Jill Kochanek, a doctoral student in Michigan State University’s Kinesiology program, was named the winner of the American Kinesiology Association’s 2021 Doctoral Scholar Award.
The prestigious honor, based on recommendations by faculty in kinesiology programs across the U.S., celebrates one scholar each year for their distinguished academic, leadership and service record.
“Jill’s work is at the cutting-edge of social science research in Kinesiology,” said Assistant Professor Karl Erickson, Kochanek’s advisor. “At the intersection of the sociology and psychology of sport, she merges incisive conceptual critiques with a pragmatic, real-world approach to better help youth sport coaches and leaders promote athlete development in socially responsible ways.”
Equality in sport
Kochanek’s research has been influential in a variety of capacities—statewide, nationally and internationally.
Kochanek co-developed a two-part report on the status of high school girls’ sport participation in Michigan* with Dan Gould, MSU’s Gwendolyn Norrell Professor of Youth Sport and Student-Athlete Well-Being. The 2020 research is amongst those Michigan’s Task Force on Women in Sports (on which Gould serves as an advisory member) is using while it considers and develops strategies to support girls and women in sport.
Kochanek is lead author on one of only two papers that discuss females in motor sports. Working with fellow MSU student Megan Davis, Erickson and Assistant Professor David Ferguson, who served as principal investigator on the other paper, Kochanek researched female experiences and gender dynamics within the sport. The study, published in Psychology of Sport and Exercise, helped “lay the foundation for policy changes in motorsport,” said Ferguson. FIA, the governing body of motorsport was inspired in part by the work of Kochanek and Ferguson, and is enacting changes to make the sport more accessible for women and girls, including developing practices to introduce the sport at a younger age.
Most recently, she delivered an invited, virtual lecture on her social justice work for the Carnegie School of Sport at Leeds Beckett University in the United Kingdom—an opportunity usually only offered to faculty, according to Erickson.
“She is really focused on ‘moving the needle’ to create equitable, inclusive and socially just sport environments for all young people,” Erickson contined.
In 2021, Kochanek was also named a recipient of MSU’s Excellence-in-Teaching Citation, one of only 6 given at the university and one of three for College of Education doctoral students, as well as the recipient of the Department of Kinesiology’s Outstanding Doctoral Student Award.
Outside the traditional classroom, Kochanek received a Creating Inclusive Excellence Grant from MSU’s Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives to develop and implement a multi-session cultural competence module for athletic training majors and evaluate the newly-developed curriculum. She is also heavily involved in community service as a practitioner: She is a diversity/inclusion facilitator with the national non-profit Ross Initiative in Sport for Equality (RISE) and, locally, a high school girls’ and boys’ soccer coach. Following graduation in May 2021, Kochanek will continue her work as a critical sport scholar-practitioner at Springfield College (Mass.), where she will serve as the director of the master’s program in athletic leadership in the School of Physical Education, Performance and Sport Leadership.
*The Status of High School Girls’ Sport Participation: A Report Compiled for the State of Michigan Women in Sports Task Force PDFs: Part 1 (March 4, 2020) and Part 2 (April 5, 2020), submitted by Jill Kochanek, M.S. and Daniel Gould, Ph.D., Institute for the Study of Youth Sports; Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
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