Being a Serious Coach Doesn't Mean Being Childless

The story I never told, and why I'm telling it now

A few weeks ago, a good friend of mine was coaching at a national championship meet. She's a D1 head coach. She's built something special at her program, and I am so proud of her. Before the meet, she called me about a childcare gap. Her assistant coach was arriving later in the day, they had one deck pass to work with, and for a window of time her two year old daughter was going to have to be on deck with her while her top swimmer raced.

We talked it through, and my advice was simple. Walk on that pool deck with confidence. You're doing it all. You're a good mom and you're a good coach.

She got asked to leave. Then she got escorted off the pool deck.

I've been sitting with that ever since. Part of what I've been sitting with is guilt. Because I have a story I've never told, and I've wondered if telling it sooner might have moved the needle for coaches like her. I'll never know. But I know why I stayed quiet. It was fear. Fear of not being taken seriously. Fear of my credibility being questioned. Fear of being called a liar by people who are still in powerful positions in this sport.

I'm done being quiet. So here it is, my honest experience.

Where it started

I was raised by a working mom with three kids who did it all. That was my foundation. There was never a question in my mind about whether women were supposed to work and raise families. That was just what you did.

Then I swam in college for two women who happened to be mothers. I didn't think of it as remarkable at the time. They were just my coaches. Looking back, I can see everything they modeled. Our assistant coach didn't come to morning practice one day a week so she could get her kids on the school bus. Both coaches stepped back from daily coaching in the summers while our team trained as one big group with the men. Not once as an athlete did I question their commitment. Not once did I feel like I was getting less. We were working hard, and we had so much fun.

That was the version of coaching I absorbed as a swimmer. It didn't survive contact with my first job.

Early in my first coaching position, I asked my head coach if I could leave Saturday practice a little early for my nephew's first birthday. His answer: "He'll have another one."

I knew in that moment this was not a place where I could have kids and be supported. So I did what a lot of women in this profession do. I started quietly gathering intelligence. At every meet, I'd find the coaches who were mothers and ask them, how do you do it? What did maternity leave look like? What's your schedule? Every conversation gave me a different answer, and the takeaway was that there was no roadmap. You just had to build it yourself inside whatever environment you were in. Honestly, that gave me confidence. Okay. I'll figure it out.

"I have to act like you're not here"

My next job was a great one. Big staff, lots of communication, real coaching responsibility. I got pregnant in that role, and the morning sickness hit hard right as we were heading into the biggest meet on the calendar, the one every athlete and coach points their whole life toward. I didn't want to tell the staff that early. I was nine weeks. But I wasn't feeling well and I felt I owed them honesty, so I told them. I said I'm not at my best right now, I might need a little extra support, but I'm here.

The next morning, the head coach skipped our usual 5:30 AM planning meeting. Didn't address it. So the following day I came in even earlier and caught him in his office, just the two of us, and asked what was going on.

He said, "Now that you're pregnant, I have to act like you're not here."

My whole body went numb. What stays with me is how casually he said it. Like it was a reasonable operating principle. He explained that he knew how this works, that once women coaches get pregnant they're no longer coaching, so he could no longer depend on me.

I'd love to tell you I stood up for myself in that moment. I didn't. I went internal. And over the following weeks I stopped sleeping. I was in genuine distress, newly pregnant, in a job where I had just been told I no longer existed. So I resigned. I committed to coaching my athletes through the end of the season, and I made one single request on my way out: do not say I'm leaving because of motherhood. I wasn't trying to burn anything down. I just knew what that story would do to my career

The next day, a press release went out saying I was leaving for motherhood.

I lost it. With help from a family member who's a lawyer, I sent letters to the publications that ran it. One editor was kind, took it down immediately, and apologized. Another refused. I sat across the table from the administrator whose entire job was supposed to be advocating for women in sport, shared everything, and watched her go cold. The message was clear, whatever loyalty existed in that room, it wasn't with me. She told me to take it to university HR. So I walked across campus to HR, alone, and I told them I wasn't trying to get anyone fired. I just wanted it documented, so that if this ever happened to another woman, there would be a file.

Meanwhile my former boss called me. He'd seen the press release and knew me well enough to ask, is this real? I told him no. I'm leaving, but I'm looking for my next coaching job, and that press release was designed to make sure nobody would call. He told the people who did call the truth. And that's how I landed at one of the best programs in the country. Getting that job was my rebuttal. My response to the story they told about me was going to be success.

The standard I swallowed whole

Here's the part that took me years to see, and it's the real reason I'm writing this.

The discrimination I experienced didn't just cost me a job. It installed an operating system. Somewhere along the way, I absorbed the belief that serious meant childless. That commitment was measured in what you were willing to sacrifice, and that motherhood was the tell that you weren't all in. Nobody had to police me after that. I policed myself.

I had my first daughter in the middle of championship season. I was back on the pool deck two weeks later. Two weeks. And any moment I wasn't on deck, I was worried about how it would be read. Over the years, more than one coach I worked alongside made the same kind of offhand comment about colleagues who were mothers, a modified schedule here, an early leave for a school pickup there, a late start after a doctor's appointment, comments that made it clear flexibility for mothers read as a lack of seriousness. I doubt any of them meant for those words to land the way they did. But they landed on me, and I decided I would never be talked about that way.

A month and a half after giving birth, I traveled for a meet. A month after that, another one. At finals one night, mid-session, I needed to pump. I was in physical pain. My head coach told me to go, that he'd cover, that he'd talk to my swimmers. And I couldn't do it. I could not fathom my swimmers coming back from a relay and me not being there. They would have been fine. This wasn't about them. This was the standard I had built in my own head about what serious coaching looked like, and what would happen to me in this culture if anyone saw me waver.

