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Maria Stustman y Marquez (Dartmouth '96)Head Volleyball Coach -- Hartford |
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Bio
 What was your experience in youth athletics? Were there opportunities available to you?
My first experience with athletic started in the fourth grade so I was about nine years old, playing basketball. There were no opportunities for young girls at that time so I played on a basketball team with a group of boys. I did that until I was in the seventh grade when there were opportunities to play on girl’s teams of volleyball and basketball and stuff. So really for three years I played with all boys. That was the opportunity there. I grew up in a small town in northern New Mexico so that’s kind of what was available. Once I got older I played volleyball and basketball and we made a move to a bigger city in New Mexico, Albuquerque, and once we got there were all sorts of opportunities for playing volleyball in high school and junior high. That really made the transition for me to be more competitive and really gain a lot more experience at travel, oh I would have never had the opportunities to travel as I did when I started playing club ball and really becoming more competitive with volleyball.
Do you think parents have changed at all? Are they more accepting of young girls' athletic pursuits?
I definitely think that’s changed over time. My parents were really supportive of me in doing that. I think partly because my boy cousins were involved with soccer and doing a whole bunch of other sports. I really aspired to play and be competitive in that way. I think my parents thought of it early on and were encouraging. I think they may have been different for other people maybe my mother, I think about her playing sports and she’s like, “I never even played softball, we played in a powderpuff and that was it.” So I think between my mom’s generation and my generation that changed a lot in our area of the country. In Pennsylvania my grandmother on my father’s side was playing basketball when she was in med school so the difference may be between the regions.
How did the women’s athletics atmosphere differ between New Mexico and Dartmouth?
I think I don’t really think it differed as much. What I do think was different was the emphasis and educational component at Dartmouth with women’s athletics. There were tons of celebrations. I think I saw more women as leaders at Dartmouth. The University of New Mexico is such a large campus and only half of the athletic programs were housed in the same area that volleyball was so I didn’t get to see a lot of the other coaches or people around, it’s just such a bigger campus. There was always something going on with women’s athletics, they are celebrating diversity or something like that at Dartmouth. That may have been going on at New Mexico within athletics as well, but because the athletic department was a bit bigger in terms of numbers it was hard to know about.
What has athletics done for young girls that choose to participate? Has the impact been positive?
Oh yeah! Definitely! I think it’s hitting me now, you know we all have volleyball camps. You can go up to Dartmouth and do their volleyball camps in the summer. And the children are just so much more ambitious; I don’t know if it’s ambition but just more assertive and excited about the sports. We go to national tournaments across the country for recruiting and there are thousands of young women playing these days. They are so much more confident and just very excited about what their doing and they’re more aggressive and seeing that they are more aggressive and competitive and thriving to become champions or to become better than what they are and that’s always exciting. And especially with the really really young kids. Everyone once in a while we’ll get like nine or 10 year olds at the day clinics I deal with and they are just so in to it, they’re so excited. They just want to play and learn. There’s no shyness and I think maybe that has changed a little bit.
What obstacles still stand to young women who want to participate in athletics?
I still think that economics plays a huge factors, socio-economics, because many of the sports now are branching and doing club seasons and I think people who don’t have the income to pay for all the flights and pay for the coaching I think are at a disadvantage. There may be other ways in other sports to compete but there are some really high priced clubs out there that travel nationally. Then there are ones that don’t and those might be more affordable but I still think it’s really difficult. There’s a few non-profits out there now that are trying to help some of these students who can’t afford it play and have a competitive experience but really the majority of people that I see when I’m recruiting are middle class and higher and they’re all well educated. Their parents travel with them to every tournament. So I think I would have to say funding their experience. I’m sure that there are different programs in other sports that do that but in volleyball anyway that’s what it seems like to me.
What do you see in the future for women's athletics, will it continue to expand?
I think the Ivy League does a great job because here we have opportunities for 34 sports and they do a really great job with compliance in terms of equity— gender equity. So for me I think the Ivy League is doing just a great job with that. How would it expand? You know, maybe there’s more promoting maybe there’s more marketing, there’s more interest in women’s sports overall because there is going to be this whole group of women who have competed at these high levels becoming a part of the work force or doing something different— becoming involved in athletics more and perhaps people just in that nature start paying more attention to the growth and what women are doing in general. Just because there are more people getting involved, more people pay attention to it. But, it’s hard to say nationally if you look at some of the pro sports pro women’s volleyball they’ve tried pro teams but they’ve fallen through there’s not the funding. Then we have a different type of women’s volleyball which is beach volleyball and all the notoriety and promotion that they got during the Olympics. So I think it’s coming around, the Olympics this year were great and women were really kind of on the forefront as well. I think that trend is continuing.
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