Anna Baeth, Ph.D. student in the School of Kinesiology and research assistant in the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport, has been awarded an NCAA Graduate Student Research Grant. The NCAA program is a competitive grant process that provides funding of up to $7,500 for graduate student research within the general topic areas of student-athlete well-being and college athletics participation. The grant will support Baeth’s dissertation, “Analyzing the Pathways of Women Head Coaches with a 20+ Year Career Longevity in NCAA D-I Sport.”
Baeth will be researching the decline and stagnation in the percentage of women head coaches of NCAA D-I women’s programs since 1972. Her study will investigate why women with a career longevity of over 20 consecutive years stay in the profession, as opposed to why they leave it. She will use quantitative and qualitative methods to gather and analyze data, and her findings may offer strategies for coaches, advocates, and administrators to better retain collegiate women coaches. Baeth is co-advised by Kinesiology professor Mary Jo Kane, Ph.D., and senior lecturer Nicole M. LaVoi, Ph.D.
“As a coach in the NCAA and a research assistant in the Tucker Center, my aim is to use and promote the results of my study to create a series of research reports and best practice guidelines which organizations and institutions can use to help retain women in coaching,” says Baeth. “My ultimate goal is that, through this research, I will be able to work with the Tucker Center and WeCoach, a branch of the NCAA that focuses on recruiting and retaining women in coaching at the collegiate level, to create a series of workshops for women in coaching which will help provide further supports to help them make coaching their lifelong career.”
