Carole Oglesby, Ph.D. was first President of WomenSport International, founded in 1994. Her professional career has focused on women’s/gender studies in sport and sport psychology and goes back more than fifty years. She earned a PhD in Kinesiology at Purdue University in 1969 and a PhD in Counseling at Temple University in 1999. She was the inaugural president of the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, president National Association of Girls and Women’s Sport, Trustee of the Women’s Sport Foundation, First President of WomenSport International, Co Chair for International Working Group for Women in Sport 2014-2018, Executive Board of the U.S. Collegiate Sports Council, U.S. Olympic Committee Board of Directors, Association for Applied Sports Psychology Health Psychology Chair and Executive Board member, former Advisory Board Beyond Sport, Boards of Somali Women Foundation and Sheeroes of India.
She has received major awards and recognitions from many of these organizations. She was awarded the AIAW Award of Merit, NAGWS Honor Fellow and Women’s Sports Foundation Billie Jean King Award; American Alliance of Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance Honor Award, R. Tait McKenzie Award for service outside the profession, C.D. Henry Award for service to racial and ethnic minorities. She was the first woman nominated to give the Coleman Griffith Lecture at AAASP. She was the first recipient of the Boris Planchard Medal for service to Girls and Women’s Sport in Latin America. She received the America Psychological Association Div. 47 Lifetime Achievement Award in Public Service and also the Phillip Noel Baker Research Award of the International Council of Sport Science and Physical Education, Lyn Vandien Lifetime Leadership Award, International Association of Physical Education and Sport for Girls and Women.
Early on, and consistently, Carole Oglesby has experienced the elation and personal development associated with performance excellence. In high school, she was a California Honor Orchestra French hornist. She played in three national Amateur Softball Association World Tournaments on teams finishing 2nd, 3rd, and 4th. She coached softball teams that competed in College World Series at Purdue and University of Mass. She served as Chef de Mission for the World University Games U.S. Winter Games team in 1987. She was a consultant for athletes who competed in Pan America Games in cycling and Olympians in rowing in Atlanta, Sydney and Beijing.
Carole served as a liaison for global women’s sport advocacy community to the United Nations. As a culmination of this role, she was principal author/contributor for a UN-Division for the Advancement of Women monograph entitled Women, Gender Equality and Sport, translated in five languages and released March 2008. Having published over 50 chapters, articles, essays, five books or monographs and advised 49 successful PhD students at Temple University, her own doctoral work in counseling was a culmination of a lifetime of observation that sport, and other high performance contexts, can bring trauma as well as positive development.
In 2000, her colleague and friend from Women’s Sports Foundation, Deborah Slaner Larkin, honored her by endowing at Temple University, the Carole Oglesby Graduate Scholarship to advance research on sport and health of African American Women. To date, there have been 12 African America Kinesiology graduate students whose work has been benefited by receiving this award.
