Inspiring. Motivating. Passionate.
Every single one of the guest speakers invited to the AWSM2011 convention shared those three qualities.
The convention opened Thursday night with a trip to the Charlotte Motor Speedway, where Lesa France Kennedy, CEO of the International Speedway Corp. gave a candid account of her life in the motorsports industry.
Friday featured Dorothy Seymour Mills, whose story of her life-long quest for recognition as a baseball historian resonated deeply.
Girls on the Run founder Molly Barker graced Saturday’s lunch program and gave a heartfelt presentation on how her background and her struggles with alcohol early on in the her motivated her to start Girls on the Run, a program aimed at encouraging girls to honor their bodies, celebrate their voices and build their self esteem.
To cap off the weekend, 15-time national ski jumping champion Lindsey Van (Park City, Utah) described her fight to make women’s ski jumping an Olympic sport. Honest as she was engaging, Van spoke with fiery conviction about how she’d fought for the inclusion of her sport in the Olympics because she didn’t want the next generation of female ski jumpers to have to jump through the hoops that she had to go through. Her story is detailed in the upcoming movie Ready To Fly, a documentary by Bill Kerig. Kerig was also at the AWSM convention.
In this video from their presentation at Saturday night’s dinner cruise on Lake Norma, Kerig and Van talk about how they became partners.
Founded in 1987, the Association for Women in Sports Media (AWSM) is a worldwide organization of more than 600 women and men (professional and student) employed in sports writing, editing, broadcast and production, PR and sports information.
