Elite Female Athletes Are Jumping the Coaching Ladder, and I Think That’s Okay

With the latest announcement that Annie Lazor would be joining the staff at the University of Florida after this month’s US National Championships, the usual chorus of frustration about elite athletes jumping out of the pool and onto the deck, seemingly ‘skipping the line’ in what will ultimately make up the vast majority of their professional lives, have rained down.

These shouts have waxed and waned for generations, though they’ve become louder with a remarkable recent run of female athletes doing this.

• Annie Lazor – Florida
• Noelle Peplowski – Indiana
• Melanie Margalis – SMU
• Margo Geer – Alabama (head coach)
• Kelsi Dahlia – Notre Dame

Every time this conversation rolls up, my initial thought is one of cynicism:

We don’t have enough people qualified to be on a pool deck.

And I firmly believe this. I think there are more swimming coaching positions in the United States than there are people who have both the right experience and the right demeanor to occupy them.

And so in this case, if I have to choose between the right experience and the right demeanor, as a head coach, I’m believing it is much easier for me to give my assistants the right experience than it is the right demeanor…

Especially when they’re the low-coach on a big co-ed coaching staff.

Not all of the swimmers listed above are that. But some are. And for anyone who thinks that just because it’s a Power 5 job, it’s glamorous, let me tell you: it is not always that. Low pay, long hours, a lot of time spent herding athletes around. First year assistants’ jobs include things like apparel and equipment management, organizing team meals, logging hours into compliance systems, in the stands filming races during meets, and chasing down contact info for recruits. First-year assistants aren’t responsible for training plans, they don’t spend their days correcting the technique of Olympians, they aren’t making event lineups for conference championship seasons.

They’re on deck some too, assisting and learning, but the last coaching spot on a Power 5 team is not more glamorous than the head coaching spot on a mid-major squad.

I want to be clear – I recognize the difference between the situations of swimmers on the list above. I think thrusting a coach with no on-deck experience into the role of head coach of a Power 5 program is still a mistake – and I will always think that’s a mistake, even if it occasionally works out. But I digress on that matter.

But what about the coaches who have been doing the work, and the sport doesn’t respect that?

Fair. I totally buy this. Coaching, like most jobs, involves a lot of networking to climb the ladder, probably magnified substantially. So much of coaching is pseudo-psychology, and that inevitably bleeds over into the hiring. I think there’s an argument to be made that we aren’t particularly good, as a sport, at separating the people with the right skills from those without them. I think a lot of hiring in the world is that way, but it’s especially true in swimming.

Every time hiring conversations come up, the justifications that people give for making or not making a hire reek of cognitive dissonance. Those reasons never seem to be recirculated or re-evaluated when the choice either works out or doesn’t work out.

With higher expectations and a changing culture around sports, though, the system needs to be better. There are too many ‘known problems’ who continue to get opportunity-after-opportunity.

We may be watching a moment, though.

Setting aside the people stuck in old-school mindsets, there’s broad consensus in the US that women are at a disadvantage when it comes to being hired. There are very few programs in the country that interview male and female candidates in lockstep for the same positions – the designation is always “we need a female for this role” or “we need a male for this role.”

And if you look at the staffs across the country – you can see how that works out for female coaches.

As a sports, we’ve collectively tried banging our heads against the wall trying to change those systems, and not much has changed. With Teri McKeever out of the picture, at the top level, that huge weight falls on Texas head coach Carol Capitani. Even if USA Swimming wanted to stick more women on the staff for this summer’s World Championships or next summer’s Olympics, there is nobody else who is likely to qualify any swimmers where the choice would be justified. The head of the US National Team program, Lindsay Mintenko, is a woman, and the top-up approach has thus far not netted many great gains for women in coaching.

So maybe this is a different pathway. These swimmers already have these big networks, that we talked about above as being so crucial to moving up.

Maybe this is the spark we need to really change the dynamic of women in coaching. A number of women left the Florida team after last year, and, it appears, part of the way that Anthony Nesty is addressing that is by adding another woman to the coaching staff – a reasonable choice. (We haven’t heard that Kristen Murslack is leaving, though there is a lot of spin left in this summer’s carousel).

While these low-level assistant jobs aren’t always glamorous, what they do offer is a shorter path to the high level Power 5 jobs. We can’t deny that. In this sort of isolated moment in time, where there are a lot of people working to get more women into high level Power 5 jobs, this might be the spark needed to change the system.

On a broader scale, I think the discussion focuses far too much energy on how we decide who gets the first shot, and not enough on how we decide who continues to get shot, after shot, after shot, in spite of repeated evidence to the contrary of their fitness for coaching swimming.

In any revolutionary change, there are winners and losers. I hold a lot of empathy for those who get skipped on the ladder, and I understand their frustration. If the system changes because of it, though, that’s a win.

There’s a whole other spur of this debate in the manner of coaches jumping from the club ranks to the college ranks, but I personally think that conversation is stuck in another era. For one, there are a whole lot of club coaches in this country making way more money than Annie Lazor is going to make at Florida this fall. For another, I think there is an increasing divergence between coaching at the club level and at the college level. I no longer view them as being on the same pathway, but rather as parallel pathways of the same career-tree.

But there are plenty of other college coaches who were passed over for all of the above jobs and who are rightfully feeling frustration right now, and probably wondering if they made the right career choice.

My answer to those people is to suggest that they figure out what they can do to make themselves valuable to a program like Florida or Indiana or Alabama. Annie Lazor has 22,000 Instagram followers, she has name recognition among athletes, she has experience with the struggle and the highs and the lows, she has seen inspiration within herself.

Some of that, we don’t all have the opportunity for. Some of us were never going to be Olympic swimmers. But we all have the opportunity to figure out what makes us tick. Are you working on your social media? Are you taking the courses and expanding your education? Are you attending the conventions and introducing yourself? Are you working camps in the summer? Are you building relationships not just up the ladder, but across the ladder and down the ladder?

It’s a cliche, but standing out as a coach isn’t about stomping on another to make you look better. It’s about making yourself better. Figuring out how you can better serve your team and your athletes.

And if that isn’t your thing, national unemployment rates are low, and there are a lot of jobs in this country that pay better than swimming that don’t require that kind of mindset.