In this episode of “Tucker Center Talks” [S2E5], Nicole M. LaVoi, Ph.D., talks to Courtney Boucher. Courtney is a current doctoral student in Kinesiology at the U of M, a research assistant in the Tucker Center, and a two-time Pam Borton Fellow for Women in Sport Leadership. Boucher and LaVoi discuss the inception, purpose and impact of the Women in College Coaching Report Card (WCCRC), a longitudinal research project that the Tucker Center does each year in collaboration with WeCOACH. Boucher shares her insight about the process of the report card from a student perspective and the idea behind her M.S. (’19) thesis at the U of M in which she examined hiring practices of athletic directors in NCAA Division I institutions over five years, an offshoot of the Women in College Coaching Report Card.
The 2019-20 dataset indicates that the percentage of women head coaches in seven select NCAA Division-I conferences went up for the seventh year in a row and is now at 42.3% (up from 41.8% in 2018-19).
The Women Coaches Symposium (WCS) has been postponed. The full-day WCS was originally scheduled for Friday, April 24, but was cancelled due to concerns regarding the COVID-19 virus. The WCS Planning Committee is working to book a new date for the event this coming fall. More information is and will be available at the Symposium website: wcs.umn.edu.
Tucker Center director and School of Kinesiology senior lecturer Nicole M. LaVoi, PhD, was in Canada last week with Canadian Women & Sport | Femmes et sport Canada helping facilitate a Gender Equity in Coaching Workshop in collaboration with Sport Canada, Coaching Association of Canada, 16 NSOs, and an Advisory Committee made up of some of the top experts and academics in the sector. The workshop is designed to uncover unconscious bias in coaching, benefits and barriers, best practice in recruitment and retention of women in coaching, and embedding gender equity in organizations.
Participants in Gender Equity in Coaching Workshop 2020
In this episode [S2E3] of Tucker Center Talks, Dr. Nicole M. LaVoi, Tucker Center director and School of Kinesiology senior lecturer, talks with Tucker Center director emerita, Dr. Mary Jo Kane about her line of sport research. They talk about why media portrayals matter, the evidence on quantity and quality of sport media coverage of female athletes, Kane’s sport media guide and audience reception research, key findings, and who benefits when female athletes are routinely sexualized.
The Reifsteck award recognizes high quality research that challenges current thinking, offers novel insights about a topic, and/or provides relevancy to a timely topic focused on women and girls in physical activity settings. The award, named in recognition of Dr. Erin Riefsteck, is given annually to a scholar of student status who has had an original research article published in the WSPAJ during the previous 12 months.
Wasend was also a 2-time recipient of the Tucker Center’s Pam Borton Fellowship for the Promotion of Girls and Women in Sport Leadership.
In this episode [S2E2] of Tucker Center Talks, Dr. Nicole M. LaVoi, Tucker Center director and School of Kinesiology Senior Lecturer, talks with Tucker Center Affiliated Scholar Dr. Chelsey Thul, Lecturer in the School of Kinesiology at the University of Minnesota. Drs. Thul and LaVoi talk about Thul’s groundbreaking research on the development, implementation, and evaluation of culturally relevant physical activity programming for underserved adolescent girls that was designed with girls, using the voices of girls. To learn more about this collaborative research and its impact visit: https://www.cehd.umn.edu/tuckercenter/research/girls-research/
More about the Girls’ Initiative in Recreation and Leisurely Sports (G.I.R.L.S.) Program, a female-only culturally relevant physical activity program: http://girlswinmn.com/
Read the report that inspired this work: The 2018 Tucker Center Research Report Developing Physically Active Girls: An Evidence-based Multidisciplinary Approach
Read Thul and LaVoi’s scholarly paper: Thul, C. M., & LaVoi, N. M. (2011). Reducing physical inactivity and promoting active living: from the voices of East African immigrant adolescent girls. Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 3(2), 211-237. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/2159676X.2011.572177
In this first episode [S2E1] of the second season of “Tucker Center Talks,” Dr. Nicole M. LaVoi, Tucker Center director and School of Kinesiology senior lecturer, talks with Dr. Caroline Heffernan, an assistant professor of Sport and Recreation Management at Temple University and graduate of the U of M’s School of Kinesiology’s sport management doctoral program. Her groundbreaking research is on gender allyship in sport contexts. The two talk about what Dr. Heffernan found in her research, what individuals can do to be gender allies, and why professional sport is leading the way in hiring women coaches.
Tucker Center director and senior lecturer in the School of Kinesiology, Nicole M. LaVoi, PhD, was the keynote speaker at the Sport Canada Research Initiative (SCRI) 2019 Conference on October 24, 2019, in Ottawa, Canada. The SCRI annual conference brings together sport researchers, policymakers, and practitioners from across Canada to translate knowledge to application in order to enhance the quality of physical activity participation of Canadian youth and adults.
In this episode [S1E5] of “Tucker Center Talks,” Dr. Nicole M. LaVoi, Tucker Center director and School of Kinesiology senior lecturer, talks to Dr. Nancy Lough, professor in the Higher Education Program, Director of Marketing for the University of Nevada–Las Vegas College of Education, who has studied marketing, sponsorship, and gender equity in women’s sports since the 1990s. She is a longtime Title IX consultant and author of the newly published Routledge Handbook of the Business of Women’s Sport and a Tucker Center Affiliated Scholar. They discuss the business model of women’s sport and what needs to be done to advance equity in women’s sport.
The July, 2019 Tucker Center report, “Head Coaches of Women’s Collegiate Teams: A Comprehensive Report on NCAA Division-I Institutions, 2018-19,” is cited in the New York Times piece, “Where Are All the Women Coaches?” The op ed uses Tucker Center data to argue for pay parity between men and women athletes.
