Undergraduate Offerings

The Center for Leadership in Athletics resides in the UW’s College of Education. In addition to our graduate program in athletic leadership, we teach various courses at the undergraduate level intended to give UW students a deeper look into the intersection of athletics and education. Current course offerings include:

Lead Instructor: Dr. Jennifer Hoffman. – Offered Spring Quarter

Introduction to the role of sport in the university, including intramurals, club teams, e-sports, and intercollegiate athletics. Attention to how sport promotes or competes with educational values. Students in this course investigate how sports activities cultivate the collegiate ideal through ceremonies, stories, rituals, and rites of passage; all of which are most well understood by insiders to the campus community.

Lead Instructor: Dylan Kartchner  – Offered Fall Quarter

Examining the pipeline from early childhood to college, the course introduces and explores themes related to physical development and lifelong health implications for today’s youth, sport as a vehicle for individual and community development, access to sports and recreation activities in the community, equity and inclusion within a positive sports environment, and the role of sports in social justice and cultural change in the local, national, and global arenas. As such, this course introduces the historical and foundational context for these themes and explores them within a current event and/or emerging issue.

Lead Instructor: Dr. Hannah Olson  – Offered Winter Quarter

This introductory course explores the influence of sport and physical activity to positively impact the lives of young people. The class will introduce students to the concept of ‘Sports-Based Youth Development’ and how educators and leaders can proactively utilize athletics and activities to effectively build social-emotional and bio-physical skills in participants. The course will introduce students to foundational positive youth development frameworks and provide opportunities for students to better understand how these frameworks play out in a sport context. Focusing on individual identity development, students will develop strategies for creating positive youth development in both individual, group, and team environments.

Lead Instructor: Dr. Julie McCleery  – Offered Fall Quarter

Teacher, leader, scientist, psychologist, trainer, tactician, artist: these are some of the titles describing the sports coach. Using educational and organizational leadership principles, we will explore the various roles of the coach and what makes a coach “great” across various settings and contexts. Students will learn strategies used by coach-educators in effectively supporting mastery and peak performance without losing focus on the holistic well-being and healthy social-emotional growth of their athletes.

Lead Instructor: Dr. Sara Lopez  – Offered Spring Quarter

This course aims to examine diversity themes (race, class, gender, sexuality, and physical ability) together with historical sport events through a social justice framework. In this course, we define social justice as “promoting a just society by challenging injustice and valuing diversity”.  As a foundation, we examine the role and influence of sport in our society, with a focus on the United States setting. We think critically about the influences of power, institutions, and systems in addition to who are the drivers of social justice and change in and through sport.

Each of these courses counts as electives towards the College of Education’s ECO major. 

In addition to course offerings, the Center occasionally hosts undergraduate students to conduct research or engage in fieldwork and independent study.  If you are an undergraduate student interested in exploring this opportunity, please contact Hannah Olson.