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Good morning, Fearless readers:
This week, I talked with a previous, current and future female high school activities director about the impact women in sports administration positions has on girls’ sports in Iowa.
Our conversations reminded me of all of the ways athletics affect young women outside of their physical health. They build leadership and problem-solving skills, develop resilience and demonstrate how to be a part of a team.
If you participated in athletics as a young girl, how did that shape the person you are today?
In this week’s Fearless e-newsletter, you will find:
- A story about female activities directors and the changing nature of the position.
- A story about therapists helping Perry students heal after the January 2024 shooting.
- In the headlines: Sarah Diehn was promoted to editor of the Business Record.
- A break from the news: Caitlin Clark donated $22,000 to 4 Iowa charities.
- Lots more!
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Last but not least: Please share your thoughts in our 2025 survey on the status of gender equity in Iowa. While nonscientific, the results illustrate current opinions and experiences that women have across the state in and outside of work. This year’s survey will remain open through Feb. 28 at 11:59 p.m. Results and select comments will appear in future Business Record and Fearless coverage. There are multiple-choice questions and short-answer questions where you can leave comments. In an effort to receive honest answers, respondents are welcome to share answers anonymously or with their name. Thank you for participating in this survey, and thank you for the role you play in empowering Iowa women.
— Macey Shofroth, Fearless editor
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Female athletic directors are continuing the legacy of girls sports in Iowa
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BY MACEY SHOFROTH, FEARLESS EDITOR
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Erin Gerlich, executive director of IGHSAU, sits with Coach Dan Gable at the Dan Gable Donnybrook Wrestling Tournament in Coralville. Contributed photo.
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When Madison Melchert was hired as the activities director for Dallas-Center Grimes Community School District beginning July 1, it meant more to her than just finding a new job. It was a continuation of a legacy, giving back to a community that gave so much to her as a young person.
Melchert attended DCG schools and excelled in athletics. She won the state cross-country title in 2011 before going on to run at the University of Iowa. She previously worked at DCG as an assistant activities director before beginning her current job at the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union (IGHSAU). She loves her community deeply. Now, she gets to manage the same activities that helped shape her as they continue to develop the next generation of students.
Becoming the leader girls need
When Melchert officially begins her position, she’ll be joining a small but growing number of female activities directors in the state of Iowa.
According to Matt Weis, current president of the Iowa High School Athletic Directors Association (IHSADA), the organization has 56 female members. That’s in contrast to the 386 male members. The activities director profession has long been dominated by males, Weis wrote via email.
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Beth Goetz is the first woman to serve as the athletic director for both men’s and women’s sports at the University of Iowa. Tonya Moe, athletic director for Linn-Mar High School and incoming IHSADA president, was one of two female athletic directors when she began her career in the late ’90s. Moe will be the second female president of the IHSADA. Erin Gerlich, now the executive director at the athletic union, was the first.
Moe and Gerlich both said male colleagues and mentors voiced the need for more female activities directors in the state and encouraged them to pursue leadership roles. They both saw it as an opportunity to be the female leaders they didn’t see when they were younger, and maybe even help more girls get involved in athletics. In the 2023-24 school year, 56,805 girls participated in sports, compared with 81,222 boys.
"I didn’t have any female coaches until I was in college," Moe said. "I saw them in these leadership roles, and they’re being successful. I wanted to be one of those people for the girls [in Iowa]."
Sports build tough women
Iowans cheered on the meteoric rise of University of Iowa basketball star Caitlin Clark the last few years, and Iowa State University’s Audi Crooks continues to dominate. The two have built upon a legacy of supporting women’s sports in Iowa that’s almost a hundred years old.
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"In the early 1920s, the National Federation of High School Sports came out with a position statement that basically said, ‘We’re not going to offer female competition anymore because it is detrimental to their reproductive health,’" Gerlich explained. "But Iowa was thriving with girls basketball. A group of superintendents banded together and voted to create a girls union."
