Student-Athletes Organize
Women in Sport Symposium

by Kyle Leach
4/01/2009

Anna Baeth '09

Swarthmore student-athletes Anna Baeth '09 and Erin Heaney '09 will host a symposium, Women in Sport, on Sat., Apr. 5, from 4-7:30 p.m. in Kohlberg Hall's Scheuer Room. Baeth, captain of the Garnet field hockey team, and Heaney, captain of the Garnet volleyball team, were inspired to put the symposium together after attending the 2009 Snell Shillingford Coaching Symposium at Bryn Mawr College earlier this semester.

“We are a very fortunate group of women,” says Baeth, a sociology and anthropology major from Frederick, Md. “We get to play the sports we love for our college and while it’s been a way of life for most of us, it is a right that many women spent decades fighting for.”

Symposium festivities will include a panel of women with careers in athletics, including Christyn Chambers, associate director of athletics at Swarthmore, a dinner, the screening of the HBO special Dare to Compete, and the keynote speaker, Jen Shillingford.

Erin Heaney '09

Shillingford, one the of nation’s foremost advocates for Title IX, was the president of the United States Field Hockey Association and spent 20 years at Bryn Mawr College, serving as a coach and athletic director until her retirement in 1999. She helped found the Snell Shillingford Coaching Symposium, designed to encourage female student-athletes from all 11 colleges in the Centennial Conference to find creative ways to pursue their passion for athletics after graduation.  Shillingford dedicated the symposium to her own coach, colleague, and mentor, Eleanor Snell, a longtime field hockey and softball coach at Ursinus College.

"The Women in Sport Symposium is our way of recognizing the women in athletics at Swarthmore who came before us," says Heaney, a political science major from Buffalo, N.Y.  "We hope to teach the current women athletes the important role athletics can play in their futures."