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Courtesy
of Janet Pendergraph
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In
High Gear
Janet
Pendergraph is as comfortable on the racetrack as she is in the
boardroom. After working for many years as a top executive in
the transportation industry, she is now vice president of Performance
by Design International (PBD) Inc., a company founded by her husband
in Auburn, New York, that designs and builds race cars. In her
spare time, she completed an M.B.A. through SU’s University College
and attained professional rank as a race car driver. “I discovered
I have the physical and mental ability to go fast,” Pendergraph
says. “I love driving, I love competing, I love winning.”
One of the perks of working at PBD is that
Pendergraph has learned the technical elements of formula race
cars—a real asset for any driver. That’s far outweighed, however,
by the disadvantages of being a woman behind the wheel. “Women
don’t have year-round sponsorship, so we must hold other jobs
to make ends meet,” she says. “Men who have been racing all year
have an unfair advantage.”
Despite the little track-time she’s had,
Pendergaph has been competitive from the start. She’s driven amateur
races on tracks in New York, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Arizona,
and Florida, typically finishing in the top 10. Her top finish
as an amateur was at Firebird in Arizona, where she came in second.
“I led the pack for the whole race and I could have held off a
car on the last turn of the last lap to win,” she says. “But I
was driving a customer’s GT Cobra Mustang and I didn’t want his
car to sustain serious damage.”
Pendergraph’s professional driving career
took off in 1999, when she was one of 30 drivers chosen from a
field of 400 to participate in the Women’s Global GT Series at
Road Atlanta. After a tough race, she finished ninth.
In addition to carrying out her executive
duties and battling for the checkered flag, Pendergraph enjoys
piloting her own bush plane, scuba diving, and coaching youth
basketball. “It became clear to me very early on that women have
to be twice as good and twice as fast,” she says. “That’s why
when opportunities come along, I work hard to deliver the best
results. I’m always in overdrive.”
—Christine
Yackel
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Winning
Attitude
Caroline
Silby knows what it takes to be a world-class athlete. As a
youngster, she earned spots on the U.S. national and international
figure skating teams and participated in the 1984 Olympic trials.
Now a sports psychologist in private practice in Alexandria,
Virginia, Silby specializes in the unique problems of adolescent
girls. “Competitive figure skating taught me how to win gracefully
and recover from defeat,” Silby says. “Now I help female athletes
learn the mental skills they’ll need to succeed.”
Although she excelled in skating, Silby
never intended to pursue a professional figure skating career.
“I’d have ended up a Smurf in the Ice Capades,” she says, “so
I knew it was time to go to college.” She completed a psychology
degree at SU and earned a Ph.D. in sports psychology from the
University of Virginia.
Drawing upon her own experience, Silby
helps young female athletes cope with performance anxiety, body
image, sexual harassment, and eating disorders. She conducts
motivational seminars and works with individual athletes at
all levels of competition. She also wrote Games Girls Play:
Understanding and Guiding Young Female Athletes (St. Martin’s
Press), to help parents understand the special needs of their
sports-loving daughters.
Silby says it’s unfortunate that so many
teenage girls lose interest in athletics due to low self-esteem,
because female athletes tend to feel more empowered, do better
in school, don’t do drugs, and are less sexually active. “We’re
making good progress,” she says. “In a few years, I hope to
see an explosion of female athletes participating at higher
and higher levels.”
—Christine
Yackel
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