Now we're going to move to our panel discussion in this part of the game-changer session. As mentioned earlier, the moderators are Dr. Eric Carson and myself. Neither of us has disclosures, especially with regard to this session. Some of our panel members couldn't make it, unfortunately, due to flight issues. Troy Vincent, the Executive Vice President of Football Operations at the National Football League, unfortunately could not make it. And Kim Davis, who's the Senior Executive Vice President of Social Impact and Growth Initiatives and Legislative Affairs at the National Hockey League, she also had flight difficulties as well. Joining us, however, we have Mr. Ronnie Barnes. He's a member of the Giants organization since 1976 and team head athletic trainer. Team athletic trainer since 1980. Was promoted to the position of Vice President of Medical Services in 2003. Dr. Riley Williams is a professor of orthopedic surgery and attending an orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery in Weill Cornell Medical College. Is a graduate of Yale College. He is currently the Medical Director and Head Team Physician for the Brooklyn Nets. Dr. Williams also serves as Team Physician for USA Basketball. Dr. Robin West. Dr. Robin West is President of Inova Musculoskeletal Service Line and Chairman of Inova Sports Medicine. She currently serves as a Lead Team Physician for the Washington Nationals. She previously served as Head Team Physician for the Washington Football Team and Team Physician for the Pittsburgh Steelers, University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. Don Davis. Don's working with the National Football League Players Association during his playing days. Working with them during his playing days. His current position is a Senior Director of Player Affairs at the NFLPA. His role allows him to give back to the game that he loves in helping players navigate issues that come with transitioning into and out of the National Football League. Dr. Derek Jones. Dr. Jones is the head of Ochsner Sports Medicine Institute. He created OSMI and runs a program with over 160 athletic trainers and numerous operative and non-operative clinicians. During a 10-year period as Lead Orthopedic Surgeon for the New Orleans Saints, he was instrumental in aiding the team to its Super Bowl victory during 2009-10. And yes, I still am mad about that. He was formerly the Team Physician for the New Orleans NBA team over 15 years as well. He is currently Team Physician for numerous high schools and college teams. Dr. Clarence Shields has spent most of his career in private practice at Kerlin and Jobe Orthopedic Clinic in Los Angeles, during which he developed Kerlin and Jobe Sports Medicine Fellowship Program, which has produced more than 220 alumni. He served the team position for the Los Angeles Rams football team from 1973 to 1995. He has acted as Team Physician for his alma mater, Loyal Marymount University, since 1980. Also serves as Medical Director for Team HEAL, Helping Enriched Athletes Live, a non-profit foundation he created to provide comprehensive medical care, certified athletic trainers, and rehabilitation centers for underserved high school athletes. He has served in many capacities for AOSSM, including past president in 2001. So we're going to move forward and we're going to start kind of a discussion with our panels here. We have kind of three sections that we're going to work through. The first one being personal thoughts. And this section essentially is going to relate to some of their experiences and how they've kind of gone through these experiences. Next slide. So our first question, essentially I'm going to address this to Dr. Jones and Dr. Shields. This is a question that really delves into your experiences. Being the first and only, and many few times being alone, the burdens of being this alone, how did you deal with these expectations, yours and others? And I'll start with Dr. Shields first. Well, thank you, Eric. You have to reflect a little bit about this question. I think part of the things that were mentioned earlier today in Dr. Spindler's presidential address was about teams. And I was always involved with a good medical team when I was taking care of the Rams. And as being the only person of color, it didn't really come up that I was the only person that was different than the other team doctors. And I guess originally when I first was on the sidelines, the other team doctors would always call me, coach, where is the team doctor? And after a while, people realized that I wasn't a coach, I was the team doctor. And then it didn't seem to matter very much. It is a growing thing to realize that whatever you do, it involves other people. And you have to be a team player when you're a team doctor. A lot of times you think you're standing on a limb by yourself. But one of the great things about this society was I always had access to people who were senior to me. If I had a problem and I didn't know how to deal with it, I could always call and get a consultation. And I think that that was probably one of the best things about this society. I could always call someone like Dr. Bob Leach or so, hey, I got this problem, what should I do? And I would always get a straight answer. And then they'd say, good luck. So I always remember those kind of