What is the Oregon Girls Sports Leadership Summit and what is our mission?
Often much is expected of our student-athletes leaders but seldom do we intentionally teach them the necessary skills in order to build their own leadership foundation and set them on the path to success. The Oregon Girls Sports Leadership Summit (OGSLS) is an annual event in Oregon designed to give female student-athletes with an interest in leadership the same emphasis on instruction, encouragement, and practice that we give athletes before asking them to compete.
This event gives female athletes the opportunity to collaborate, network, take risks, reflect on their leadership style, and see how they can deepen their own communities.
Each annual event has a theme that helps bring the activities together and create a memorable takeaway for the student-athletes. We want to create a community of student-athletes that “Own their leadership” and can draw back on the event theme to help them do that. Owning their leadership means that the student-athlete is proactive in their leadership role, and understands the purpose of leadership and the duties that come with achieving larger individual and team goals.
Background/History
The first-ever Oregon Girls Sports Leadership Summit was in November 2016. It started with 200 girls from 48 schools in the Portland-Metro area, doubling the next year to 400 girls. The event has doubled in size each year, showing an increase in the number of participating schools by 20-35% annually, and in our last event in 2019, we had 620 attendees, and our attendance growth was only limited by the available space.
What does the Oregon Girls Sports Leadership Summit event look like?
This event is a one-day event, held from 9 am to 3 pm. The event itself is jam-packed! Over the course of the day, student-athletes will hear from guest speakers, meet other student-athletes, collaborate in workshops, and be inspired to “Own their leadership” and reflect on what they learned throughout the day. We keep kids moving and active throughout the event, both mentally and physically, through interactive workshops, exercise breaks, and lunch. To ensure we build connections between athletes, facilitators, and other attendees, we diversify the agenda with both full group keynotes, as well as small group sessions and breakouts to connect with each girl in attendance.
Our vision is for an event with topics, speakers, and workshops that focus on our core values and purpose, but also meet the needs of our student-athletes and stay current with hot-button topics. For instance, in 2019, the OGLS theme was “Own It!”. This theme encourages student-athletes to take responsibility for their actions in all aspects of their life, not just athletics. We had speakers that talked about social media, mental and physical health, and how you impact others around you through your actions. For example, lead from the bench, stay positive, and be inclusive.
Program and Event Support
Currently, the organizational and program leadership, agenda development, keynote speakers, and event staff have been made up completely of volunteers, and donations from local companies. In addition, this program has been delivered in conjunction with an academic institution that provided the infrastructure (facility, technology, meals, etc.) to reduce costs as we grew, but the program has relevance to many non-academic organizations and can be adapted as needed. Much like the growth in attendee interest, we have seen interest grow in schools wanting to run this program, community volunteers, and local companies who are willing to sponsor and expect to see the growth of this event in 2024.
Future Goal
Take this event across the country and impact as many female athletes as possible. With a dedicated program team in place, and a consistent and repeatable event model, we believe this program could scale to multiple states, schools, community organizations or other communities focused on the growth and development of student-athletes, specifically those identifying as female. With additional resources, we believe this program can, and should, be modular to allow for some of the content to be as relevant as possible for the local attendees, and could potentially run concurrently to allow for some content sharing (e.g. high profile keynotes live-streamed to all participating programs).
