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Pat Griffin, professor emerita of social justice education in the College of Education, will be honored by the Sports Equality Foundation for her groundbreaking achievements as an LGBT athlete, coach and advocate for over 45 years with induction this August into the 2025 LGBTQ Sports Hall of Fame.

“It’s a great honor for me to be able to be inducted,” Griffin says. “I’ve been doing this work since the early 80s, 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 to whom they could turn 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,” Griffin says.

Five years later, Griffin became a professor at UMass Amherst, attending and speaking at workshops for women in sports, researching LGBTQ issues in education and athletics, and advocating for equality in sport.

The former director of the Women’s Sports Foundation’s It Takes a Team project and a founding director for Changing the Game: The Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network Sports Project, Griffin 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. 

She says that one of the projects she’s proudest of is her book, “Strong Women, Deep Closets.” Published in 1998, she says that she still receives feedback from readers who tell her that the book has changed their lives. 

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Griffin explains that 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,” she says. “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. It’s such a burden to carry around that fear of exposure. It was very isolating.” 

In her years since retiring and in the current political climate, Griffin says she 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,” she says. “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, saying that “LGBTQ people are in sport and we belong there and we will fight for our space.”