consultations. And that's the great thing about this society. You always have people who've been ahead of you whose shoulders you're probably standing on. And don't be afraid to ask them, how do you handle a particular question? So I think I was very fortunate to have a career that I was a team doctor for 20 some years. And it doesn't happen very often like that now because it's much more complicated. Sometimes I look at a game on television and I wonder, it was just myself and the internist. And we didn't have a team of orthopods, a team of spine surgeons, anesthesiologists, extra trainers. And you'd kind of wonder, did we miss very many things? I don't think so, but you never know. Thanks, Dr. Shields. I have two experiences that are very similar to one another. I moved from Detroit, Michigan down to Tallahassee, Florida. My dad joined staff at Florida A&M University. And I became the first black at a school in Tallahassee, Florida, deep south, 1974. And the experience I had in that situation very much mimicked my experience with the New Orleans Saints. Initially, I thought of as a different person. Someone like Dr. Shields thought of maybe I'm a trainer or somebody else, not qualified. No one takes a chance to look at your CV and what you've achieved prior to arrival. You assume they did, but they don't. They have all the stereotypes that the society has created for them that come to play. And that's the first third of my experience. The central part is I show who I am, show them what I'm capable of. In high school, I was a great athlete, a great student. And everybody loved me. It worked out well. And I was a rock star. Everything was great. And with the Saints, the same thing happened. 2008, Sean Payton said, hey, you've been doing all this work behind the scenes. Hey, you should be the head guy. And things changed. The guy that had been there for a long time went away. I came in, took over. We won the Super Bowl a year and a half later. I'm a rock star. I operate on his knee. He loves me. I operate on the owner. He loves me. Everything's great. Then we had some problems in the team. Some things started to go wrong. And, you know, that's when things changed for me with my experience. So I think as being the only one, it's the stereotype that comes to play first. And that's the experience, I think, in the general society we have. And when they get to know you, you know, you're considered different, a different person, and they categorize you differently from the other blacks or other category women or minorities. And then things are cool. But the initial experience is one of a little stress and a lot of anxiety in proving yourself. And it's hard. You have to work extra hard to make your name, make your presence known, and show them that you're qualified. Once they figure that out, things are pretty good, as Dr. Shields was alluding to. But there's a trial period there if they get to know you. All right, our next question. As a woman or black male team physician in professional sports, did you ever experience doubt, mistrust from athletes who have never had a woman or person of color as their doctor? And I'll address that to Dr. West and Dr. Williams. You know, if I look back at my career, I don't think that I've ever really experienced this doubt and mistrust from the players themselves. I've actually had the opposite, I feel like. When I started in the NFL, I was in the NFL for 18 years, I actually had players, I think, seek me out, and they trusted me, and they came to me for my opinion. And when I talked to a lot of the players, you know, a lot of them had role models. Their mothers and their grandmothers had raised them as single mothers and single grandmothers. And they had done everything to help them work multiple jobs. And so they really respect women. And so I had that opposite feeling when I was there. But on the contrary, I did experience from the other physicians. So I didn't have any issues with coaches or owners or anything. But other physicians, I now remember this, you know, I was probably 15 or 18 years into my practice, and I was joining a new team. And I was being introduced by one of the team physicians. And he introduced me to the players and said, this is our new head team physician, Dr. Robin West. And she was hired for her good looks. And she was hired to be the pretty girl on the sideline. I was like, I was so taken aback by that. And that was really very disheartening. And it was interesting, I walked out of the meeting, and a bunch of the players came up to me and said, are you pissed off about that? Like, how can someone introduce you that way? And that was really the first time I felt that way. I felt very, you know, separated out from my male colleagues, so. So before I answer this question, I'm going to call some things out. The reason I'm sitting here as a doctor is because of Dr. Shields, who I didn't know, but I knew he existed. So because I knew he existed, I knew I could do it. So thank you for that. Joel, I knew you existed. I didn't know you. But you can't be it if you don't see it. Derek, thank you for pushing me in the orthopedics at Stanford. Ronnie, thank you for pushing me into the fray my first day as a fellow with the Giants. So the point of all that is, it doesn't just happen. It has to be some visualization of it. And it has to be