While the sporting world has been rocked by the pandemic, it looks for a major rebound this spring: March madness, indeed.

No one knows for sure what the future holds for sports, but as vaccines are rolling out, fans look forward to a semblance of normalization. The Doe turns its gaze to all manner of athletics, from a look inside the NFL to aspiring Olympians—and our writers aren’t pulling any punches.

Illuminate your perspective on issues in sports and athletics through stories from anonymous writers. Break out of your echo chamber with The Doe!

Sports and Athletics Stories From Verified Writers - The Doe

While the sporting world has been rocked by the pandemic, it looks for a major rebound.

Athletics

I fell in love with martial arts early. I had seen The Karate Kid, Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles and a ton of ninja movies. From age three to 12, if you asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I would have said I wanted to be a ninja. 

My brother and I started training at a strip-mall karate school. I think my dad got us into it just to appease us. I don’t think he cared about most of the stuff that parents try to put their kids in martial arts for discipline or self-defense. “These kids love karate, let’s do it.” 

It wasn’t like a totally legit school, but we trained there and competed until we were probably about eight. Then my dad had a work friend who ended up being a super-legit martial artist. He took us into the little training group he had that centered around a style of martial arts called Jeet Kune Do, which is what Bruce Lee pioneered. It was the first pragmatic martial art, trying to take a bit of the others and making one that was more effective and realistic. We started training there, and when we went back to these strip-mall karate tournaments, we were just blasting through: smoking everybody.

Our coach took us to the first Ultimate Fighting Championship in 1993 at McNichols Arena in Denver. I was ten and my brother was 12, so we didn’t know what we were seeing. Our coach had taken a couple of seminars from Royce Gracie, and he was like, “This Brazilian guy is gonna beat everybody.” My brother and I were like, “No fuckin’ way.” This guy Ken Shamrock, who did a little bit of WWF was there. We thought he was gonna smoke everybody. Then Royce Gracie won the whole tournament, and we were like: holy shit. It blew our minds. I remember our coach saying back then, “If you guys ever see a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or Gracie Jiu-Jitsu school, you need to take advantage of that.” And back then those didn’t really exist anywhere except for California.

We did that until we were probably in like seventh or eighth grade, until it wasn’t cool to be doing karate anymore. Then we started playing lacrosse and football, because when you're 13 you want to play football and not chop boards in half, you know? So we took our hiatus from martial arts. I took a little interest in boxing in high school. Then, when I was at college, I went grocery shopping and saw a big sign that said “Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu,” and I remembered coach saying I should jump into that. So I walked in and asked, “What’s up with this? Is this the same shit that Royce Gracie does?” So I signed up and started going there once a week. Then it quickly turned into two times a week. Then it was every day, and then I was skipping college classes to go. I was good at it and I loved it.

I had my first fight in 2005, in North Platte, Nebraska. It was the Wild West back then. The athletic commission kind of sanctioned matches, but not really. Nationally, they sort of delineated between pro and amateur. Usually, pro fights were five-minute rounds, and amateurs were three-minute rounds. In pro fights, you could knee to the head, or elbow to the head, but you weren’t supposed to in amateur matches. But, in reality, there weren’t a whole lot of rules, and there was no real delineation between amateur and pro. 

My first fight there were three three-minute rounds. I asked, “Can I knee to the head?” And they were like, “Yeah sure, fuck it.” I got paid a little bit. I figured, “Fuck it, I’m pretty good at this. I’m having fun with it, I want to compete.” I did it once and I won, and I loved it, so I was like fuck it: I’m gonna do it again. 

The promoter invited me back, and I won that one too. Then my third fight was the first time I had to step-up. “This guy’s done a bunch of fights, he’s good.” The dude had all these tattoos, and he looked gnarly, so I was super intimidated. Then I knocked him out in 22 seconds, so I just kept riding it. By then I was teaching, so I basically lived at the gym. It was my life, and I loved it.

