They aim high on and off the court
Women’s coaches shoot for balance
“There’s nothing like winning a big game on the road, then asking the trainer for a bag of ice to keep your breast milk cold while you walk through airport security with a cooler.”
Brooke Wyckoff laughs now, but when the 37-year-old Florida State women’s basketball assistant found out she was pregnant, she remembers thinking, “How hard could this working mom thing be?”
A former standout forward for the Seminoles, Wyckoff had seen other female coaches balance basketball and family. The first two years of her career, Wyckoff considered herself a solid multitasker. Then she had a baby, and her respect for working mothers — especially coaches — increased exponentially.
“There’s nothing like winning a big game on the road,” Wyckoff says, “then asking the trainer for a bag of ice to keep your breast milk cold while you walk through airport security with a cooler.”
The NCAA women’s tournament is here, but Wyckoff and third-seeded Florida State were eliminated with an 86-65 loss to Buffalo. Avery, her 4-year-old daughter, watched from the stands. Across the country, dozens of moms — and dads — in coaching will spend the next few weeks juggling scouting reports and nursery rhymes, balancing practice and play dates. These moms say they face unique challenges on the job.
Working moms are the norm, according to the Department of Labor:
70% of mothers with children under 18 work, more than 75% of whom are employed full-time. Moms who work as Division I basketball coaches know it’s not just a full-time gig — it’s an all-the-time gig. They spend about 100 nights a year on the road, schedule births around the recruiting calendar, plan parent-teacher conferences between big games.
“Being a mom in coaching is like being part of a special sorority,” says Gonzaga coach Lisa Fortier, mother of three. “But sometimes people don’t really get that working moms are asskickers. People need to watch out. Working moms can take over the world any minute now.”
A trendsetter
Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw has won a national championship, been to seven Final Fours and coached 19 All-Americans. She is no-nonsense to the core, demanding excellence from her players every day. When her only son, Murphy, 27, would come to practice as a child, players “felt like I completely changed,” McGraw says. “It was like, ‘Oooh, Murphy’s here, now we can have fun today!’ ”
As a baby, Murphy visited practice with McGraw’s husband, Matt. When Murphy started to crawl, McGraw would sit him on the baseline, then take her players to the other end of the floor. She measured drill time in Murphy’s crawling speed. “We’re gonna work on this play until he gets to half court!” she’d yell. As a toddler, he loved pre-practice stretching, because he thought all his “big sisters” circling up meant it was time for a round of Duck, Duck, Goose.
When it was McGraw’s turn to be a mom in the stands instead of a coach on the sidelines, “a lightbulb went off.”
“When he started to play sports himself, all of a sudden, I understood better that these people are giving their daughters to me,” McGraw says. “I’ve got to make sure I’m building them up. I learned a lot about how to coach from watching his games.”
The time coaching demands often scares away younger women who worry that balancing a career and family is impossible. That’s why McGraw says athletic directors need to be conscious of putting more women in plum roles.
“We need to hire more women coaches,” she says. “We need other women to see that, yes, I can be successful as a head coach and successful as a mom.”
That example helped one of McGraw’s assistants, Niele Ivey. An All-American guard who led Notre Dame to the national title in 2001, Ivey was a mom to Jaden, 5, when McGraw offered her a job at her alma mater in 2007.
Jaden attended almost every road trip of Ivey’s professional career in the WNBA, sitting with fans or staying with friends in the area. Before a game at Madison Square Garden, Ivey sat alone in a bathroom stall, breast pumping and thinking, “Man, NBA guys have it easy.”
Ivey knew the Notre Dame job would require late nights and trips away from home. She had watched her mother, Theresa, work to send Ivey and her four siblings to Catholic school in St. Louis.
“For me, I never had reservations, because I saw my mom and Coach McGraw do both,” Ivey says. “They are my role models. Some people hide their passion and turn down opportunities because they’re scared you can’t do both well. But coaching is my calling.”
Jaden, 16, is a staple at Notre Dame home games — when he’s not playing in a varsity game of his own.
Like her head coach, Ivey preaches creating whatever type of support system you need to succeed. For Wyckoff at Florida State, it’s two rotating nannies. For McGraw, it’s her husband. For Ivey, it’s Theresa, who spends the majority of basketball season in South Bend.
It’s chaotic, Ivey admits. It’s also the only thing her son has ever known.
Managing ‘mom guilt’
Jennifer Rizzotti has coached for 19 years and parented for 12. Yet every time the George Washington coach goes on the road, she feels a pang. “There’s not a trip that goes by that I don’t feel guilty leaving my family,” says Rizzotti, who’s in her second year at GWU after 17 seasons at Hartford. She and her husband, Bill, have two boys, Holden and Connor, ages 12 and 9.
Wyckoff takes issue with the guilt moms get saddled with when it comes to caring for their children. What type of society is it, Wyckoff says, when a mom feels bad for leaving work because she has pick up her kid from day care?
After Avery was born, Wyckoff rallied female coaches and started Moms in Coaching, an organization that meets at every Final Four to trade stories and offer support. They have an ongoing group text for anytime an overwhelmed mom needs a pep talk. Wyckoff sends out a quarterly newsletter. In the most recent edition, she linked to a blog post offering suggestions on changing workplace culture so working moms won’t stress, or feel guilty, about leaving the office for a family event.
‘ That first trip ... it’s hard’
Stephanie Norman, Louisville associate head coach, was an assistant at Oregon State when her son Parker, now
16, was born. Daughter Cassidy came along three years later. Her first trip away from home came when Parker was
4 months old. The night before she flew out, Norman recalls, she lay on the floor of his nursery, “crying the entire night.”
“As time goes on, you get a little more accustomed to it,” she says. “But that first trip, man, it’s hard.”
In her 11th season at Louisville, Norman is one of the top recruiters in the women’s game. Having children was never a reason to slow down.
“I feel like I deal with reverse guilt — I try to be the first one in the office and the last one to leave because I don’t want anybody to think that having a kid is going to change my work ethic,” Norman says. “No one in my office has ever made me feel that way. But working moms, we feel like we have to continue to prove our worth. I’ve been doing this a long time, and I still battle that.”
Charli Turner Thorne, head coach at Arizona State, recalls when working moms weren’t often praised for incorporating kids into their work life.
Turner Thorne and her husband, Will, have three boys: Connor, Liam and Quinn. Liam, now 16, arrived on Selection Sunday 2001.
Four days later, Turner Thorne flew with her children to Indiana for the Sun Devils’ first-round game. Bill Maher of Politically Incorrect asked a national television audience where this new mom’s priorities were.
The comment infuriated her. “Like, how dare you?” she says. “I wasn’t going to let my team down.”
“There is so much pressure on every woman who gives birth to breastfeed. Doing that when you go back to work is such a source of stress. You need to do what’s best for you.” Brooke Wyckoff Florida State assistant coach
“I’ve missed some big moments because of work, and that’s emotional for me. But the sacrifices I made took care of (our family). I had a lot of help from my mom — and it’s OK that it takes a village.” Niele Ivey Notre Dame associate head coach
“A lot of times people will look at me and say, ‘Oh, you have it all!’ Well, I don’t know that anybody does. I do know that life is about trade-offs, and you have to remember that.” Charli Turner Thorne Arizona State head coach