Caroline Wiley needed a place for active and sport-loving women, like herself, to find the stories, communities, businesses and resources required to be their best active selves.
Because Wiley (MA '96, Recreation and Leisure Studies) couldn’t find that place, she built it herself. It’s called SeeWhatSheCanDo (SWSCD), an online portal where women have access to an athletic directory of approximately 60,000 listings and at least 67 different activity pages that showcase what’s happening right in their neighbourhoods. She calls it the “A-Z of sports” – but it is so much more.
The portal features a community hub where women can join and create groups and events by location, from beach bike rides to pickleball to women and their dogs and beyond. There’s also a section for news coverage of women’s sports and an Athlete Advisor Directory, featuring businesses and organizations who are passionate about investing in women. The website uses the power of technology and community to deliver agency and inspiration, and to demonstrate what’s doable.
“The world of sports is so diverse demographically, geographically and by type,” says Wiley. “I asked myself, ‘How can we leverage each woman’s strengths so they can do everything they want to do?’”
Seeing ourselves in others
As a grad student at the University of Waterloo, Wiley researched a concept called “enduring involvement,” which looks at how people are motivated to do what they do, specifically through a gender lens. She also knows that, often, women make decisions to participate in sports by gathering as much information as they can beforehand, and they usually need an existing sense of belonging before they are willing to get involved.
“There is often fear of judgment, fear of not knowing or failing,” says Wiley. “We must recognize that there are different aspects at play when women decide to jump in.”
Through her graduate research, she also found that mass media played a huge role in influencing and normalizing what women think they can do. Even nearly 30 years later, experts are still talking about the same thing – what media is and isn’t doing to show representation.
“I’m of the generation where I got told I couldn’t play hockey because I was a girl,” explains Wiley. “Often women, especially women over 30, don’t see themselves as athletic because they haven’t gotten the right messaging throughout their lives.”
Moreover, as a mother of two active university-aged daughters, Wiley has also seen firsthand the powerful role mainstream media and messaging continues to play in shaping what young women perceive as possible or doable in the world of sport and play.
Through SeeWhatSheCanDo, Wiley aims to provide these women with a place where they can see themselves represented in photos, articles and other media at whatever place they are in their lives, regardless of what they believe in or how they identify themselves.
Building a sense of belonging
As a child, Wiley developed her love for community through playing sports with her siblings and neighbourhood friends. Though she was one of the youngest (and a girl), they included her in softball, street hockey and lots of other pickup games.
This love for community continued through Wiley’s UWaterloo journey as she connected with others on campus. She was involved in the Graduate Student Association and the Recreation and Leisure Graduate Student Association, taught squash and officiated volleyball through recreational programs and bartended at the Graduate House, where she got to meet individuals from all different departments.
Her experience at Waterloo, paired with her previous undergraduate degree in Commerce from Queen’s University, carried her through many different avenues in recreation and leisure, including sales and marketing of sports and playground equipment, running a provincial sports organization, management consulting and teaching sports marketing at the college level. These career changes, together with her husband’s career opportunities, brought her to six different communities, two provinces and two countries.
“I experienced firsthand what it’s like to move to a new community without knowing anybody,” says Wiley. “SWSCD is what I would have wanted when I was going through all of those transitions.”
The power of a story
O
ne thing Wiley loves about SWSCD is the ability to share positive stories about active women. She tells her own story of how she met her co-founder, Tina Finelli, while learning how to play ice hockey for the first time. Finelli was learning how to play ice hockey at 40-something, and so was she. “You’re never too old to learn and to experience the power of sport,” says Wiley.
She also shares a story of interviewing a para-ice hockey team of women in 2018. Wiley says upwards of 90 per cent of women who are physically limited do not engage in the world of sport. Still, these women were there for the same reasons: To get some exercise, meet new people and have fun. She recalls being invited to play with the team the following year and finding it to be “one of the most difficult sports” she’d ever played in her life.
It’s stories like these she hopes will help women see what’s possible. “A good story can move mountains,” says Wiley. “It can move people to action in big and small ways.”
