Pat Griffin to be Inducted into the 2025 LGBTQ Sports Hall of Fame
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Professor Emerita in Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Pat Griffin, will be inducted into the 2025 LGBTQ Sports Hall of Fame by the Sports Equality Foundation in August. This momentous recognition honors her groundbreaking achievements as an LGBT athlete, coach, and advocate for over 45 years.
“It’s a great honor for me to be able to be inducted,” Griffin Said, “I’ve been doing this work since the early eighties, and I would say the seed for that beginning was at UMass.”
Griffin was hired as the Swim and Dive coach at UMass in 1971, where she quickly became a beacon of support for her athletes, running into them at LGBTQ+ events and dances and being someone they could turn to for guidance. “I loved that I could be that person, but it was also really disturbing to me that these young adults, a whole generation behind me, were still going through the same kinds of isolation problems that I did.”
Five years later, Griffin became a professor at UMass, attending and speaking at workshops for women in sports, researching LGBTQ issues in education and athletics, and advocating for equality in sport. She is the former director of the Women’s Sports Foundation’s It Takes A Team project, was a founding director for Changing the Game: The Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network Sports Project, and continues to work on the NCAA affiliated project Common Ground on creating welcoming and respectful spaces in sport for members of all sexual orientations, gender identities, and religious perspectives. One of the projects she’s proudest of is her book Strong Women, Deep Closets. Published in 1998, she still receives feedback that the book is changing the lives of readers.
Her work was significantly inspired by her own experiences as an athlete growing up and during her years on the basketball, field hockey, and swim teams at the University of Maryland, College Park.
“The women I admired, the women who were my coaches at the University of Maryland, I just loved them. I would’ve done anything for them, but I was so afraid that if they found out about me, well, I just didn’t want to disappoint them because I looked up to them so much,” Griffin said, “It’s such a burden to carry around that fear of exposure. It was very isolating.”
In her years since retiring, especially in the current political climate, Griffin recognizes how much work remains to be done in the fight for equality in sports, “it’s so painful to see what’s happening right now. I feel like so much of the progress we made between 2010 and 2020 is just totally unwound. It’s going to be a hard fight to make up that ground.”
Griffin calls for the continued action of educators and activists, “LGBTQ people are in sport and we belong there and we will fight for our space.”