Corkran & Saraswat Selected for Snell-Shillingford Coaching Symposium

by Sports Information
12/20/02

LANCASTER, PA - Franklin & Marshall College field hockey players Christine Corkran (So., Ellicott City, MD/Glenelg Country) and Shuchi Saraswat (So., Mountain Lakes, NJ/Mountain Lakes) have been selected to attend the 2003 Centennial Conference Snell-Shillingford Coaching Symposium from January 17-19 at Bryn Mawr College.

The Symposium is a weekend affair where female undergraduates from the Centennial Conference colleges (Bryn Mawr, Ursinus, Swarthmore, Haverford, Muhlenburg, Dickinson, Franklin & Marshall and Gettysburg colleges in Pennsylvania and Washington, Johns Hopkins, and McDaniel colleges in Maryland) come together for seminars on various issues pertaining to coaching and the area of athletics.

Based on findings in the Longitudinal Study of Women in Intercollegiate Sport by R. Vivian Acosta and Linda Jean Carpenter the percentage of women coaches on the college level has been declining steadily since 1984. In response to those numbers Jen Shillingford, former Director of Athletics at Bryn Mawr College, created the symposium in 1999 as the Snell Coaching Symposium to encourage women undergraduates to enter the field of coaching. Following Shillingford’s retirement as the director of the event, the symposium was re-named the Snell-Shillingford Coaching Symposium to honor her contributions to women’s athletics.

Symposium participants are given the opportunity to speak with a panel of mentors, recent graduates, graduate assistants, and key women in the field of athletics. This year’s guest speakers include Shillingford, Charlotte West, former president of the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women and the former Associate Athletic Director at Southern Illinois University, Tracey Belbin the current National Field Hockey Team Coach, and Christine Grant, former Women’s Athletic Director at the University of Iowa. Over the first three years of the symposium, data has shown that fifty percent of participants have gone on to coach on a variety of levels.

Franklin & Marshall finished the 2002 field hockey season 10-8, 6-3 in the Centennial Conference for the first winning season in program history since the 1992 team went 13-6.