Published by Macey Shofroth | fearlessbr.com
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.
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.
“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.”
