Contact: Sally Widman
URSINUS SPONSORS SNELL SYMPOSIUM TO HELP COMBAT NATIONAL SHORTAGE OF WOMEN COACHES
COLLEGEVILLE, Pa.-Jen Shillingford is hoping to create a ripple effect that will bring a new wave of female coaches into the world of girls' and women's sports.
The recently retired athletic director of Bryn Mawr College has, since last spring, been the Eleanor Frost Snell Chair of Health and Physical Education at Ursinus College. As such, she intends to help reverse a negative trend which, since 1972, has led to a majority of women's sports teams' being coached by men, and an even larger percentage of women's athletic programs' being administered by males.
Ironically, it was Title IX that changed the way women were hired and promoted in athletic departments, Shillingford says. Although Title IX created more opportunities for girls and women to play sports, there were fewer coaching jobs open to females.
In the early 1970's, before Title IX, and before the AIAW was subsumed by the NCAA, 90 percent of women's athletic programs were run by women and more than 90 percent of women's teams were coached by women, Shillingford said.
"What happened was that at a given institution the men's and women's programs would be merged, and the man would be put in charge," Shillingford explains. Slowly over the years the numbers of coaching positions held by women has continued to drop, at one point as low as 15 percent, as the men in charge hired other men. Male coaches discovered there was money to be made coaching women's sports and sought out those jobs. The old direct line that went from teaching physical education to coaching a girls' or women's team slowly eroded, too, as more and more institutions hired separate instructional and coaching staffs, Shillingford adds.
Earlier this winter, Shillingford organized the first Snell Symposium on Women and Coaching at Ursinus. She intended the experience as a prototype for other such programs, one that will eventually generate a new women's network whose members will go on to mentor and coach future female athletes.
Major names in the field of women's athletics spoke at the event. They were Donna Lopiano, executive director of the Women's Sports Foundation; Christine Grant, women's athletic director at the University of Iowa and the nation's foremost proponent of Title IX and gender equity; and Charlotte West, retired associate athletic director at Southern Illinois University and former president of the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW.)
Lopiano imparted her formula for great coaching to the young women participating in the symposium. These future coaches have a responsibility to lead, inspire and keep to a high standard, she said.
"Women's sports is where it is today because we have established a point of difference, vis-a-vis men's sports. I would ask you to make sure your players keep that point of difference." Citing the American Women's Soccer team last summer as an example, she said, "Their success was not just about how good they were, it was also about how good they were to young kids following in their footsteps. You have a responsibility to create heroes and you create heroes by the values that you teach them."
Things have been improving for the past several years, Shillingford and the others say, but there is still room for improvement.
Today, 47.4 percent of college women's teams are coached by women. But only 19.4 percent of women's programs are directed by females. Through the efforts of such luminaries as Grant, West, Lopiano, and many others, Shillingford hopes those percentages will continue to increase.
"Everybody can do something to help correct this situation," says Shillingford, who is also president of the U.S. Field Hockey Association. "The Snell Symposium is just a small thing, but if everyone did that, think what could happen."
Shillingford is now promoting her program through the Centennial Conference, in which Ursinus competes, and will take her message to other athletic conferences as well.
Jenepher Price Shillingford was graduated from Ursinus in 1954, and received a master's degree in education and sociology from Temple University in 1959. She is herself a veteran of an earlier groundswell of women's coaching prowess, begun by the legendary Ursinus field hockey coach Eleanor Frost Snell. Snell's career record from 1931 to 1971 in field hockey, softball and basketball was 197-61-29. Numbers of her students went on to become top coaches, and they in turn coached and taught other future coaches. The Snell string includes two former U.S. Olympic field hockey coaches: Vonnie Gros, Ursinus '57, and Beth Anders, Ursinus '73. (Anders played on the bronze-medal-winning team at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.) Because of Snell, Ursinus is home to the nation's oldest Division I field hockey program and the U.S. Field Hockey Association Hall of Fame.
Hockey is Ursinus' only Division I, non-Centennial Conference sport-it competes in the Patriot League-in all others, it competes at the Division III level.
Shillingford became athletic director at Bryn Mawr in 1980 and pioneered that college's wellness education program, which became the model for other schools. In addition to the USFHA presidency, she has served on the United States Olympic Committee Board of Governors. She is also a past president of the Ursinus Alumni Association.
In the 1980s, Shillingford chaired the effort at Ursinus to raise money for the Snell Chair, which has previously been held by both Gros and Laura Borsdorf, a professor in the Ursinus department of exercise and sport science.
Ursinus, 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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