My sixth fight was the first one I lost. It was a boring fight, and I spent the whole time on my back, so I knew I had lost before the judge’s decision. But in my head, I told myself: “I gotta come back and get another win. I gotta get this back.” I was all-in at that point. It was too late to turn around.

I fought for ten or 11 years as a pro. I fought for a company called Strikeforce. They got bought by the UFC. Then I fought for the WEC, which at the time was like UFC Light. Those were awesome fights; I loved that organization. It was the same company as UFC, it just had a little bit different management. I fought for them twice, and then they got absorbed by the UFC. I fought for UFC once and lost the decision. 

At one point, I ended up fighting in Japan. Japan has its own hybrid thing called shoot boxing. They have a big tournament every two years called the S-Cup. It’s mostly Japanese and Dutch fighters, and they have a couple of American kickboxers come over. It’s basically Muay Thai rules, but you can do standing throws or standing submissions. You can hip-toss somebody, or suplex them or whatever. It’s kind of its own thing. And it’s huge in Japan.

That fight happened on short notice because my kickboxing coach, who is probably the best American-born kickboxer, had a ton of international success. He called me after I fought this guy at 1STBANK Center in Broomfield, Colorado. He asked, “Hey how’s your weight?” I was like, “I’m fine, why?” He was like, “Do you want to do a kickboxing match in Japan in two weeks?” I said sure, and he said the promoter would send details. 

The guy I was supposed to fight was the 2006 world champion. The promoter texted me his name, and YouTube wasn’t that big back then in 2009, but I searched him on YouTube, and there was a laundry list of fights all against dudes that I idolized—Andy Souwer, Gilbert Ballentine, Ramon Dekkers, Andy Souwer again. I was like, “Oh fuck, what did I just get myself into?” And my MMA coaches said, “Don’t do this.” But in my head, I knew that if I went to Japan and I lost a kickboxing match, it wouldn’t matter. Nobody would have to know. And if I can beat this world champion at his sport, I could make a big deal out of it. So once again I said: Fuck it.

Combat sports are huge in Japan. Kickboxers were like pop stars. Big fighters would get mobbed in the street like Backstreet Boys. But it was all run by the yakuza. It’s different there because it’s pretty open. They have like, office spaces: “That’s a yakuza office space.” It’s not underground. You’ll know yakuza dudes because they have the tattoos. It's all wrist to neck, like the movies. If you catch anybody from flak from anyone, they’ll take care of it. If you lose your luggage, just tell them you’re with K1 kickboxing, and they’ll get your luggage to you real fast. 

We got picked up at the airport, and about 20 minutes into the drive, my wife was like, “Where are they taking us?” I specifically remember pulling up to the hotel. The driver got on the phone and talked, in Japanese, for two or three minutes, then put the car back in drive. My wife was like, “Oh fuck, oh fuck, here we go, they’re gonna kill us.” I said, “Chill out. They’re not gonna kill us. Yet.” 

They took us straight to the office of the yakuza guy in charge so he could meet me. It was probably how before you bet on a horse, you want to examine them. We go to his office and it was the most balling-ass office I’ve ever seen. He's there in his badass suit, and you see tattoos peeking out. I was overwhelmed—in way over my head—I don’t know what I got myself into. 

So, I upset him. I won. I kicked him in the head and knocked him out. It was a huge upset.

I don’t even think they raised my hand after the fight. Everybody was silent. It was a weird scene. They canceled the afterparty. The day after the fight, I was on cloud nine, but we couldn’t really leave the hotel, because we were terrified. Then we got a phone call in the hotel saying that Mr. Takeshi would like to see you in the lobby. I was like, “Nope.” My wife was like, “Nope.” But the Australian guys who were coordinating things took us down and the yakuza guys gave me an envelope full of uncirculated U.S, bills, serial numbers in order. That night they took us out and we had a fucking blast hanging out with them. 

Things felt better after that, but I was still scared as shit spending the money, which is what I bought my wife’s engagement ring with. I was handing over an envelope full of cash at the Shane Company, waiting for bars to slam down and the cops to come in. It was like slo-mo, then she marked the first bill and was like, “OK thank you, sir.” Inside, I was like, “Oh fuck, oh thank god.” But still, as far as experiences go, that was definitely the highlight of my career. 