That standard came from more than just what I absorbed watching other coaches. Over the years, four different coaches at the highest level of our sport told me some version of the same two things, directly, in conversation, unprompted. Two of them told me that one of their biggest regrets was not being more present for their own children, or not having had children at all. One of those same conversations included another line, one that's stayed with me since: you don't see babies in a boardroom, so why would you see one on a pool deck.

The other two told me, separately, that when they hired assistant coaches, they preferred someone unattached, no partner, no kids, someone who could give the job everything without anything else competing for it. Both said it to me directly, matter of factly, like it was simply how the job worked. I was standing in front of them at the time, attached, with two kids, doing the job at the highest level there is.

It was a punch in the stomach every time, in both directions. Grief for the families some of the best in our sport didn't build, sitting right next to a hiring standard that made clear a family was a liability. Four different people. The same conclusion, four different ways. That's not one bad moment. That's a culture, fully internalized, spoken out loud without a second thought.

Trying to be both

By my second daughter, I'd found more of my footing. I took a real month off. I built a schedule that worked. Two mornings a week were protected for my kids' therapy and doctor appointments, and I'd come in later those days. On our team's recovery afternoons, I'd sometimes scoop my oldest up early from daycare, grab lunch, and bring her to the weight room and the pool deck. She loved it. Our athletes loved it. Those are some of the sweetest memories of my coaching career, and they cost the team nothing.

Then the program grew, as programs do, and practices got added on exactly the mornings I had protected. Nobody forced me to be there. It was made explicitly optional. But our best athletes were in the water on those mornings, and I wanted to be there, and so I found myself rushing out of speech therapy and occupational therapy, dropping kids at daycare, racing across town to catch the back half of practice. And the feeling that settled in was this: I felt like a bad coach for trying to be a good mom.

Read that again, because I want to be precise about it. That feeling wasn't put on me by any one person. That is the culture of this sport working exactly as designed, inside a coach who loved her job and loved her kids and had been taught, over and over, that she couldn't fully be both.

The level this happened at

I want to name something here, and I want to be honest that it's uncomfortable for me to do, because it can read like I'm building myself up. That's not the point. The point is that it closes a door people love to walk through.

During the years I'm describing, as a mother of two, I was one of the top assistant coaches in the country. I was recruiting the best athletes in the world. I was coaching on some of the best teams ever assembled in our sport, teams that won multiple consecutive national championships. I was a national team coach for our country, and at one point led the US team as head coach at an international competition while my daughters were both still toddlers. Athletic directors were calling me about head coaching jobs. I was doing this profession at the highest level it can be done, with two babies at home, pumping in hotel rooms, traveling the world representing my country on a pool deck.

And all of it still happened. The press release. The administrator who went cold. The standard I enforced on myself so hard that I was back on deck two weeks postpartum.

So if your instinct is to explain a story like mine away, to assume that the woman in it probably just wasn't committed enough, wasn't good enough, wasn't serious enough, I'm taking that off the table. I was all of those things, at a level almost no one reaches. This culture doesn't only push out the coaches on the margins. It puts its weight on the very best women in the profession. And if it could do this to me, with my track record and my leverage, I need you to think about what it's doing right now to the young assistant with two years of experience, no championships behind her name, and a positive pregnancy test she's afraid to mention.

Why I'm telling it now

I never shared any of this. The people involved are recognizable, some are still in powerful seats, and I was afraid. Afraid of being called a liar. Afraid of having my contribution questioned. I understand every woman who has made the same calculation.

But here's what I've come to accept. My silence didn't protect the next generation of women coaches. It just left them to have the same conversations on pool decks that I was having, gathering intelligence, building it alone, absorbing the same standard. And I want to be clear about the timeline, because it would be comfortable to file this away as ancient history. It isn't. I swam from 2001 to 2005. I coached from 2006 to 2023. I had my daughters in 2013 and 2015. The moment a head coach told me he had to act like I wasn't there because I was pregnant happened barely more than a decade ago. My friend was escorted off a pool deck with her toddler weeks ago. This is not a story about how things used to be. This is a story about now.

So when my friend held her toddler's hand on a pool deck at a national championship while her athletes raced, she wasn't creating a distraction. She was creating an image that every young woman on that deck, athlete or coach, needed to see. Representation isn't a talking point. I reached out to one of the top women's soccer coaches in the country, at a program that doesn't just support motherhood, it celebrates it, out loud, across their own social media. I wanted to understand how a different sport had built a culture where this wasn't something to hide. In a direct conversation, she told me that seeing other women do it, visibly, is what gave her, and now gives others around her, the courage to believe it was possible.

Escorting a head coach and her two year old off a pool deck at a national championship was a failure. There may have been a protocol behind it. I'm sure someone can explain the policy. But the way it was handled set women in this sport back, again, and we have to be better than this.

Because here's what I know for certain. If you asked any of the athletes who swim for my friend whether they're getting less because their coach is a mother, I guarantee you they'd tell you they're getting more.

I believe you can be a mother and coach at the highest level. I believe you can show up fully for your team and fully for your family, not perfectly, not without hard tradeoffs, but wholly. You can call me delusional. I spent seventeen years inside this sport, most of them believing the opposite, and I've never been more sure of anything.

The culture doesn't change when the people who survived it stay quiet. So this is me, no longer quiet.