some benign interventions that happen on your behalf. So my answer to this question is actually super positive. Because I had super qualified, super interested mentors who were invested in my success. I'll call out two other people, Dr. Russell Warren, who I hope is sitting out there, who from a very early age entrusted or instilled a certain trust in my abilities that I thought was super important. My fellowship experience with the Giants was probably the most formative. And my experience was, they respected my skill set because I was put in a position to succeed and I lived up to it. And it was supernatural. Because the players are black. We got a black doctor who actually carries himself and speaks in a manner that sounds right. And when I pivoted to baseball, it was a little different, a little more challenging. But I was short-lived. And because I got the Nets gig, which I was back to basically an environment where it's predominantly African-American. The one thing I will say is, for those of you who are moving into this professional team situation, is that you have to, regardless of the level, understand who are the stakeholders. So the stakeholders are your athletic trainers with whom you work day to day. To a lesser degree, the coaching staff, and then ownership if you have access. I have had access to the owners of the Nets because of that reason it's been very stable. The Red Bulls, which is the MLS team, the owner has never even been to the United States in 17 years. It's still going. But at the end of the day, the experience that I had was really kind of born upon the fact that I've been predominantly in leagues that are majority African-Americans. And I've had people who taught me well, and quite frankly, it was always very fluid. Thank you, Riley. We'll move on to the next question. So the next question is, have you experienced difficulties or lack of support from coaches, staff, or ownership? I'm going to address this to Mr. Ronnie Barnes, the distinguished Mr. Ronnie Barnes. Well, I have not experienced any lack of support. I think I have a very supportive owner who cares about our players and cares about their health care. I think, you know, that varies across sports. Ownerships are different. General managers are different. But clearly at the Giants for a very long time, we have had people of color beginning in the fellowship program with Joe Hannifin as the first woman on the sidelines and positioned with the Giants to, you know, Eric Carson and any number of other African-Americans and people of color. So we don't, you know, I don't have any difficulty or any lack of support, but I don't, I might acknowledge that that doesn't exist everywhere. Thank you, Joel. So I wanted to put this slide up mostly for Mr. Barnes and also for everyone else. Essentially the numbers in athletic trainers with regard to race is essentially the same kind of numbers that we see with physicians. I mean, more or less, it looks exactly the same, which leads me into the next question. As an ATC, you are close to the players. Do you feel you have more buy-in from the players as a person of color? And then as a follow-up, this will go to Mr. Davis, as athletes or players, did you feel more comfortable or leery of women or people of color as medical personnel? As a first African-American athletic trainer in the league, beginning in 1980, and 25 years later there was another, I think we have a lot of work to do. We have had as many as seven head athletic trainers. That number varies, but clearly we need more work there. I do not think that race is a significant issue, but certainly with 71% of our players being African-American, we're underrepresented. And I think we really need to begin recruitment, mentorship, and support of people of color to change that. I worked with a group of psychologists with respect to mental health. And we had a forum with players. And the question was raised, would you feel more comfortable speaking about your mental health issues with someone who looks like you? And unanimously the players said yes. So it tells us that there's either unconscious bias or a desire to see someone at least represented on the medical staff that looks like them. So we have a lot of work to do. With respect to athletic trainers, we have a diversity and inclusion committee within the NATA. And the NFL is working very closely with the NFLPA and the NFL Physician Society to mentor medical students and folks who might be interested in entering the field of sports medicine. So again, we have a lot of work to do, but I think we're headed in the right direction. I think from a player perspective, and my academic pursuits will warrant the answer to this. It depends, right? That's what I've learned in academics. It just depends. I think it depends on the person. I don't know if the latter, the leery of people of color or women is there. I have not heard of that in my 25 years in the National Football League and being involved. Being more comfortable? It depends. I think it depends on the team you're with. I think it depends on the individual and that individual's upbringing and who, one, they have been exposed to, but more importantly, who they have had interactions with, right? And so, does it help? I believe absolutely. I always enjoyed, as a player, being able to have someone who had