March 19, 2018 UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa.ââ'¬" Penn State Intercollegiate Athletics will be well-represented during a panel on Tuesday, March 20 as part of Women's History Month events on the University Park campus.
Charmelle Green, Senior Associate AD and Senior Woman Administrator, and three members of the ICA staff will participate in the panel "Gender Equity in Sports: Reality or Dream?" The event will be held at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday in Freeman Auditorium in the HUB-Robeson Center. The panel is co-sponsored by Penn State's Gender Equity Center and the Penn State All-Sports Museum.
Joining Green as panelists are: head coaches Coquese Washington (women's basketball) and Erica Dambach (women's soccer) and Kris Petersen, associate director of strategic communications, who is the primary communications contact for the Nittany Lion football team.
Amira Davis, assistant professor of history and women's, gender, and sexuality studies also is among the panelists. The panel will be moderated by Jonna Belanger, an instructor in the Department of Kinesiology and a U.S. paralympics track and field classifier.
The event is free and open to the public and will include a question and answer opportunities.
Penn State fields one of the nation's most comprehensive and successful athletic programs, sponsoring 31 intercollegiate varsity programs (16 men's and 15 women's), tied for the fourth-highest sport total among Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) institutions, that are fully funded at the NCAA maximum scholarship levels.
Penn State's 800 student-athletes earned a school record-tying Graduation Success Rate (GSR) of 90 percent in the 2017 NCAA Graduation Rate Report, continuing a rate well above their peers nationwide. During the 2017 fall semester, school records were re-written when 26 teams and a total of 520 student-athletes earned at least a 3.0 grade-point average. The Nittany Lions rank No. 4 among all Division I schools with 200 CoSIDA Academic All-Americans all-time, with seven honorees since December 2016.
The Nittany Lions' 50 NCAA Championships all-time (78 national championships overall) rank No. 5 among all NCAA Division I programs and are the highest total of any college or university east of the Mississippi River. Penn State's 31 NCAA titles since 1992-93 leads all Big Ten Conference institutions. The Nittany Lions have won 107 Big Ten Championships since capturing their first crown in 1992-93, including seven in 2016-17, and three thus far in 2017-18.