When Joanna Barney founded the Utah Avalanche in 2001, she left a raft of doubters in her wake.

After a standout career with the University of Utah women’s soccer team, Barney heeded a visceral call to soccer coaching in her home state. But as she naturally gravitated toward the girls game on the club level, she ran into roadblocks at clubs with both girls and boys programs. Why not pour more resources into the girls game? she asked. Hire more dedicated coaches and elevate its prominence?

For one, she vividly remembers conversations with a few of her male colleagues. And they weren’t encouraging.

“It’s never going to happen,” Barney remembers being told. “The parents in Utah will never see their daughters as the same type of athletes as they see their sons. Girls create expense. Boys create revenue.”

As it happens, Barney’s Avalanche exceeded expectations. Dissatisfied with a unified model that she felt heavily favored the boys at the expense of girls development, she splintered off to form the Avalanche. Over the last nine years, the club has sent about 230 girls players on to earn a total of around $14 million in college scholarship money. After the Elite Clubs National League (ECNL) was formed in 2009 as the female answer to the U.S. Soccer Development Academy, the Avalanche were among of the first wave of clubs to join.

Barney is something of an anomaly. The Utah Avalanche is the only club in the ECNL that boasts a female coach, director of coaching and club president rolled into one. Barney wears all of those hats for the girls-only club, but there aren’t many like her in American soccer. She admitted she can remember coaching against a single female coach - ever - in her five years in the ECNL.

“When I’m at a game, it’s usually not that I’m standing there against one male coach,” Barney said. “I’m usually standing there against five male coaches.”

More than three years ago, TopDrawerSoccer.com analyzed the percentage of women’s coaches in the ECNL. The league’s carefully trimmed number of clubs and well-groomed record-keeping made it a natural core sample. At the time, three years after the league’s founding, 18 of its 330 teams were coached by women. Five percent. Not much has changed in the three years since.

There are currently 77 member clubs listed on the ECNL’s roster for the 2014-15 season, each of which has five teams entered in the league stretching from the U14 to the U18 age brackets. That breaks out to 385 total teams across all age divisions. Within that total, there are just 25 teams led by a female head coach. Four lead multiple ages.

All told, there are 21 women in head coaching positions in the most exclusive nationwide league for girls soccer, a rate of about one added female coach per year over the last three years. And only two clubs - Virginia’s McLean YSA and Connecticut’s FSA FC - employ more than one female head coach.

Today, 94 percent of the league’s teams are guided by male head coaches, a slight one percent drop from three years ago. The administrative numbers are similarly arrayed. Five of the 77 ECNL clubs have a female director of coaching, and four have a female president of operations.

This month provided a rare confluence of the present and the future. In Canada, the U.S. Women’s National Team is the midst of breaking ratings records and hooking the attention of the nation at the Women’s World Cup. Meanwhile, just outside Seattle, the ECNL is currently holding its annual playoffs, the single biggest event on the league’s calendar. Invigorated by the full national team’s run through the knockouts, scads of top girls players - many of them in the highest places in the U.S. Youth National Team system - are convening to wage their own pitched battles on the field.

But while the younger generation has plenty of older professional playing examples, the vast majority of girls soccer players in the U.S. won’t play under a female head coach for the entirety of their careers.

“I think I can be of value to some of my alumni players who come back and say, ‘I want to do what you do. How do I do it? How do I start?’” said Amanda Schmutz, one of the ECNL’s five female coaching directors with Heat FC. “I never had that. It’s a different world when you’re always the only girl on staff everywhere you’ve ever been. It’s always a different situation for you. I’ve never been on a staff that had another female on as a full time coach.”

The dearth of women’s head coaches isn’t limited to the ECNL. Several years ago, peer-reviewed journal Gender and Society found that just 13.4 percent of the 1,490 American Youth Soccer Organization soccer teams they reviewed over an eight-year period had women head coaches. A cross-section of a US Youth Soccer Region IV Championship tournament in late June revealed even smaller numbers. Of the 80 participating girls teams from the U14-U19 age ranges, just four had female head coaches, or five percent. There were 283 matches played in those six age brackets over the course of six game days. Female head coaches shared a sideline just once.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Women’s National Team system is still figuring out ways to fold its former players into the coaching profession. In June, USWNT legend Michelle Akers told USA Today, “I’m not sure they want (former national team players) involved.” No league or level is immune.

But it hits the ECNL particularly hard because of its place of prominence in pre-college girls development. Since its foundation in 2009, the league rapidly grew into the nation’s most successful year-round girls-only club league. It closely mimics the Development Academy in its structure, which, practically, puts a stable nationwide base on the professional pipework from a player’s preteen years to the NWSL. There are still multiple options for girls soccer players - high school’s influence is decreasing, but it still limps along - but the ECNL is now the club nexus for college and U.S. Youth National Team scouting for girls. If a top player isn’t competing in ECNL league matches and showcases, her visibility is lowered significantly. A growing number of Division I college coaches don’t scout much else.

The hot core of the issue is not whether it matters that so few women coach soccer at the highest club levels, but what to do about it. With such a small percentage of women’s coaches being promoted to head coaching positions in the U.S., there’s a bubbling discussion coming to the fore about its meaning.