shared life experience with me in the coaching ranks, in the professional ranks, no matter what it was. So I think it depends, but I think absolutely there's unconscious bias that we all have that want us to have someone who looks like us treating us ultimately. Thank you. Next slide. So we're going to move on to kind of current issues going forward. Maybe a little controversy here, but I'm going to ask Mr. Davis to kind of continue along. Next slide. Please explain the Rooney Rule in 2003 and now the expanded Rooney Rule of 2021, obviously referring to the Mike Tomlin, Brian Flores. Is this working? Is this not working? So you're our management person, so you're going to step up and solve all our problems now. Yeah. The Rooney Rule is a Rooney suggestion. First of all, it's not a rule because it hasn't panned out like it had the folks who had put it into place. Dan Rooney, a lot of people salute him for things that he did and trying to be very inclusive and diverse in his hiring practices. But basically what the rule says is that a minority candidate must be interviewed for every open position, head coaching position. I think what you've seen as of recent is that folks felt like, and that's the behind Mike Tomlin's, excuse me, behind Flores' lawsuit is the sham interviews. If I just simply have already made up my mind, but I'm going to meet a quota, so to speak, in order to get around this rule to be compliant, which again, there's really no punishment. So that's why we call it a suggestion, it's not a rule. But as they've expanded this rule now to make sure that there's going to be a time period by which these interviews are going to take place. They're moving into things like there needs to be a certain specific number. They all need to be given, there needs to be a job description, number one. There needs to be a set of questions that are going to be asked and everyone needs to go through that same, that exact same process so that you can create a more equitable hiring process. That's the expanded rule and what we're trying to go as from a player association standpoint, being that many of the coaches that are in the pipeline are former players. We have a definite vested interest in this. Thank you. The owners in their spring meeting also included an expansion to the rule, or at least a suggestion that since most of the persons who are named head coaches come from the offensive side of the ball, at least two people, woman or man, must be hired by every team to serve in a role with the team in the 2021 season, so 2022 season. So clearly we're moving in the right direction to include both women and men. There's an under-representation of head coaches, offensive coordinators, and special teams coordinators. Thank you. All right. When leadership takes ownership or ownership takes the lead of DEI, there's usually a more robust DEI initiative with transformative results in any organization. Do you feel this is happening in your leagues? And this is addressed to Dr. Williams, looking at the NBA and as a collective, and also to Mr. Davis. So I'm a pretty big consumer of sports, so I think certainly, just to say it bluntly, I think if you're going to be an owner in the NBA, you have to be comfortable with black people. That's just the way it works. So your minds are typically strategically oriented around people who played in the league or at least coached, and there seems to be, at least in my experience, a very wide breadth of types of people across all the ethnic representations as well as genders as well. Now, there has been an injection of, in and around the medical services and performance, a more European and Australian bent, which is interesting. I think it's happened in some of the other leagues as well. But I do think that there is a comfort level that pervades from the top down, and which you saw happen, for those of you who were familiar with the Clippers ownership and what happened there, that was swift justice that was meted out, because it was so egregiously not in line with the rest of the owners. And what I've experienced, certainly I've been with the Nets for 17 years, is at no point did I ever feel or observe where race was really an issue in other managers, owners, or kind of top down in the organization, which I think, and the other thing, I also think that the league leadership over the past two decades, the two people they've had have also been sort of very aware of why their league was successful, and quite frankly kind of drove in direction where that sort of theme from top down was consistent. I think in academics, there's a construct that would address this when you talk about power and those in leadership positions. So they have the power, and when you have the power, it is not only your responsibility, not only should you be accountable for it, but in order to yield successful results, you have to be, we've mentioned it on the slides earlier, like there has to be an acknowledgement. I think we use the acknowledgement. So I think the framework though has to go past first awareness, which I think we are as a society, as a professional entity, professional sports. So there's awareness, there's been some acknowledgement, we see all the statistics. I think now we have to move to the next point of it is accepting responsibility. And I don't know that that's