SEVENTH ANNUAL WOMEN & GIRLS LEADERSHIP AND SPORT CONFERENCE PAVES PATHWAYS BEYOND THE PLAYING SURFACE

WGLSC | 5/6/2026 1:00:00 PM

York Athletics & Recreation proudly hosted its seventh annual Women & Girls Leadership and Sport Conference, empowered by this year’s lead sponsor, ONLY. Held, on Friday, May 1, the event took place at the Schulich Executive Dining Hall inside the prestigious Seymour Schulich Building, home to York’s Schulich School of Business. 

The conference is a key pillar for York Athletics & Recreation as it leads the way in advancing gender equity in sport while empowering women to feel seen, heard and valued on and off the field of play.

“The Conference is a demonstration of York’s commitment to advancing Decolonization, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion,” said Executive Director, Athletics & Recreation Steven Chuang.  “As a department, we play a pivotal role in contributing to the dialogue around systemic barriers faced by women in sports in Canada.  As the second largest university in the province, we are raising the bar by demonstrating leadership in the power of storytelling by bringing together experts, coaches and athletes with diverse lived experiences.  We are very proud to empower the next generation of women in sports.”

This year’s theme of Her Game, Her Story was centered around storytelling and the avenues available for student-athletes after their playing careers.

The conference was highlighted by the keynote address from Natalie Achonwa, a Toronto native who went to four final fours while at Notre Dame and was drafted fifth overall by the Indiana Fever in the 2014 WNBA Draft despite tearing her ACL only months earlier ahead of the NCAA tournament.

Achnowa touched on her upbringing in Toronto and her journey in basketball which has spanned nearly three decades. The daughter of Nigerian parents, Achonwa was the middle of three children and reminisced about her first time shooting a basketball, which she fired high over the backboard. That moment, as it turned out, sparked her competitive spirit, and has seen her carve out a career both on the court and off, now serving as an assistant coach with the WNBA’s Seattle Storm. The most common theme of Achonwa’s address: work ethic, exhibited by the arduous nature of her ACL recovery and training for the 2024 Paris Olympics while pregnant with her daughter.

“Don’t expect to get far without putting in the work,” she said. “Show up every day looking to be better than you were yesterday. Be the competitor everyone needs on their team.”

Kicking off the festivities was Toronto Varsity Blues women’s volleyball assistant coach Dr. Alix Krahn, who hosted the first of two Fireside Chats on the day, Invisible and Undervalued. Her research focuses on the areas of women in coaching, at the U SPORTS level. While there has been an overall improvement in the number of women working in high performance sport, Krahn’s research shows only 16% of U SPORTS women’s teams are coached by women, while less than 1% of women coach U SPORTS men’s programs, with each figure having decreased over the last decade when 26% of women’s teams had female head coaches. Her research into 15 female U SPORTS coaches showed themes of burnout, time precarity emotional labour and identity negotiation in which those studied were overworked, undervalued and facing double standards surrounding job expectations and their identities as female coaches. 

The second Fireside Chat, Courage and Confidence, featured longtime hockey coach and executive Melody Davidson, who was recently announced Commissioner of the Canadian Sport School Hockey League. She grew up in the small southern Alberta town of Oyen, with a population of under 1,000 people and began coaching as a teenager with her sister’s soccer team as a teenager and has been a coach and builder in sport and recreation her entire professional life. Her message, and career, was synonymous with the courage and confidence to be a woman in sports.  She earned a bachelor’s degree in sports administration from the University of Alberta and was the recreation manager for the small town of Castor, Alta., before, at the behest of a colleague, taking a leap of faith to enrol in the University of Calgary’s National Coaching Institute (NCI). The courage taken and self-confidence shown led her to coach the 2006 and 2010 Canadian women’s Olympic teams to gold, while winning two other golds as an assistant coach and director for the 2002 and 2014 teams, respectively. Davidson was inducted into the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) Hall of Fame in 2024.

The Powerhouse Panel She Plays On consisted of five powerful women in the Canadian sport landscape, Sam Eyles-Frayne, Manager of Sports Medicine for the Laurier Golden Hawks; Erin McAleenan, Head Coach of the UNB REDS women’s basketball team and former York women’s basketball head coach (2016-21); Sarah Gates, former McMaster Marauder women’s basketball star; Sydney Payne, Canadian Olympic gold medal rower; and Frankie Billingsley, Softball Canada National Director of Umpires, 2020 Tokyo Olympic softball umpire,  and York’s  Associate Registrar & Director, Student Records and Scheduling. The panel tackled each member’s story in their careers in sports, including Eyles-Frayne’s as the first female head strength and conditioning coach in U SPORTS and Gates as one of U SPORTS top players during her five-year career who has had to overcome two separate ACL tears in her first year of pro basketball. They also discussed many of the issues women in sports face including impostor syndrome, feelings of self-doubt while navigating a male-dominated industry and being the victims of harassment by those in positions of power.

After shifting to a focus on current events over the last two years, the conference returned to its roots as a source of inspiration for women and girls as they foster their lives in sports.

“We wanted to get back to the heart of our ‘why,’ which is storytelling and community building,” said WGLSC Co-Chair and York women’s volleyball head coach Jen Neilson. “We wanted to showcase the many roles that women play that aren’t visible, to show that women in sports are incredible, and that to be a great woman in sport, you have to balance a lot.”

A common theme of this year’s conference was the word, ‘village,’ which serves as a strong and important metaphor for the community that athletes, and women at large, need to feel supported through their journeys in sports.

“Yes, we’re their coaches, but we’re their allies as well,” Neilson said. “How do we build our village, how do we build our community, how do we support each other.”

York Athletics & Recreation and the conference planning committee thank all those who supported and attended this year’s conference, and we look forward to bringing together women and allies from across the sporting landscape at the 2027 Women & Girls Leadership and Sport Conference.

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