Kathleen K Rogness, Esq.
Kathleen K Rogness, Esq.
Kathleen K Rogness, better known as Kay Rogness, recently retired after 17 years as Executive Director of the FRVBC Foundation, a 501(c)(3) that supported amateur team sports, and Executive Director of the Front Range Volleyball Club, an organization that provided teams and instruction primarily for junior high and high school age girls in the Denver, Colorado area. During her tenure at the Foundation, Kay grew a local tournament known as the Colorado Crossroads from an event of 116 teams into a highly acclaimed national and international event annually hosting 1500 teams and 58,000 attendees with a revenue stream of more than $3,000,000. Crossroads was one of America’s largest indoorvolleyball tournaments, attracting teams from as far away as China and Brazil. It’s economic impact on the Denver area was estimated by the city to be in excess of $28,000,000 yearly. Prior to relocating to Colorado from Illinois, Kay had turned her original post-college career as a Montessori pre-school teacher into an abiding interest in sports participation as a means of assisting young girls advance to high levels of competition in the USA Volleyball program and to obtain college scholarships for playing the sport just as the impact of Title IX was coming into focus. She helped found a volleyball organization in Illinois that she later discovered employed a coach who was a serial abuser of young girls, one of whom was her own daughter. She worked for years with a group of survivors from that organization to obtain justice for them. One of these survivors subsequently won the Whistleblower Award from CHILD USA in 2022.
During this time, Kay, who had resigned from volleyball, went to law school at the University of Denver. Her primary goal was to develop the legal skills to enact change in the culture and the laws to protect children from abusers. She returned to Illinois where she practiced civil litigation before relocating permanently to Colorado, all the while working with the abuse victims she knew to effect change at national volleyball organizations such as USA Volleyball and AAU Volleyball specifically and junior sports in general. Kay was born and raised in Pennsylvania. She has two daughters and three grandchildren.