Charlotte 49ers men’s basketball coach Ron Sanchez is building a staff without gender bias

Morgan Foster can’t wait to see her old friend and colleague Katharine Palmer when Foster starts her job as the Charlotte 49ers men’s basketball team’s director of sports performance later this month.

“KP!” Foster said when asked about Palmer, Charlotte’s associate director of basketball operations. “There’s that Virginia connection. She really gets after it. She goes above and beyond with everything she does.”

Foster and Palmer recently worked together on Virginia’s men’s basketball staff — Foster as an assistant strength and conditioning coach; Palmer as an administrative assistant. Now they’ll be reunited at Charlotte in what’s possibly a unique situation in NCAA Division I men’s basketball: two women on a men’s basketball staff.

“I didn’t know what I was going to get completely when I interviewed (Foster),” said 49ers head coach Ron Sanchez, who added he didn’t consider Foster’s gender during her job interview. “We had a really talented pool of candidates, all of them very qualified. But she stood out.”

An unscientific survey of sports information directors Tuesday turned up several coaching staffs (including coaches, trainers, strength coaches and support staff) that included one female, but none with two. According to the Toledo Blade, Maine’s Edniesha Curry is the only full-time female assistant coach in a Division I men’s program.

“It’s not something I’ve done intentionally,” Sanchez said. “It’s not my calling to open doors or break down barriers or things of that nature. When I look at people I want to work with, I generally approach it as taking gender and appearances out of the equation. I look at the content of the person, their body of work, their education and what I call their heart’s posture — are they servants. Those are the things that really matter to me.”

If Foster did hold an advantage over other candidates, it might come from her having worked with Sanchez for two years while Sanchez was associate head coach under Tony Bennett and Foster was also an assistant strength and conditioning coach for the Cavaliers women’s team.

Foster replaces Blake Bender, who took a position as assistant athletic performance coach at California.

The title of “director of sports performance” might sound like a fancy way of saying “strength and conditioning coach,” but there’s more to it than that. Foster — along with football’s Chris Laskowski and women’s basketball and Olympic sports’ Stacy Weaver — will be involved in players’ nutrition and helping reduce injuries.

“When it came to Morgan, she possessed those qualities,” Sanchez said. “I didn’t go there wanting to hire a woman. I wanted to hire the best strength coach out there. You remove the name and gender from her resume and she was the best one. That’s the way I’d want somebody to look at me.”

This story was originally published June 17, 2020 at 3:58 PM.