This past month, the National Collegiate Athletics Association (NCAA) took on the issue of homophobia in sports head on as a content sponsor in the second annual Gay and Lesbian Athletics Foundations national conference. The conference, held on the MIT campus in Boston over the weekend of March 26, featured a number of discussions and information panels, but none as high profile as the one sponsored by the NCAA.

Last year’s inaugural conference gathered a larger-than-expected turnout of college athletes, though the dozen or so present in Boston were an admittedly small fraction of the college athletes nationwide who are gay. This year, word about the conference was generated through collaboration between athletes, coaches, professors and trainers to ensure that the conference would produce real change in athletics. Information about the conference was also dispersed to campuses from New England to the West coast.

College athletics found its voice at this year’s conference with the NCAA-sponsored panel entitled: “Gay Issues in Collegiate Athletics: Getting from Here to There! An Audience Participation Session”. Accordingly, the panelists and audience worked together – through dialogue, questions, and challenges – to identify the current climate facing gay college athletes and athletic staff. The panel plans to take the information gained from the discussion and ultimately produce an outcomes document to assist athletics departments and campuses in raising awareness and understanding, and will provide institutions with recommendations for how to make their athletic environment a safer and more accepting place for gay athletes.

Mary Wilfert of the NCAA, who moderated the panel, stressed the importance of including an organization as powerful as the NCAA as well as straight allies from each sports institution in the implementation of action at the campus level.

“The NCAA can get the attention of institutions,” she said, and added that the outcome of this year’s panel will help to define the NCAA’s role in the efforts to make collegiate athletics departments a level playing field for people of any sexual orientation.

Joining Wilfert on the panel were Pat Griffin, author and University of Massachusetts at Amherst professor; Lauren Costello, Princeton University team physician; Andrea Zimbardi, former student-athlete at the University of Florida; Pam Bockle, former collegiate athletics trainer; Ryan Quinn, former student-athlete at the University of Utah; and Dan Woog, soccer coach and author of Jocks and Jocks 2, which include personal stories and accounts of being gay (openly closeted) in organized sports.

“Everyone is at a different stage,” said Jordan Goldwarg, assistant ski coach at Dartmouth College, who contributed heavily to the panel’s organization efforts. “There will be people at the conference, or who are watching the conference closely, who are still in the closet. And there will be others who have been out for years and have already made an impact back home in their own athletic department.”

While it can be a straightforward process to outline and mandate top-down actions from the NCAA or institution heads, the panel is also exploring ways to reach beyond the obvious policies and employ actions at a more personal and grassroots level.

A variety of sports figures coming out recently have had a profound impact in the daily battle for acceptance of GLBT people in athletics. Mainstream magazines such as The Advocate and websites such as Outsports.com have featured more and more coming out stories from college athletes and athletic staff in the last two years. The overwhelming majority of these individuals report a very positive experience.

Quinn, one of this year’s panelists, said he received about 180 emails after an article he wrote was posted on several mainstream gay websites last spring. “Responses came from people of all ages – some athletes, some not,” he said. “Most were people who were still in the closet and wanted to talk about how to come out.”