Spotlight on Student Organizations: Women of Color Athletics
Women of Color Athletics (WOCA) was founded in the spring of 2020 “to create a sense of community and build sisterhood, talk candidly about anything, and to have a place to meet the other women athletes of color on campus,” says co-founder Monique Anderson ’22, of the Cornell Varsity Track and Field Team.
Emily St. John ’23, of the Women’s Varsity Soccer team, joined early on motivated by teammate and WOCA co-founder Jadyn Matthews ’22, as well as national events. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Emily describes, WOCA provided Cornell’s women athletes of color a place to connect and a forum in which to discuss how racial inequities affect athletics. For Emily, she had a space to discuss, “my experience on different teams and being half Asian and how that’s changed how some of my teammates have viewed me, and how I’ve been treated on and off the field.”
In the summer of 2020, WOCA was able to naturally step in and provide connection for athletes of color, of all genders. Monique describes the benefit as threefold. WOCA was able to provide space for candid conversation, and it was able to demonstrate what they were trying to build, and WOCA members were able to “go to administration as a collection of those voices and present to them,” she says.
Advocacy continues to be a feature of WOCA’s mission. Since its founding, a WOCA member has often been present on recruitment calls with prospective student athletes of color as a way to offer a relatable student perspective. “We [have] worked with coaches to discuss how they could address things that might happen on their team and create the space where athletes feel more comfortable and feel like something will happen if they were to bring something to their coaches or administration,” Monique describes. She says the goal is to give athletes of color the opportunity to address issues with their coaches, and to feel comfortable doing so. WOCA has also surveyed its members and brought the aggregate results to coaches and team leadership, hopeful that by hearing the collective voice of athletes of color a new understanding will “trickle down to the team and help set team culture,” Monique says.
For Emily, “There needs to be more of an effort of diversifying teams. It leads to a better team. Diversifying thought and lifestyles and what people are exposed to, that makes teams better not only on the group level, but also for each individual. By having more people like you around you, you don’t feel as alone. So many people can learn so much more by speaking with more people of different backgrounds, walks of life, and with different perspectives.”Mentorship is also a key component of the club. Having no WOCA alum to connect with in 2020, WOCA members reached out to Cornell alumni women athletes of color in their search for mentors. Their efforts were successful, and students were paired with graduated athletes for mentorship. The mentorship programs continues, and is expanding.
Emily, who now leads WOCA’s outreach, is exploring community partnerships, “to help young girls of color with either mentorship or connecting them with different programs,” says Emily. “This semester I’m working with Jamie McCaffrey, a social worker from Newfield Elementary, to start a WOCA lunch group with 4th and 5th grade girls of color, and hopefully a buddy system from that so that these girls of color can have an older female athlete of color to serve as a guidance mentor and give them a chance to see someone that looks like them,” she says. “These young girls of color, they don’t have anyone to really look up to. To have that representation will be really cool.” Monique is in agreement, “Representation matters.”
Emily says of WOCA’s goals going forward, “we really want to continue to build this community of female athletes of color and really give a safe space to them because that hasn’t existed before. On most teams there’s only one or two girls of color, and that’s a really isolating experience, so we want to give them a space where they can all come in and just meet other girls like them and share the same experiences.” Emily elaborates, “it was so reaffirming to me when I talked to one of the other girls, Miya Kuramoto, about being Asian in sports, especially at the D1 level. Hearing she shares some of the same experiences as me, that was something I’ve never really experienced before. That was really cool because I was one of the only girls of color on my team for the first 2 years of my career and conversations about identity were pretty much nonexistent before joining WOCA.”
Joining the club, says Monique is, “one of the best things you can do as a woman of color athlete on our campus.” The club is open to any female-identifying varsity athlete of color at Cornell, and there is no formal membership process. It is a club priority that membership be as accessible as possible.
Students interested in joining WOCA – or exploring other student organizations on campus – should visit this website to learn more.