During Elena Viñales’ (PhD ‘19) sport management master’s program at another university, a professor asked the students about their dream jobs. The men wanted to be general managers, scouts, or to work at high-profile organizations like the NFL; one woman hoped to be the head athletic trainer for an NFL team. But all the other women, including Simpkins, wanted to work in support roles.

“‘Hmm, I wonder why that is?'" Viñales remembers thinking. "'What is it that tells women that more visible jobs aren’t a viable option in sports?'"

Viñales was also one of just three Black women in her class. “I kept wondering," she says, “‘Where are all the Black women?’”

These questions would form the basis of her PhD dissertation at the School of Kinesiology, with a focus on the barriers facing Black women working in collegiate athletics. In the course of her qualitative research, she discovered that creating spaces where Black women thrive, not just live, fosters environments where the majority of other people will thrive, too — a concept she returns to frequently now that she’s working as SoK’s first manager of diversity, equity, and inclusion. (Sport management professor Ketra Armstrong remains SoK’s director of DEI.)

“I always want everyone to feel like they belong in a space,” Viñales says. “So I want this role to help bridge the gap between the big, lofty things people think about when they hear DEI and the more practical ways people can approach this work.”

We spoke with Viñales about her past research, her current goals, and the future she envisions at U-M.

Q: What did your PhD entail?

A: One of the first things Dr. Armstrong, the chair of my committee, had me do was look up Black women in sports. Very little came up. There’s tons of things about women, but ‘women’ usually does not mean ‘Black women.’ And then there’s race, but ‘race’ also does not mean ‘Black women’ — it means ‘Black men.’ That’s how I realized I could add to this field.

Q: What were your biggest takeaways from your dissertation?

A: My idea was that sport, culture, and power impact 1) policies and practices; 2) diversity resistance, which is people being resistant to diversity; and 3) legitimate power, the idea that certain roles are beholden with certain kinds of power that are tied to men and whiteness, particularly in sport. So I came up with questions that addressed those three things and how they impact Black women’s experiences within sport organizations. 

From there, I made adjustments; I added things like networking and work-life integration because those are areas where the women I spoke with experienced challenges. Then I talked about how you could use these as an intervention within an organization to make it more accessible to Black women.

Q: How are you using those ideas in your DEI manager role?

A: With our programs that already existed, like the graduate Bridge program or DEI movie nights, I’ve been saying, ‘OK, this is a good program. How do we make it an even better program? What are ways to expand it so it benefits the students more?’

But I also want to encourage students to be active participants in this work. A lot of students have told me things like, ‘I have no idea what I’m supposed to do, but I want to do something.’ It can all seem very heavy and theoretical as opposed to, ‘Actually, let’s listen to a podcast you might not normally listen to.’ I want this work to be accessible but not minimizing.

Q: What is it like to be a role model for students?

A: I thought my dissertation would go into the ether, and no one would ever see it again. But there’s a PhD student who found it and messaged me on LinkedIn and was like, ‘This is the greatest thing ever. I’d love to speak with you,’ and now we have monthly meetings. As someone who didn’t even know that this was a possibility for themselves, it’s a surreal thing to have people fangirl over my research.

Q: What’s your assessment of campus culture when it comes to DEI?

A: I always felt U-M was not bad. But I think we need to go deeper and start thinking about policy changes that will actually have an impact. Former university leadership had this idea that they didn’t want to make anyone upset. I was like, ‘At some point, someone’s gonna have to be mad, right?’ And it probably shouldn’t be the people who are being negatively impacted by bigotry or exclusion.

I don’t feel like we are in that space now, but we need to be vigilant to ensure that that does not come back because it’s possible to get complacent and be like, ‘Well, it’s not bad.’ We have to be firm. And at some point, we also have to be unyielding.

Q: What would need to happen to pull that off?

A: I was in a meeting once where we talked about a racist thing that had happened, and people were like, ‘Oh, but those aren’t our values.’ But if it is happening over and over again, it is our values, right? When we say that and it keeps happening, we are minimizing the experience that people are having by being impacted. So we have to be firm in saying, ‘This is not what we allow and this is how we’re going to ensure it doesn’t continue.’ 

If I can’t pull that off during my tenure, at the very least I want to be able to plant the seed and let it germinate. I want to be able to see that the idea is taking root, so the next person can come and get it out of the ground.