The Pennsylvania State Athletic Conference recently hosted a “Women in Athletics Symposium” designed to help women pursue careers in coaching and athletics administration.

The three-day symposium, conducted February 3-5 on the campus of Lock Haven State University of Pennsylvania, attracted a Who’s Who of women athletics administrators, including Christine Grant of the University of Iowa; Charlotte West, formerly of Southern Illinois University, Carbondale; Jennifer Alley of the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletics Administrators; Jen Shillingford, athletics director emeritus at Bryn Mawr College and a Snell professor of health and physical education at Ursinus College; and NCAA Senior Vice President and Senior Woman Administrator Judy Sweet. Celia Slater and Mary An Salerno from the Women’s Coaching Academy directed the symposium.

The program was rooted in the Snell Symposium, an ongoing project designed to increase the number of women’s coaches (see the February 18, 2002, issue of The NCAA News). Division III’s Centennial Conference conducts the Snell Symposium each year.

At the Lock Haven event, participants focused on the dichotomy between increased participation opportunities for young women but declining professional opportunities for women coaches. The latest Acosta/Carpenter study of women’s athletics participation noted that 36 percent of Division II women’s teams are coached by women; in Divisions I and III, the figure is 44 percent. At the time Title IX became law in 1972, women coached 90 percent of all women’s college athletics teams.

“If you look at the graph, it keeps going down,” West said in the Williamsport Sun-Gazette. “If you continue to extrapolate that chart, it’s going to be too far down in the future. Unless we reverse that trend, we aren’t going to have female coaches.”

Grant encouraged Division I conferences to consider a similar program.

“I’m very disappointed Division I has not paid more attention to this,” she told the Sun-Gazette. “We need to expand the opportunities for more women to become coaches and administrators.”