Minding the gap: a skateboard camp at a famed California site to advance female coaches 

It is indisputable: significant steps have been taken toward parity for women on the field of play at the Olympic Games.

At Tokyo 2020, 48% of the athletes were women. In Paris, the number is expected to be 50-50 – equality in numbers 128 years after the modern Olympic Games came to be.

Parity in coaching numbers lags behind.

Thus, an initiative like the two-week November 2023 skateboard camp at the famed Woodward West facility in Tehachapi, California – a project seeking to fill that gap

“We made a great job. From nothing, something,” said one of the coaches in the programme, Ewa Niedzielska, manager of Italy’s Street national team.

She added, “I couldn’t do it alone. It’s always better if you have help. Like, your sisters helping you.”

The camp brought in 15 athletes from 13 nations. Some had significant skate experience. Others, not so much. Most of the young people came from developing nations. They were part of the Olympic Solidarity Youth Athlete Development, or YAD, programme, aiming to assist athletes and their coaches identify the gaps in where they are and where they want to be and to establish a map in coordination with their NOCs and NFs to bridge it. One of the key components: strengthening the skill set of the coaches with worldclass support.

It’s well known it can be difficult to gain entry to the USA. Here, the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee made sure it was no problem, Delise O’Malley, the USOPC official who led the effort to get the government to issue visas, called it simply an “act of service” and “central to our partnership with the international sport community.”

Key background: Olympic Solidarity, in cooperation with ASOIF and AIOWF and a number of International Federations, launched what is known as the WISH programme – Women in Sport High-Performance Coach Pathway.

WISH, among other things, runs back to Recommendation 6 of the IOC’s 2018 Gender Equality Review Project. That recommendation calls for a balance in gender representation in coaches at the Olympic Games. WISH aims to equip about 100 women to coach at the elite level. World Skate nominated three for WISH – Eva Niedzielska, Daniela Suarez of Argentina, Lea Schairer of Germany and Melissa Williams of South Africa.

Woodward West, World Skate had big ambitions, because the camp was set to operate on multiple layers: to make skateboarders and skateboarding better through cooperation between 1/ national federations and 2/ their NOCs plus connections between 3/ two Olympic Solidarity programmes : Youth Athlete Development programme and the OSC, the Olympic Scholarship for Coaches, and 4/ WISH.

The days were packed, morning to night, with skating, more skating and more skating still. All the same, the three coaches took the opportunity to add an informal one-hour girls-only session each day – so the girl skaters in particular could talk about, well, anything.

“I got more patient,” Schairer said, adding a moment later, “There were people whose language we didn’t speak; they didn’t speak English. Still, you were able to coach nonetheless.”

“We were able to adapt in the moment,” working through different cultures, Williams said. “It was a small miracle,” she added. “That speaks to everyone wanting the best, for themselves and each other.”

Niedzielska said, and this is the ultimate truth, about girl skaters and female coaches: “For us, and for the kids, they saw they could do this. Because they saw us doing it.

“They saw that girls can do it.”