happened. I only spend time with club owners across the negotiating table and that's very contentious. So I don't get to sit in the rooms to, I just get to shoot arrows and tell them how terrible they are. So that doesn't, they don't usually take my suggestions or any of our suggestions from the PA. However, you will say once there's that acknowledgement, I mean, once there's an acceptance of responsibility, I think then you can take action. And some of these things would seem simple, but I think when we have implicit bias, when we have a professional league, so I'm just speaking in the NFL in particular, we have a lot of initiatives, we have a lot of education going on, but what you'll find is that that's really only addressed to those who work for the club, i.e. coaches, trainers, anyone who works in the NFL, all of the players, so all of them do it, but yet the one missing component is it's voluntary for the club owner. Okay, well, if you volunteer not to come, then how are we going to make any changes? So not to be doom and gloom, but I mean, it just, it's kind of where it's difficult in today's society because you would have thought in many aspects we would be further and yet we aren't. And so then you just ask the question why, and I love how we, as we talked about, when we put these things out, we may not have all the answers, but let's start somewhere, right? Want me to go ahead, Joe? So this is just a reminder, you know, lots of times people will say, you know, we talk about pipeline, we talk about, you know, things are changing, but in reality, the numbers are not changing very much, and I think that was illustrated by our two initial speakers. Yes, this question essentially is, most of these have second opinion lists for athletes consulting. Would involving more women and people of color, and who would meet these criteria and help these athletes in making choices for the medical care going forward? I'm going to address this to both Robin and Derek. Yeah, I think it would be great to, you know, bring that up. Yeah, I think it would be great to, you know, be included on those lists as a female or as a POC. The most important part really is that meeting the criteria, right? You can't put people on this list who don't meet the criteria, because then you're not helping the situation, you're actually making it worse. If you have people who aren't qualified, and they're getting these referrals, then it's making our situation worse. So you want to have highly qualified people who make these lists, and again, allow the athletes to pick and choose. Their second opinions. Thanks, Robin. Yeah, I think it would actually help a lot. If you have, Mr. Davis was just alluding to it, people that you have a common experience with, that you get an opinion from, and you get an opinion from that person, you have a common experience, you have common cultural experiences, you'll trust them and their opinion. And you can weigh that against the other opinion you may have had from a person that didn't have those same cultural experiences. And so a comparative, for the athlete, I was a former athlete, I would love to have two answers to the question, one with the person I affiliated more with, and one I didn't affiliate with. So it makes sense to have people that are people of color or women that you can affiliate with, answer some of those questions for the athlete. So the next question has to do with who's choosing the physician. These next set of slides, I have to attribute to Dr. DeLuca, one of our colleagues, who's a team physician for the Philadelphia Flyers. He gave a talk about a week ago, and I asked him if I could borrow some of these slides, and he agreed. But we were thinking about the same thing, and we were thinking about he agreed, but we were thinking about the same things. So Dave Goldberg, in 04, stated that after a spat of negative publicity, the NFL quietly enacted a policy that prohibits clubs from entering into marketing contracts with healthcare organizations that require team to use doctors from the medical group. But the rules haven't stopped partnerships that continue to raise concern. Andrew Bishop, former physician for the Falcons, New York Times, felt that this sponsorship compromises you as a physician. The perception is that if this individual was so eager to do this, he's willing to pay to do it, then he's going to do whatever management wants him to do to keep the job he paid for. And actually, he's not here, but we do have a quote from Troy Vinson when he was with the NFLPA. Players want to trust team physicians, but we know there's a business side. That sometimes sneaks in the way and causes a little bit of conflict of interest. Sam Effling, a journalist in 2013, until the players are choosing the doctors, leagues should bar sponsorship deals that let hospitals describe themselves as an official healthcare provider. So Dr. DeLuca, Dr. DeLuca actually came up with a solution. He felt that teams should allow multiple hospital systems to advertise and let GMs and owners select team physicians that have a PA's vet that physician. Now, this isn't a brand new novel idea. Actually, in Minnesota, the Minnesota Twins have three physicians from three different hospital systems because they chose their physicians. So it is doable. To that end, when getting docs involved