Two female graduates of Boston College who have achieved success in the field of athletics – Jen Welter, the first woman to hold a coaching position in the NFL, and Laura Gentile, founder and senior vice president of espnW, the pioneering website for women’s sports – will talk about their experiences on March 15 at 6 p.m. in Fulton 511.
The event, “Leading Women: Breaking the Barriers in Athletics,” is sponsored by the Winston Center for Leadership and Ethics, in conjunction with the student group Boston College Women’s Summit: Own It.
Jen Welter, a 2000 graduate of the Carroll School of Management and a former rugby player at BC, served as an intern linebackers coach for the Arizona Cardinals in 2015. Prior to joining the Cardinals, she was linebacker and special teams coach for the Indoor Football League’s Texas Revolution—the first woman to coach in a men’s professional football league. She also became the first woman to play running back in a men’s professional football season when she signed with the Revolution in 2014.
Welter is a veteran of several women’s professional and semi-professional football teams and a member of the 2010 and 2013 gold medal-winning USA Team at the International Federation of American Football’s Women’s World Championship. She holds a doctoral degree in psychology and a master’s in sport psychology.
Laura Gentile, who earned an MBA from the Carroll School in 1996, is a senior vice president of espnW – ESPN’s first dedicated business built to serve women who love sports — and Women’s Initiatives. Launched as a blog in 2010, espnW has evolved to become the premiere site for women’s sports, a multimedia business encompassing digital, social, television, films and events such as The espnW: Women + Sports Summit.
Before espnW, Gentile served as ESPN vice president and chief of staff, working directly with the president of ESPN Inc. and ABC Sports on all aspects of the company’s business. She played an instrumental role in the development of “ESPN on ABC.” Her other positions at ESPN have included senior director of brand management within ESPN’s consumer marketing department, where she was responsible for the marketing direction for properties including the NFL, “SportsCenter” and the NHL.
A former All-American field hockey player at Duke University, Gentile was named to Street and Smith’s Sports Business Journal Forty Under 40 Class of 2012 and an SBJ Game-Changer. She was appointed to the U.S. Department of State’s Council to Empower Women and Girls Through Sports. In 2013, she received the Advertising Women of NY Changing the Game Paradigm Shift Award and Women in Cable Telecommunications’ Signature Accolade for espnW’s Global Sports Mentoring Program.
The event is open to the public. For information, e-mail winston.center@bc.edu or call ext.2-9296.
–Kathleen Sullivan | News and Public Affairs