This was the beginning of the IGHSAU. Longtime union director E. Wayne Cooley explained their goal in the 1950s: "I take a lot of pride that every girl walks down every main street in every town in Iowa just as tall as the boy."
It’s the only union in the country that focuses specifically on girls’ sports. Gerlich said the union is routinely commended for its excellence in producing state tournaments. The organization has implemented programming that instills leadership in exemplary female athletes across the state, like the Student Advisory Committee and Empowering the Iowa Girl.
The union sets the tone for how female athletes are celebrated and encouraged in Iowa.
"I have no doubt that I’m the person I am today because of my involvement that I had in athletics," Moe said. "It teaches you grit, courage, hard work, dedication, time management. Someone once told me, ‘You need to have fear and failure in your life in order to learn.’ I was scared in sports and I failed in sports, and it made me work harder."
Women leaders create women leaders
Melchert joked that conferences for activities directors are the only places she can go where the line for the women’s bathroom is short and the men’s is long. But as more women move into leadership positions, she expects that to shift.
Gerlich and Moe expect that, too. Gerlich believes the job of an activities director has shifted over the last few decades, and women are uniquely positioned to handle the responsibilities of the role.
"So much of the focus is in communication, scheduling and finding the right workers in ‘X, Y and Z.’ When a lot of females step up to the plate and are in that role, it’s a no-brainer. They do a fantastic job of doing those things because typically females work well in that skill set," Gerlich said.
Female activities directors are also uniquely positioned to address some of the emotional needs of athletes, both girls and boys. Moe asks her coaches at Linn-Mar to take five minutes to talk with their athletes about their life outside of sports. She hopes to implement some type of mental health initiative across the state when she becomes IHSADA president in March.
All three women hope their work as leaders in sports can encourage their female athletes to pursue this path, too, if they’d like.
"So many girls come up to me, either during their time or after they’ve left, to say, ‘I want to pursue an avenue in sports because I saw you do it and I didn’t think it was weird that you were doing it,'" Gerlich said.
That opportunity to inspire the girls in her school district came even before Melchert accepted her new position at DCG. In the video announcing her hiring, the school included Piper Messerly, a current student and the first female cross-country runner to win state for the school since Melchert.
Messerly "raced" through the DCG schools in the video to arrive on Melchert’s doorstep, asking her if she’d accept the position of activities director. The experience was a reminder of the impact she could make on young girls pursuing their athletic dreams.
"It’s more than a state championship for me," Melchert said. "It’s the fact that what I did could have inspired her because she would have been so young when that happened. I know what it feels like to do that, and know the impact she’s making on so many other kids that are looking up to her."
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Editor's note: This story originally ran in our sister publication, dsm magazine.
Life in Perry changed forever the day a 17-year-old student opened fire on classmates and staff at Perry High School. In the months after the January 2024 shooting that killed two people — principal Dan Marburger and sixth-grader Ahmir Jolliff — and wounded six others, students, parents and the entire tight-knit community have struggled to come to terms with the tragedy.
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Anna Zuidema, the clinical director at Good Life Therapy in West Des Moines, remembers the day she received a call from the Heartland Area Education Agency as it was mobilizing a team of counselors to help students and staff try to make sense of such a senseless event. The AEA was enlisting clinicians to provide longer-term support, for the people who still needed counseling after the initial response teams had moved on.
"The response was almost immediate," she said. "I think there was a collective awareness amongst my colleagues and other practices and organizations that just created this mass outpouring of support."
At the time, Zuidema’s staff included a pair of interns who volunteered to help at the school. One of them had experience in mobile crisis response, and together, they visited Perry once a week to meet with students. Instead of formal therapy, Zuidema said they offered a more low-key format. "Here’s a place you can go and talk. They had the therapy dogs there and everything."
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One of the volunteers, Morgan Edgeton, was a graduate counseling intern at Good Life Therapy and had experience working with school-age children. She jumped at the chance to help in Perry and has been offering counseling services in the district since February. She sees six to eight students each week.
