The second NCAA Summit on Athletics Opportunities for Minority Women was an exercise in action more than talk.

At least that was the message from leaders who assembled recently in Indianapolis to figure out ways to enhance opportunities for minority women in intercollegiate athletics.

As was the case for the first summit, this one included representatives from several high-profile organizations, including the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletic Administrators (NACWAA), the Women's Basketball Coaches Association, the Women's Sports Foundation, the National Association for Girls and Women in Sport, and the Black Women in Sports Foundation. Representatives from the NCAA Committee on Women's Athletics (CWA), the Minority Opportunities and Interests Committee (MOIC) and the Executive Committee Subcommittee on Gender and Diversity also attended.

The CWA and MOIC determined the focus of the summit for two reasons. One, the numbers don't lie. Fewer than 4 percent of head coaches in intercollegiate athletics are minority women, according to the NCAA's 1999-00 race demographics report. The highest concentrations are in women's basketball (6.7 percent) and women's track and field (4.7 percent indoor, 4.0 percent outdoor), but overall, minority women make up fewer than 300 of the more than 7,500 head coaches in NCAA sports.

Second, the issue of enhancing opportunities for coaches is something that has been on the docket for several of the organizations represented at the summit. Knowing that, the NCAA committees thought that a convention of ideas and partnerships would produce results.

The mission for this summit was "to enhance partnerships that will bring about action strategies for developing understanding, intracommunication, potential programs and develop first steps toward a unified strategic plan."

Unity was the key, according to many who attended the summit. While members of each organization realized how they could be effective as individual groups, they also realized their strength in numbers.

"It's important that not every group be a satellite group," said NACWAA Executive Director Jennifer Alley. "We're all going to communicate with each other throughout the year to see how we can each assist each other in what we want to do."

The groups agreed that increased education, enhanced role models and grass-roots growth were imperative to boosting opportunities for minority women in coaching and advancing those who already are in the profession.

Tina Sloan Green, president and executive director of the Black Women in Sports Foundation, said the demographics of participants in women's sports such as basketball and track and field would indicate a large pool of prospective minority coaches. And even in nontraditional sports in which a lower number of minority women participate, education at the grass-roots level would lead to more participation and thus more potential coaches.

"We need to help both current student-athletes and prospective student-athletes see that the coaching field is something they should want to pursue," Sloan said.

Barriers to hiring

Because the pool of minority women coaches does not mirror the pool of minority women participants in intercollegiate athletics, the groups at the summit tried to figure out why. Most agreed that the reasons are the same barriers that tend to hinder hiring for other minority groups -- lack of commitment at the top of the hiring hierarchy and lack of access at the entry level for prospects who are interested in pursuing a coaching career.

Though tearing down those barriers is a daunting task, the summit participants agreed that education and programming could be the best shot.

"Especially in basketball and track, because we know we have some numbers in those sports, there's no reason we can't make a concerted effort that those young ladies are given the chance to receive internships and coaching opportunities when they graduate," said Green.

Many organizations already offer paths for prospects to get started. Green's Black Women in Sports Foundation offers after-school programs and other clinics for minority girls to be introduced to nontraditional sports, as well as to basketball and track, and to receive the academic emphasis. Green said it was important to make young people understand that there's more to staging an athletics event than putting teams on the floor. She said when she takes her clinic participants to games, she tells them to pay attention to who's working them in addition to who's playing them.

"We teach them to be aware of who's the announcer, who's the coach, who's the event manager," she said. "We also have them come to Temple University and interview coaches, like the coach of the fencing team who also is a health professor. It's important that early on they're mingling with not only people who have played the sport, but people who now are professionals in the sport. You have to plant that seed early."

She also said that coaching, particularly at a Division II or III level, offers its own training ground for other positions in college athletics.

"If you go into coaching, you also get the other experiences, especially at levels where coaches have to do a lot of their own administrative work for the sport. As a coach, you're also in the public eye and you do a lot of public speaking. Such a situation prepares those coaches for positions as assistant athletics directors or even as directors," she said.

"Not only is NACWAA concerned with expanding its membership to under-represented groups, but also with recruiting minority women to make sure they have the opportunity to attend the HERS program and that they have a chance to advance their careers," Alley said.

The HERS program has been so successful for women, in fact, that the NCAA's CWA and MOIC have asked for funding to allow NACWAA to expand to expand the Institute at a second location annually.

Next steps

Alley said the most rewarding facet of the summit was for each group to see what other groups were doing to address the issues. She said most have taken definitive steps toward progress since the first summit in 1999, and she expects more of the same in the future.

"It was encouraging to know that we didn't just spend a day brainstorming in 1999 only to not do anything further," she said. "And after this summit, the commitment when we left was just as strong."

Among the target goals for the coming year are for the organizations to:

Concentrate on education as a focus and to encourage minority women to view coaching as a viable professional opportunity.

Establish partnerships with other organizations to strengthen initiatives.

Create list servers to enhance communication and to promote programming, as well as to share resources and potential candidates.

Engage NCAA athletics admin-
istrators in discussion of the issues and encourage them to be part of the solution.

Require each organization participating in the summit to provide bi-annual status reports.

"We've seen positive results between our first and second summits, and I think we're going to see even more positive results from now on."