Contact:Sally Widman, 610-409-3300;mailto:[email protected]
"SNELL II" TO GIVE WOMEN'S COACHING ANOTHER BOOST AT URSINUS
COLLEGEVILLE, Pa.-The Snell women's coaching project at Ursinus College is now well into its second year, and Jen Shillingford, its creator and leader, is beginning to see some results. As she prepares for Snell Symposium II on the 26th through 28th of this month, she is receiving calls from around the country from women who share her deep interest in inspiring more women to enter the coaching field.
The program is needed because, even now, 29 years after Title IX mandated that colleges provide equal athletic opportunities for men and women, the percentage of women's teams coached by women has hit a record low, and women run less than 20 percent of women's athletic programs.
The second Snell Symposium will open at 7:15 p.m., Friday, Jan. 26, in Olin Auditorium with a keynote address by Chris Voelz, the sometimes controversial and highly regarded women's athletic director at the University of Minnesota. Voelz, a presence at Minnesota since 1988, has won expanded facilities and more opportunities for her women athletes, adding women's soccer, ice hockey and crew teams, among others. But the progress has come at a cost--lawsuits and continuing battles with both university and state bureaucracies. Voelz will share her formulas for success with the symposium's young participants.
"She is a great cheerleader for women's coaching and sports," said Shillingford, who expects 25 women students and at least one faculty mentor from each of the 11 colleges in the Centennial Conference.
Voelz's speech is free and open to the public.
Shillingford has held the Eleanor Frost Snell Chair of Health and Physical Education at Ursinus since 1999, when she returned to her alma mater from Bryn Mawr College, where she had just retired as athletic director. The term of her chair ends this June, but she hopes this symposium will lead to others and become a self-sustaining trend.
"I am hoping other athletic conferences will pick the program up and run their own," said Shillingford, who has spent much of her time since last summer bringing word of her efforts and the reasons for it to the 100 NCAA conferences competing in Division III.
A study released last summer reported that only 45.6 percent of collegiate women's teams were being coached by women, an all-time low, while only 17.8 percent of women's athletic programs were being run by women. There are several reasons for this ironic phenomenon, in a day when more girls and women than ever are athletes, says Shillingford. Title IX led to the merging of many separate-and-unequal men's and women's athletic programs, which men, more often than not, ended up running. Once women's teams were elevated in status, their coaches began to receive higher pay and men applied and were hired for those jobs. Finally, the old system of having gym teachers coach teams has died out. Now most schools and colleges have separate staffs for teaching and coaching, and again, more men have been hired to lead both men's and women's teams. Women are almost never hired to coach men.
Snell Symposium II will also feature Bridget Belgiovine of the NCAA, speaking on "Connecting with National Organizations" at 3 p.m. Saturday in Olin. Returning from last year's highly successful symposium are Christine Grant, immediate past women's athletic director at the University of Iowa and the nation's foremost proponent of Title IX, who will speak on "The Joy of Sport" at 7 p.m. Saturday evening in Wismer Center; and "Title IX and Gender Equity" at 9 a.m. Sunday morning in Olin. Charlotte West, retired associate athletic director at Southern Illinois University and former president of the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW), will speak on "The History of Women in Athletics" on at 10 a.m. Saturday in Olin. Saturday afternoon, Shillingford will moderate a panel consisting of Voelz, Grant, West and Belgiovine.
Throughout the rest of the weekend, participants will attend workshop and seminar sessions on such varied and practical topics as how to plan a practice, visual imaging, teaching skills, and ethics and sport. By the end of the academic year, each participant must complete a project that in some way helps to support women's coaching and athletic opportunities.
The projects, along with the faculty mentors' involvement, will help inspire more women to return to the fields and courts of college athletics, even against discouraging odds. "Everybody can do something," says Shillingford. "Everybody can't do everything, but if everyone does something, then this will work."
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.CC-2586
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