Director of VCU’s Center for Sport Leadership receives Fulbright award to create soccer coaching program for girls in South Africa

By Greg Burton
Center for Sport Leadership

Carrie LeCrom, Ph.D., executive director of the Center for Sport Leadership at VCU, has received a Fulbright award to work with colleagues at Stellenbosch University’s Centre for Human Performance Sciences to create, pilot and evaluate a soccer coaching program for girls in South Africa.

“To say I'm honored to be the recipient of a Fulbright would be an understatement,” LeCrom said. “I've spent the last decade devoted to developing sport for development programs and instilling in our CSL students the many important ways sport can be used to promote social change. My time in South Africa will take this work even further, allowing me to spend a year devoted to a very special population of girls who have so much potential.”

LeCrom, a two-time VCU graduate, is one of is one of more than 800 U.S. citizens who will teach, conduct research and provide expertise abroad for the 2018-19 academic year through the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.

Recipients of Fulbright awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement as well as record of service and demonstrated leadership in their respective fields.

Over the past 10 years, LeCrom has been awarded more than $2 million in grants from the U.S. Department of State’s Sports Diplomacy Division to operate cultural exchanges and sport for development programs in Ethiopia, China, South Africa, Kazakhstan, India and Sri Lanka.

Learning to coach and organize are merely vehicles through which the girls will learn and practice important life and job skills.

LeCrom will spend most of 2019 in Stellenbosch, located in South Africa’s Western Cape province, just east of Cape Town. LeCrom’s initiative will reach into the rural communities to a group of girls who are some of the most distressed due to their isolated locations, high levels of gender violence, and lack of access to education and extracurricular programming.

“The young girls participating in our program will learn to become effective soccer coaches and to organize soccer events for girls from the local elementary schools, which in itself is a worthy project because the younger girls are also underserved,” LeCrom said. “However, learning to coach and organize are merely vehicles through which the girls will learn and practice important life and job skills, such as time management, goal setting and communication under pressure when presenting to a group.”