as team physicians, minorities and women fellowship training sports docs are very few. Do you see a way to improve minority and women physicians in professional sports? And I address this to Mr. Davis and Dr. Shields. I love some of the suggestions that were already put forth. I think absolutely. Ensuring that those fellowship positions, that there is the people of color are selected for those. Right. I think what happens sometimes is we the the narrative is, well, in order to do that, I have to lower the bar, which really pisses me off as a person of color. But I think that just simply like when you have a poll and just saying, look, why don't we just address it and pick some people of color who are qualified because they couldn't have gotten this far or be in this pipeline, so to speak, if they weren't. Let's just pick them. And then we see how the how the job goes from there and they can be evaluated. So but yeah, I mean, I think there's some great suggestions. The sponsorship piece is tricky from a CBA standpoint so that, you know, it does say in there in Article 39, we have this where the doctor is supposed to be the team. The team physician is has a duty first to player as patient, not to the club. Obviously, when you have sponsorships, there's things there could be conversations going on. Still trying to see how we can best address that. But we from a collective bargaining agreement, we do have a little bit of teeth and meat in that should we find out that something like that someone, a player did not receive adequate care. And we have moved with grievances on that. Dr. Shields, I'd like to share with you a program that the NFL is starting this October. It has to do with the four historic black medical colleges. One of them is in Los Angeles to Charles Drew University. They have we have two teams, the Chargers and the Rams. They're involved. Each team is going to take a medical student who I have been involved in selection process. There will be a student spending four weeks to six weeks at each location. They will travel to one game. They will spend time in the training room, get to know all of the people in the medical team. And the idea is these are seniors in medical school. They haven't really figured out what it is they want to be. But this will expose them to what it's like being a team doctor. I think that this is the beginning. This is with the Players Association as well. And I've I'm very excited about this because it's a step in the right direction to get more people of color and minorities involved in being a team doctor. This is a pilot program, so we don't know what the outcome will be. But I think that this is a commitment that each of the two teams in Los Angeles have made. And I'm very excited that this is going to maybe change the landscape in the future. It's going to take a while, but you have to start somewhere. And I think that this is a great, great idea. And the two students that I've interviewed for this have been ecstatic about this opportunity. So we'll see where it goes. But this is a step in the right direction. Shout out to our NFLPA medical director, Dr. Tom Mayer, as well as Dr. Herman Taylor of Morehouse because I believe they were the brainchild of that program. Thank you. I think you guys actually answered the next question. We were going to ask you to talk about some of the programs and how they're set up and the target outcomes. So we'll just go ahead and move past that question. I did want to, and Kevin Davis couldn't be here, but I did want to share with you some thoughts about DI initiatives in the NHL. So I wanted to talk about becoming an effective diversity, equity, and inclusion entity. Since May 25th of 2020, certainly everyone's awareness in all companies, teams, you know, you name it, every corner there have had heightened awareness with regard to DI issues. Every business organization had to have one. Some already had DI programs prior. Some created to appease the workforce. Some created to be agents of change. So how do you know if your DI initiatives are effective and do you want to know? How do you measure success, short-term, mid-term, long-term? Certainly, you know, starting programs with kids in high school, that is a generational type of change and we need to do that, but it will be a long-term change. No one has all the answers and each organization will need to find them for themselves and their level of commitment. Are these just programs? And that's really one of the things that the NHL didn't want to have. So they started an Executive Inclusion Council in June of 2020. Several prominent BIPOC players in the league formed the Hockey Diversity Alliance, whose mission was to eradicate racism in hockey at all levels. The NHL established the Executive Inclusion Council to work alongside them. The Executive Inclusion Council included people that were owners, club executives, as well as other hockey leaders. Under the council was committees of player inclusion, youth hockey, as well as fan inclusion committee. They just recently released their demographic report from the last two years. That was the first thing they wanted to do. They wanted to try to figure out who are we exactly and that's, I think, what every organization needs to do to try to figure out where they want to go. You have to know who you are. They