By Sarah Westbrook
From January 30 to February 1, the Bryn Mawr Athletic Department hosted the tenth annual Snell Shillingford Coaching Symposium, designed to encourage female student-athletes from all eleven colleges in the Centennial Conference to find creative ways to pursue their passion for athletics after graduation.
Each year the symposium includes a different group of athletes drawn from the Centennial Conference, female coaches and administrators, as well as speakers and panelists noted for their sustained passion and commitment to women’s athletics.
The concept of the annual symposium was originally conceived by Jen Shillingford as a way to promote female coaches in all levels of athletics. Shillingford spent twenty years at Bryn Mawr serving as a coach and Athletic Director until her retirement in 1999. She dedicated the symposium to her own coach, colleague, and mentor, Eleanor Snell, a longtime field hockey and softball coach at Ursinus college.
The symposium has not changed much from Shillingford’s original outline: staying true to the “spirit of getting more women involved in coaching,” while stressing the “many avenues and many opportunities to stay involved in athletics, not necessarily coaching,” noted head basketball and lacrosse coach Katie Tarr.
Tarr, has co-directed the Symposium for the last several years, along with Ursinus lacrosse coach Erin Stroble, and found that “what is really neat [about this year’s symposium] is that it has continued, and the women that are running it are now kind of second generation, and in maybe four or five years, we’ll do the same.”
Tarr and Stroble first attended the Coaching Symposium in 2002 as student-athletes in the Centennial Conference, and both went on to independently become head coaches of other Conference institutions.
Tarr partially credits her experience at the conference with her decision to pursue coaching. It left her asking herself, “How can I impart a passion of athletics to the next generation?” The symposium has largely been successful in attracting younger female student-athletes to coaching. Many of the participants pursue athletics in their lives after college.
After rotating through many Centennial Conference institutions in the last several years, the Symposium returned to Bryn Mawr to mark its tenth anniversary in the place Shillngford first organized it.
Bryn Mawr head field hockey coach Danya Pilgrim was in charge of all on-site logistics and publicity as 2009 symposium coordinator.
Twenty-three student-athletes participated in this year’s conference, including three athletes from Bryn Mawr. Events included various lectures by Centennial Conference coaches, a panel of six women who have integrated athletics into their professional lives, as trainers, administrators, or game officials, and an address by the two main guest speakers, Christine Grant and Charlotte West.
Grant, a former athlete and athletic director at the University of Iowa, and West, a coach, administrator and athletic director at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, have been nationally recognized for their outstanding contributions to women’s sports and the history of the Title 9 Amendment.
Tarr praised them as “inspirational” and “having an inexhaustible passion to push the future of women’s sports.”
The presence of Grant and West was especially significant to Tarr, because of their ability to ground student-athletes in the frequently difficult history of women’s athletics, and to demonstrate how far they have come. Tarr stressed their “ability to paint a picture of where women in sports have come from and where they are going.”
The symposium also included attendance at Bryn Mawr’s basketball game versus Trinity College Saturday night, to give the participants an opportunity of seeing “coaching in action,” according to Tarr, and to initiate a discussion of the strategies and temperament a coach employs in sometimes stressful situations.
Sunday concluded with a reflection on the weekend’s events and a discussion about how to stay involved in the community, and maintain a passion for athletics, while pursuing a post-college career.
Tarr expressed her hope that “the women this week are as inspired as I was [at the 2002 symposium] and that they sense that intensity, that passion, and can find a way to inspire that passion and their love for their sport to the next group.”
