Hannah Dreissigacker and Anna Schulz enjoying a late term ski.

[This blog post got lost in the COVID swirl. We wanted to highlight it, and hope to add to it with more current grades. Credit - GRP Rower Bridget Schodorf]

Title IX, the landmark civil rights law making gender discrimination illegal, specifically in educational contexts, was passed in 1972. This law directly impacts female college students’ ability to participate in athletics. Thanks to Title IX, my female teammates and I are able to train here at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center (COC) for the Green Racing Project.

While female college athletic participation has been growing since 1972, the number of women coaches in college athletics has been declining. You might be wondering what this has to do with the Craftsbury Outdoor Center and the GRP. The GRP is, in part, composed of female athletes who all benefited from Title IX. We all worked to be awarded opportunities and scholarships to either ski or row at such a high level in college that we were able to continue participating in our sports at the elite level.

When it comes to skiing, the COC operates a high-striving junior program. The young skiers in those programs have the GRP athletes and coaches to look up to and learn from. This includes a handful of female coaches who benefited from Title IX and skied in college or beyond before coaching here. Ideally you are seeing a theme here. Everything is connected, from coaching and elite-level participation to junior programs.

Fortunately, there has been a push to increase the low (and declining) number of female college coaches. This is important for the COC because, if we as a community of lifelong atheates want to keep moving forward, we need more women coaches. More women coaches mean more female role models for young female athletes. When a young skier or rower has a female coach, they are able to imagine doing the same thing in their future.

So how can we at the COC make this system even better? Retention. There is a lot of data out there about how to get women into college-level and elite coaching positions, but there is less information about how to support and keep them at a given program. Understandably, pregnancy and child rearing can impact the careers of female coaches. This is something we at the COC are particularly aware of, as three female employees gave birth to their first children over the past year. (Congratulations to Ski Coaches Anna Schulz and Hannah Dreissigacker, along with office staff member Tara Bushey!)

I sat down with Anna Schulz, our head junior and BKL coach. She and her husband, COC Coach Ollie Burruss, recently welcomed their first child, Emma. Discussing her experience, Anna reminded me that COC is a unique place to work, with a generous and flexible pregnancy and maternity leave policy. Vermont rules for employers state that employers must give employees six weeks of unpaid maternity leave. The COC bests that law by providing six weeks at 60% pay, which Coach Ollie took advantage of. Anna instead tapped short-term disability through her insurance provider. Anna and Ollie benefit from the fact that they both work at the Center and live just a few minutes away. An added bonus: Being a ski coach here isn't a 9-to-5 job, giving Anna the flexibility to pop home in the middle of the day and sometimes bring Emma to work.

Even with all the positive things Anna had to say about the Center’s approach to pregnancy and maternity leave, there is always room for improvement. The COC’s policy of partial-pay leave is good (far better than many employers in the U.S.). But compared to the rest of the world, the United States falls short of what other countries do for new mothers (and fathers).

There are things we can do to improve new mothers’ experiences here. Two things Anna points out as being difficult right now are finding child care and a place on the COC campus to pump. Both of those challenges are greater now because of COVID.

Looking to the future, Anna is sure the Center will continue to be accommodating, as always. However, because she and Ollie both travel with the ski team in the winter, there are questions about how things will go this season, now that Emma has joined the family. Ideally, the Center will figure out how best to support them.

I also talked with Andrea Carpentier, the COC accountant and HR point person to get more specifics about the COC policy. She told me that what’s in place is very new and basic. It wasn’t until a couple years ago that a full-time staff member had a baby. At that time, a more concrete policy was put in place. Andrea basically reiterated what Anna had to say about the kind of leave options staff have. She explained there are a few places on campus that are good for pumping, but there is no defined space. And she confirmed that there is, only very limited child care available. Andrea points out that in Craftsbury and the surrounding areas, child care is a systemic issue the community faces.

We believe the COC’s current practices are good, but we want to improve. To that end, we have decided to use (and rename) a tool developed by the Tuckerman Foundation, the Women in College Coaching Report Card, this tool gives a grade A-F based on the percentage of Women’s head coaches on Women’s teams. Our new name for this tool is the Women of COC Report Card. How the WCCRD is calculated is explained here.

This tool will give us a way to keep ourselves accountable and strive for excellence in all areas of sport. We will start by giving ourselves a report card for the Fall of 2020 based on the percentage of Women coaches we have at the Center, for all sports and levels, since all levels of teams are co-ed. Based on the WCCRC scale the COC has a grade of B, with a 55% percentage of women to male coaches. If we look at just the head coach of the GRP the grade is a D at 33%. However all teams at the COC are co-ed making this scale a little different than the WCCRC. It’s hard to give the COC and GRP a grade like college teams using the WCCRC given we have co-ed teams. That’s why we want to adjust it to our needs. The COC’s final grade will take into account the percentage of women coaches, but due to all COC and GRP teams co-ed status, it will also reflect feedback from women coaches currently on staff.

Meaning, our Report Card will also involve us regularly asking our female coaches questions to find out if their professional and personal needs are being met, going a step beyond the WCCRC, which is simply assigns a grade to the school, sport, and conference based on the percentage of women’s head coaches for those women’s teams. The answers to these questions will go into the grade we assign for each season. Therefore, given the grades we assigned from the WCCRC for ourselves and the answers we got from talking to Anna Schulz and Andrea Carpentier, we are assigning ourselves a B for the Fall of 2020.

We want to start focusing on the next step, which is retaining the women coaches we do have. We want to make sure we have an effective system in place for coaches with families. In the immediate future, the Center will endeavor to work with our female coaches to put in place a better system for pumping, while also determining how we can help with child care.

Title IX and pregnancy at Craftsbury