ITA #WeAreCollegeTennis

Many coaches and administrators are starting to wake up to the role they can play in the discussions and decision-making processes to help eliminate racism, biases, bigotry, sexism and anti-semitism from their college campuses and within the community. This sense of awareness and responsibility is a great first step to help make college tennis programs a more inclusive place for our student-athletes.

In order to make college tennis diverse, equitable and inclusive towards one and all, it is important to take a moment to understand what these terms (DEI – Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) truly mean. People are not diverse, we are individuals. DIVERSITY is relational, it’s about the differences between people within your teams. INCLUSION is not a natural consequence of a diverse team — we need to design for it, we must work to understand what those we work with need to feel valued and included. EQUITY means focusing on everyone’s individual needs rather than EQUALITY which means treating everyone the same (these definitions were found HERE). 

The following visual and auditory content and resources provided below help equip coaches with some fundamental knowledge as to how they can start or continue to foster diverse,equitable and inclusive teams while meeting the individualistic needs of the players/student-athletes they coach.

J. Webb Horton is the Director of Community Outreach at Florida Gulf Coast University. A former college tennis coach himself, J. Webb has recently assisted a number of college tennis coaches in opening up the dialogue with their teams about diversity, equity and inclusion matters. In this video, he shares some of the insights from the conversations he has had with coaches and student-athletes to date, his own personal experiences, and provides many thoughtful insights and resources for coaches to explore further.

Kirk Walker came out publicly in 2005 and was labeled by the media as the first Division I coach to be publicly out. During the years that followed he helped NIKE launch the #BETRUE Initiative to help fund the LGBT Sports Coalition — which he is a founding member of. Kirk helped launch Equality Coaching Alliance in 2011 and it has grown to over 1000 members that include coaches, administrators, athletic trainers, officials, Olympians and other sports professionals working at the high school, collegiate, and professional level of sports. In addition to ECA, Kirk works extensively with another LGBT sports network called GOSPACE. This group is specifically for current and former student athletes from the high school and collegiate level that identify as LGBT. This group has exploded in recent years and will surpass 1000 members by the end of 2020.