The ECNL straddles a fine line in all this. The league isn’t nearly old enough to count on graduated former players flocking back to the league to coach former teams. And whether that even happens with any frequency in the future isn’t entirely certain. Like other girls club and high school leagues, the ECNL is more a victim of demographics and entrenched culture than it is a willing participant in the male-dominated coaching corridors of elite girls soccer development.

The clubs themselves are autonomous collectives within the broader scope of a wider league structure. To this, there isn’t much the ECNL and leagues like it can do beyond the continual support and nurturing of talented coaches, regardless of the gender.

None of the league’s female coaches argue the ECNL is acting as an obstinate gatekeeper to female coaches, or that its men’s coaches necessarily do a poor job. The fact that the demographics cut across all levels and leagues makes that a tough sell. According to multiple sources TopDrawerSoccer.com spoke to for this story, part of the issue gathers around simple arithmetic. There’s a general consensus in many coaching circles that there aren’t nearly as many women’s coaches applying for jobs and then staying in the profession long-term. However true that may be, it discounts the larger proportion of female assistant coaches and those occupying other administrative jobs. Almost every ECNL program has at least one female coach on staff, but only a small sliver of them own head or full-time jobs.

Barney posits at least part of the issue could orbit around work-life balance concerns.

“I’ve got a lot of really good female coaches inside my organization,” Barney said. “And yeah, I think there’s a lot of that across the country. The question is how long do they stay? As I think about it, most of them are younger.

“It seems like part of the reason is that it’s really difficult to juggle both that and a family,” added Barney, who works a full time job on top of her duties with Utah Avalanche. “Once you start having kids, coaching is so time consuming. And it’s the travel in the ECNL and the dedication that’s involved. You’re spending a lot of hours out, and once you have kids it becomes very difficult, at best, to do both.”

Schmutz is one of Barney’s peers. She played with Barney at Utah and went into coaching at around the same time. Notably, she coached with mega-club Colorado Rush before joining Las Vegas, Nevada outfit Heat FC, where she is today. Schmutz is on the exclusive list of female coaching directors in the ECNL, and she’s one of the four female coaches to handle more than one team (she coaches Heat FC’s U14 and U17 outfits).

Off-hand Schmutz could think of just two other female head coaches in the ECNL. And one was Barney.

“I think you don’t have to be a female to be a good role model to women’s players,” Schmutz said. “But I think I’m a great personality for some of the girls to see you can be bold, and you can be competitive and still be a good person and a woman. I think it’s a good other perspective for players to have a female coach. There’s a million great male coaches as well, but I think if you ask most of the players, they’ve never played for a female coach.”

One area where female coaches are in readier supply is in the college game. Nobody disputes that college is still a primary refuge for many of the game’s top female head coaches, where women like UCLA’s Amanda Cromwell and Notre Dame’s Theresa Romagnolo have rightly earned some of the most prestigious posts in the game. But that hasn’t translated to the clubs that help develop and feed those college programs their players.

Like Schmutz and Barney, Shannon Cirovski is one of the outliers. After coaching the University of Maryland girls program for seven years, she left in 2006 and eventually ended up in the realm of elite club soccer. Cirovski recently left a club coaching post to become the director of coaching for Bethesda SC’s ECNL program in Rockville, Maryland. Cirovski’s bonafides were hard to overlook, and soccer courses through her family’s veins. Her husband, Sasho, is one of the most iconic men’s college coaches in history with Maryland, where he’s won a pair of national titles and coached scores of future national team players in his 22 years.

Cirovski, who sets the coaching agenda for one of the nation’s deepest and most successful female development clubs, has dealt with obstacles at past clubs in hiring female coaches. She says many of the women she’s brought into clubs over the course of her career were met with perhaps more skeptical scrutiny than they deserved.

“At every club I’ve brought females to the club, because that’s who I know,” said Cirovski, who was an integral part of the 1991 U.S. Women’s National Team that won the World Cup. “I know more females than I know males. It’s really interesting. The reaction of the club to the females that came in wasn’t what I think it should’ve been. Let’s embrace these people. Let’s invest in them. Let’s nurture them, because we need females. That was my thing. You have to treat people well, because what females are giving up oftentimes is time that they could be spending with their children or their families. Obviously it’s the same with the males, but there are so few women head coaches that we need to figure out how to nurture them and what we can do to make their lives a little bit easier.”

There are no easy answers for how to generate more women’s head coaches in places of prominence. It may simply be a matter of time, when the ECNL becomes more established and today’s pioneering women’s coaches and directors exert more influence. Still, Mia Hamm and the golden generation of U.S. Women’s National Team Soccer is now of prime coaching age, and women’s head coaches are still seeking a toehold in elite American club soccer.

If American soccer can’t find a way to develop and nurture more women’s coaches like Barney, there’s no guarantee they’ll stick around long enough to be part of the transformation.

“It’s exhausting. There isn’t a year that goes by that you sometimes don’t question, ‘How much longer can I do this?’” Barney said. “Especially as my kids get older and they have their own things that they want to pursue, and I want to be there for them, it becomes more and more difficult. I don’t know if that’s a male vs. female thing, if that’s the role we play more, but there’s not a year that goes by that you don’t question.”