By Reilly Cahill

Megan Chawansky thought she had her career path figured out.

After earning three All-Big Ten honors and becoming the sixth-leading scorer in Northwestern women’s basketball history, Chawansky had her sights set on becoming a coach.

Then she discovered a different passion in sport.

“Growing up in sports, my vision was like, ‘I’m going to do my sports to the highest level, and then I’ll probably be a coach,’” Chawansky said. “That was kind of the end game vision, and as I moved into that realm, I realized I wanted to have different experiences in sports. So I was caring less about developing high-performance athletes and more about what else sport can do.”

That question has taken Chawansky around the world and shaped a career focused on the ways sport can connect communities, create opportunities and address social challenges.

Now, Chawansky, who earned master’s and Ph.D. degrees from The Ohio State University in 2002 and 2008, respectively, has joined the Sports and Society Institute as an affiliate.

Chawansky is an associate professor in the Department of Health and Sport Sciences at Otterbein University, where she is entering her ninth year.

Her work in sport and society, however, extends far beyond central Ohio.

Chawansky previously served as a research officer at the University of Bath and a lecturer at the University of Brighton, both in the United Kingdom.

She also worked as a consultant in Sport for Development and Peace, an area that uses sport to support international development and peace and conflict-resolution efforts. Her work included studying how sport programs could create opportunities for girls and women in underserved communities.

“Whether it was in India, I spent a few weeks there looking at a netball program that tried to work with underserved girls, could the sport help catapult them into different directions, different life options?” Chawansky said. “I got to go to Zambia to study another program that had similar kinds of objectives. I’ve just been really interested in people’s experiences on the ground.”

Chawansky has traveled to more than 40 countries, experiences she said have helped her understand how sport operates across cultures and communities. She hopes that perspective can create new connections and opportunities through SSI.

“[As someone] who has been able to use sport to go to Ukraine, go to Kosovo, go to places that aren’t maybe on everyone’s radar and try to find a point of connection and try to understand what sport means to people in different parts of the world, so if there’s any connections I can facilitate from some of those experiences, I’m happy to offer those to the organization,” Chawansky said.

Through those experiences, Chawansky said she has seen how sport can connect people with different backgrounds and provide common ground around larger social issues.

“I do think it kind of taps into some sort of emotional, physical response in people that maybe other practices don’t,” Chawansky said.

Chawansky becomes the 15th SSI affiliate and the sixth to join the institute in the past year.

For Chawansky, joining SSI provides another way to contribute to conversations about the role sport can play in society while helping students explore possibilities beyond traditional careers in athletics.

“I’m just happy to be part of a group that’s really trying to advance some important conversations,” Chawansky said. “[To] help, at this phase of my life, bring people along to try to have some of the experiences that have been really important for me, and to meet some different students and kind of get some insight on what people in Columbus, students in Columbus, are thinking about when it comes to sport.”