that backdrop that a league that touts itself as the pinnacle of women's soccer goes about its business with just one female coach.
"I wouldn't use the word concern; it surprises me," NWSL commissioner Jeff Plush said when asked if the disparity in his league concerned him. "I think that will evolve over time."
He didn't specify what kind of time frame.
There isn't anything inherently insidious with men coaching women, any more than there is in, let's say, a male journalist writing about women's sports. But as a summer recedes that became about not just the competitive success but marketing clout and mass appeal of female athletes, be they the U.S. women's national team, Serena Williams or Ronda Rousey, as well as the inroads into coaching male athletes made by both Hammon and Jen Welter with the Arizona Cardinals, it is a puzzling state of affairs in women's soccer.
Should Seattle beat FC Kansas City on Thursday, two women, born in England, would hold the most important championships in women's soccer: Harvey and United States coach Jill Ellis.
And yet in neither case is it clear that the success is a harbinger of things to come.
We assume there will be ripple effects as a result of what Carli Lloyd, Becky Sauerbrunn, Julie Johnston and the rest did on the field. We don't assume the same with coaches like Ellis and Harvey.
Perhaps surprisingly, Harvey -- the 2014 and 2015 NWSL coach of the year -- is among those who don't see a playing field in need of leveling.
"I'm a true believer that if you're the right person for the job, you should get it," Harvey said. "I think female coaches in other sports are showing that. They're breaking down the barriers in the men's side of the game with basketball and things like that. As females. if they show the knowledge and the characteristics that are needed to coach at that level then they get given the chance and the opportunity. That's something that in our sport we've got to keep striving for, whether that be getting the opportunity within the women's game or getting the opportunity within the men's game. [The latter is] going to be difficult and it's going to be a long time coming.
"But I truly believe that nothing should be given to any female coach; it should be something that you earn."
Just 32 years old when she was hired by Seattle, barely a full year older than Solo, Harvey was already by that time a former coach of the year in England's top professional league, where she led the Arsenal women's team to multiple league championships. Injuries cut short her own career, but rather than coaching being something she fell into as a way to stay involved in the game, it was almost as if she had played to pass the time until she was ready to coach.
"I'm not sure it was a path I chose," Harvey said. "I just think I was sort of [born] to do it. I was brought up in it. My dad coached me and my brother to be educated of the game. And we sort of took that on at a young age. Obviously, when you're that young a lot of your education is through playing the game, but I always had a desire, from really early, that I felt like I knew the game well enough that I could tell other people what the game should look like."
She still knew what it should look like even as Seattle stumbled to a seventh place finish in the league's first season. Solo and Rapinoe missed significant portions of the season. Another allocated player, Amy Rodriguez, missed the entire season while pregnant. Harvey had not yet been able to pry Little away from Arsenal. But players who were around for that season, the "dark days" as Harvey wryly put it, describe an atmosphere little different than the past two seasons. Losing takes a toll on all moods, of course, but Harvey didn't panic, didn't change for the sake of change, didn't start throwing players under the proverbial bus.
Seattle weathered its growing pains because its coach had weathered her own years before.
"Initially I tried to be somebody I wasn't, and it didn't work," Harvey said of her early days in England, when she was sometimes coaching players older than she was. "And then I very quickly realized that for me to be successful being a coach, I needed to be who I wanted to be. And if that worked, great. And if it didn't, then at least I did it my way. I think it's worked for me so far.
"I think the fact that I'm obviously still young in coaching terms means that I can relate to the players maybe a little bit more. But I think first and foremost, I truly believe that the players are ultimately people at the end of the day. And if we can treat them like that and make sure they feel like they're an important part of the club, which I truly believe they are, then we stand the best chance of getting good performances out of them and making sure they leave absolutely everything on the field."
Women's soccer needs more women in coaching. It also needs more Laura Harveys, not just because she fits the former description but because she fits another one. It's that one that matters Thursday night.
"I think the sign of a great coach is that they're able to get the best out of their players and make all the pieces fit together," Cox said. "And she's truly done that over the last couple of seasons."