took a real deep dive. They surveyed all 32 teams. They had 31 out of 32 responses and essentially came up with these kinds of graphics. You know, we don't have to go into a lot of detail, but as you can see, some of them are as expected. I mean, it's the NHL, right? So it's 83 percent white, you know, mostly male, and most people identified as being straight. Some of the highlights here, it was interesting, one-third of the NHL franchises are located in market states where racial and ethnic minorities now make up more than half of the millennial population. At its current rate, the millennial generation, which now makes up a quarter of the U.S. population, which is about 75 million, is 44 percent non-white. More than one-fifth of Canadians identify as non-white and by 2036, people of color are projected to be about a third of Canadians' population. 60 percent of Canadian immigrants are from Asia. The NHL fandom, actually one of their biggest growing sectors, is female fan base. It's growing faster than it is in any other professional league. You can read some of these other findings yourself. Some of the key findings, nearly 15 percent of staff league-wide is non-white, 37 percent are female, 4 percent LGBTQ, 19 percent speak another language. More than half, 52 percent of women employed league-wide are in administrative positions, less than 15 percent are in senior executive positions. Asians, black, and Latino Hispanic employees represent 12 percent of league-wide workforce at roughly four percent each. Certain clubs, such as the Ducks, Coyotes, Sharks, significantly over-index in Hispanic employees compared with league-wide average from 14 percent compared to a league-wide average of four percent. Others, Canucks, Kings, and Sharks over-index in Asian employees, 22 percent. The Leafs over-index on black employees, eight percent compared to a league-wide average of four percent, and the Jets index on over-indigenous employees at eight percent compared to the league-wide average of one percent. While every club has more male employees than female employees, the Wild Canadians and Golden Knights report 47 to 48 percent female in the clubs and in female representation. In other clubs, female representation is as low as 13 percent. The response rate for this was 65 percent. I think that should be noted. Usually you get a response rate of 30 percent, so these are pretty significant numbers for them. Other key findings, 84 percent of the clubs have established organizational DEI councils, working group, or advisory board, a 12 percent increase over the last year. 12 clubs have created new senior level DEI positions, an increase of 22 percent. Three-quarters of clubs have engaged in a third party to provide inclusion training experience and employees, 69 percent have launched mentorship programs. So what about us? What about the AOSSM? Diversity and Inclusion Task Force. It was established under Dr. Sekadi as president, supported by the presidential line and board. Co-chairs are Dr. Constance Chu and myself, members you can see listed on the right. Our mission statement, the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force mission is to help AOSSM achieve its overall mission by facilitating surgeon education about diversity and inclusion for the purpose of securing the highest level of patient-centric care for athletes of all color, gender, ages, religions, affiliations, sexual orientations, and abilities. In 2021, the goals for the task force were to establish and implement an impact bias onboarding video, which we completed, review the policies, requirements, and procedures for membership application, membership policies, and bylaws, which is ongoing. Collaboration with the Emerging Leaders Program to produce a webinar, which was also completed. This was done with Coach Cheryl Reeves of the Minnesota Lynx and the WNBA, and Commissioner Kevin Warren of the Big Ten. The 22 goals for the task force were to focus on three initiatives for connecting with fellowship program directors, developing access to demographic data for incoming fellows, including race, gender, that will help understand who's applying. We have to take a deeper dive, much like the NHL did. Develop one to two webinars on issues that support AOSSM's mission to educate sports medicine orthopedic surgeons, and also to continue discussions, I think it was raised a minute ago, with the NFL and other professional organizations with regard to the role of AOSSM in future conversations. At this meeting, you're already here. Game changer session was one of the things we wanted to do. Diversity in sports medicine, the Women's Forum, and we also have the Gladden Society Sports Medicine, Gladden Sports Medicine Society gathering this evening. Just for those who didn't know, Dr. Gladden was the first orthopedic resident at Howard University. He's the first African American certified by ABOS, and the first African American elected to AAOS. I'd just like to say one thing. I'd like to thank Rick Wright and Cassandra Lee for really allowing us to put this panel on today. It was very intentional from their organizing this meeting today of really focusing on this particular issue, so I'd like to thank Rick. Thank you.

diversity

inclusion

professional sports

representation

challenges

Rooney Rule

athlete care

mentorship