International Women's Day: My Story as a Female who Loves Athletics

Today is International Women's Day and as a woman who loves athletics and has turned it into her career; I think today is a great day to discuss a bit more about why I love doing what I do and why I decided to break into this male dominated career.

To start I do have to go back a little ways in time and say that it was male sports that first got me to become obsessed with sports and athletics. My first defining moment in athletics came my senior year of college when I was able to finally take my first small step into the world that defines me by becoming the manager for American University's Women's Basketball team. Being their manager was honestly one of the best things I did in college besides joining my sorority.  I seem to get these dream positions through small quirks of fate, see my junior year of college I was in this class called Care and Prevention of Athletic injuries, which of course was taught by two of our athletic trainers and of course was full of athletes.  My self and like four others were probably the only non athletes in a class of about 15.  One of the girls in the class Alisha, who was a freshman on the Basketball team, we sat next to each other and got to know one another through our time in the class and she as did everyone knew how much I loved athletics and our sports programs.  She suggested that I talk to the director of basketball operations about becoming the Manager for the Women's team and I leapt at the chance and may have secured my spot way ahead of when I needed too but it was and is one of my most treasured memories.  I don't know if any of you ladies read my blog but thank you so much for welcoming me into your circle my senior year, I still have the card you all made me and I treasure it.

 After college it took me a while to figure out how to continue to break into the world I wanted, I wasn't an athlete so I didn't have that inherent edge up but I did have passion so I created a blog, this blog and put my effort into writing about what I knew so that I would never lose the passion that I have for this world.  I unfortunately as many of you know did take a couple years off because life got in the way but part of my 2015 besides having my world fall apart in December was to take a class called Sports Administration and that class honestly changed everything for me, thank you Dr. Jim Krause and SMWW for giving me the step, well kick, in the right direction.  Dr. Krause understood my love of compliance and he encouraged it and worked with me to understand more and more about that side of athletics.  He put me in contact with his colleague who is the Compliance Director at Cal Baptist and we talked and I told him that I was moving back to San Francisco and of course as it happens it turned out that one of his colleague's was moving to San Francisco to take on the roll as the Associate Athletic Director of Compliance at SF State and he put me in contact with him.  As you all know that call lead to me getting an internship at SF State which lead to a position which leads me to today.  Today I am constantly growing and learning more and more about what it takes to run an athletic department.  Our Men's Basketball team is going to the NCAA Division II tournament for the first time in 23 years. I love what I do and enjoy coming to work every day.

I am proud to be a woman in the College Athletic world and honestly do enjoy surprising some of our male coaches with how much I do actually know about sports.

I hope you enjoyed this post and will keep following my love affair with sports