In the beginning, their discussions focused on the aftermath of the shooting, "but there are other kinds of problems that their parents wanted them to be seen for, too," Edgeton said. "I have clients who come in for anxiety and depression, which are always going to be present in some way or another. I can see a need for more mental health services, especially in that area."
The school district recently hired a full-time mental health coordinator, funded by a federal recovery grant, as well as two trained therapy dogs to assist students and staff along their healing journeys.
"It’s been incredibly meaningful to see the Perry community supporting these efforts and their children," Edgeton said. "Perry is a small community, but you can see they’re working together to help the students and families as much as they can.
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"ERASE THE WORD ‘FAILURE’ FROM YOUR VOCABULARY. NO CASE IS EVER TRULY CLOSED, AND NO CHALLENGE IS EVER OVER."
— MARY LOU RETTON
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Sarah Diehn promoted to Business Record editor: The Business Record has promoted Sarah Diehn to lead our newsroom as editor of the Business Record. Diehn first joined the Business Record team as an intern while receiving her bachelor’s degree in news from Drake University. She officially joined the team covering innovation in 2023 and became digital news editor in 2023. For the last two years, she has been named the top innovation beat reporter in the country by the Alliance of Area Business Publishers. As editor, she’ll lead strategy and execution for the Business Record newsroom by leading our staff of reporters to plan, develop story ideas and execute coverage across our many digital and print platforms.
Des Moines University names Beth Culross Regional Simulation Center director: Des Moines University Medicine and Health Sciences named Beth Culross as director of its new Regional Simulation Center, set to open in fall 2025. The center is a 90,000-square-foot facility designed to address health care workforce challenges with simulation technology and training spaces. Culross recently served as director of the Learning Resource Center at the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s College of Nursing.
National Conference For Women: A powerhouse lineup is gathering this women’s history month: The National Conference for Women announced its speaker lineup in a press release for its second annual virtual gathering on March 5, 2025. Keynote speakers include Caitlin Clark, Gloria Steinem, Oprah Winfrey and more. Other experts will facilitate breakout sessions addressing work and leadership topics. The National Conference for Women is a network of women’s conferences hosted around the United States.
Iowa native Peggy Whitson among 2025 Astronaut Hall of Fame inductees: The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation announced Iowa native Peggy Whitson will be inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame. Whitson, a native of Beaconsfield and a graduate of Iowa Wesleyan University, has accumulated 675 days in space, which is more than any other American astronaut or female astronaut in the world. She’s held a variety of positions at NASA, including chief of NASA’s Astronaut Office and commander of the International Space Station. After retiring from NASA, she joined Axiom to become the first female commander of a private space mission, according to a story in the Cedar Rapids Gazette.
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Senators are trying — again — to make air travel easier for breastfeeding parents (The 19th). More women are sharing their homes as they grow older (The Washington Post). How a monument to women finally won a place on the National Mall (New York Times). The new science of menopause: these emerging therapies could change women’s health (Nature). A third of women don’t go to their cervical screenings - here’s how to make them more comfortable (The Independent). Ancient DNA suggests women were at the heart of social networks in Celtic society in Britain (AP News).
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Caitlin Clark announces $22,000 grants to 4 Iowa charities
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Basketball star Caitlin Clark has awarded $22,000 grants through her foundation to four Iowa charities that she said inspired her during her time at the University of Iowa.
The recipients announced Wednesday are the University of Iowa Children's Hospital, Coralville Community Food Pantry, Boys and Girls Club of the Corridor and Special Olympics Iowa-East Central.
Read more
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At its core, Fearless exists to help empower Iowa women to succeed in work and life. We believe that everyone has a story to share and that we cannot progress as a society unless we know about one another. We share stories through featuring women in our reporting, featuring guest contributions and speakers at our events.
We are always looking for new stories to share and people to feature. Get in touch with us!
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