By Terin Frodyma on SwimSwam
Though the relationship between parenthood and coaching may not be at the forefront of many mainstream conversations, for former Stanford swim coach Tracy Slusser, that is one topic that is not talked about enough.
In an editorial that Slusser, who now runs Tracy Slusser Coaching, posted to her website, she recounts a story of a friend, a Division head coach, who was working with a childcare gap during a National Championship meet, with her assistant coach set to arrive a bit later in the day, with only one deck pass to use. Between her being there and her assistant coach arriving, her two-year-old daughter would be on deck while one of the team’s top athletes was competing.
Slusser advised her friend on the situation, saying, “Walk on that pool deck with confidence. You’re doing it all. You’re a good mom and you’re a good coach.”
That coach was later asked to leave and was escorted off of the pool deck.
Slusser admits that she has felt guilt since that moment, largely because of a story she never told. Instead of holding on to this story any longer, she decides to share her honest experience.
She began detailing her childhood as the child of a working mother of three children, and later her college swimming, with two female coaches, both of them mothers.
“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.” Slusser said in her editorial. “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.”
She goes on to say that the style of coaching she experienced as an athlete was not exactly how it would unfold as she stepped into the world of coaching herself. As she recounts a personal story of asking to leave a Saturday practice a little early to make it to her nephew’s first birthday party, she is met with “he’ll have another one.”
“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.”” Slusser wrote, “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.”
Slusser then goes on to talk about her next coaching stint, an experience she says involved a “Big staff, lots of communication, real coaching responsibility.” While in that role, she got pregnant and hesitated to tell the staff about the morning sickness she had been dealing with as a big meet approached, though she eventually let the rest of the staff in on her well-being. The head coach she was working under at the time brought up her pregnancy to her and said he had to act as though she was not there.
“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.” Slusser said.
“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.”
Slusser later resigned with one ask: not to say she was leaving because of motherhood.
“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.” Slusser wrote. “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.”
Slusser then explained that her experience did not just cost her a job, but it also made her feel that “serious meant childless”.
“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… 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.”
Slusser hammers home the point that this feeling was not put on her by one person, but by the “culture of this sport working exactly as designed”,
“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… 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.”
“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.”
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