Newswise — A symposium to be held at Ursinus College is a grassroots way of addressing a lingering problem: the shortage of female coaches despite the increases in opportunities for women in athletics since the advent of Title IX.
The Snell Shillingford Women's Coaching Symposium, scheduled Jan. 21-23, named in part for Eleanor Frost Snell, a legendary Ursinus coach, was conceived in 1997 by Jenepher Shillingford, an Ursinus alumna and Bryn Mawr College emerita athletics director. Shillingford sought to help stem the decline in the number of female coaches, the weekend program at Ursinus offers the opportunity for a select group of female student athletes from Centennial Conference institutions to become more acquainted with the issues and skills involved in coaching.
Pioneers in gender equity for women's athletics, such as Charlotte West, Christine Grant, Kathy DeBoer and Shillingford will address topics involved in coaching such as ethics, philosophy and planning a practice. Grant guided the University of Iowa women's program to national prominence and has been an expert consultant to the Health, Education and Welfare Office for Civil Rights Title IX Task Force. West, whose college career was at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, was president of the American Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, a national governing body for women's athletics, and was the first woman member of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics. DeBoer is a former University of Kentucky championship coach and author of "Gender and Competition, How Men and Women Approach Work and Play Differently."
Three years ago, Erin Fitzgerald, then a student-athlete, attended the symposium and said she felt inspired to continue to broaden opportunities for women in coaching. Today, Fitzgerald, the head women's lacrosse coach at Ursinus College, is helping to run the program. As a female coach, a group whose numbers have not kept pace with the number of female athletes, Fitzgerald knows firsthand how important it is to mentor the students who show an interest in coaching as a profession.
"Now that I have been out of school for a few years and involved in coaching at the collegiate level, I understand even more the need for more women to get involved (and stay involved) in coaching women," Fitzgerald said.
The issue was brought into the spotlight in a study of all four-year college and university NCAA members with women's athletics programs, titled "Women in Intercollegiate Sports," which noted when it came out in 2000 that less than half of all women's teams are coached by women. (45.6 percent). The study's authors, R. Vivian Acosta and Linda Jean Carpenter (retired from Brooklyn College of the City University of New York) lamented the lack of role models in women's athletics. The study also found that opportunities continue to grow mostly in Division III athletics. The Snell Shillingford symposium is held at other Division III colleges, and rotates its location among the Centennial Conference schools (Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Swarthmore, Dickinson, Gettysburg Muhlenberg, and Franklin & Marshall in Pa., and Johns Hopkins, McDaniel and Washington colleges in Maryland). The New England Small Colleges Athletic Conference (NESCAC) runs a coaching symposium modeled after the Snell Shillingford symposium.
The mentoring program has been successful in sending half its participants into the coaching field at all educational levels, including, Fitzgerald, who returned this past fall to her alma mater, where she graduated magna cum laude in 2002, and was the first woman in Ursinus College history to be named First Team All-American and First Team Academic All-American. She recalled being motivated by listening to speakers like West and Grant, as a student, and is now happy to be a part of the mentoring.
"I participated in the Snell Symposium my senior year of college and enjoyed the experience immensely," she said. "The experience of working with college student-athletes is so valuable and to be able to now be a part of this program as a mentor for younger women is so exciting."
Ursinus College, founded in 1869, is a highly selective, nationally ranked, independent, coeducational liberal arts college, located on a scenic, wooded, 165-acre campus, 28 miles from Center City Philadelphia. Known for quality programs in the arts and sciences, it is one of only 8 percent of U.S. colleges to possess a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
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