I went my whole career with no real injuries. I broke my nose plenty of times. I broke my hand once, and had to have surgery on that. But I mean, my knees are fine, my hips, my shoulders. I never really had any serious injuries until my last fight. 

I was 30, and I got elbowed in the face hard enough to break my orbital all the way back. I remember talking to the surgeon, and he said, “The layman’s way to describe it is: Your eye is sinking into your face.” So I had to have surgery on that, which scared the shit out of my wife. She thought I was gonna be blind in one eye. She got pregnant pretty shortly afterward, and said, “You gotta find a real job. You can’t do this shit anymore.” Which is kinda funny, because she was pretty much managing me at the time. Then that injury happened and she went from all-in to all-out, which I get. But it was very abrupt.

I knew it wasn’t gonna last forever. You can’t fight people forever. I was winning and losing, I wasn’t smoking everybody like I was at the beginning of the career. I didn’t really have an exit plan. I’m okay with computers, but I didn’t go to school for it. I had a criminology degree, which my college doesn’t even offer anymore, but what the fuck was I gonna do with that?

I don't really know when the idea to become a firefighter first popped into my head, but I thought it seemed like a cool gig. I had a buddy I trained with who’s a firefighter, and he’d told me a couple of times, “Dude it’s a sweet job for fighters. You get a good amount of time off. You can work out on shift. It’s steady pay, the benefits are good, you're not hoping you get a fight for a big paycheck a couple of times a year.” I entertained the idea in my head, but didn't really pursue it for years.

I actually applied in 2014, but I failed the psych exam. The lady said, “So tell me about this MMA stuff.” I said, “Oh, have you ever watched the Ultimate Fighting Championship, or ever heard of it?” She’s like, “No,” in a disgusted voice. I kept trying to give her what I thought was a decent overview of MMA. “So the idea is they take all these different styles of martial arts and have them compete against each other in an organized fashion to see which martial art is the most effective.” And she’s like, “Okay,” and just stared at me. I kept trying, “It’s a legit sport,” and trying to compare it to other sports. I got to the point where I was like, “Have you ever heard of Peyton Manning.” And she’s like, “No.” And I was like, “I am fucked. I am so fucked.” And so I failed that. She was like, “You fight people in a cage for money?”

The second time I took the psych exam, it was the same lady, but this was two years later. I walked in like, ah fuck, hopefully she doesn’t remember me. When I walked in she said, “Good to see you again.” I could tell I was getting tanked already. But the second time around, I don’t know if I piqued her interest, but she talked about MMA a little more openly, and it seemed like she knew a little about it. We had a pleasant conversation, and I moved on in the process, and that was it.

It's a lot of EMS calls. I see some crazy shit. I work in a pretty dangerous city. We see a lot of overdoses; I've seen a lot of people die. 

They have a bunch of weird synthetic drugs these days. They have one called Black Mamba that’s real fucking bad. It’s some sort of synthetic psychotic. It’s like the stories you hear of people with superhuman strength fighting off like ten cops: zombie type shit. I’ve seen some situations where it's like, “We need to call a fucking priest.” We need an exorcist. Straight up. 

I remember one of the things they asked me is why did I want this job? And part of it is probably an adrenaline thing. It’s exciting! Running into a fire that sounds rad! But I think also part of it was I love not doing the same thing every day. That is most of the appeal of everything I’ve done in my life. I love to fight and change it up. I really like the idea of going to work and not knowing what I am getting into. I think that was a lot of it. The schedule’s great, I like the pay. Doing exciting shit, that might be the biggest part of it. But also I love that there's no monotony to it. 

I never know what the fuck I’m doing. It’s always unexpected.

Adventure

My Adrenaline Junkie Story: From UFC Fighter to Firefighter

Outside of the top rung, the sports, music and entertainment industries are well-known for their long hours and low pay. The great majority of those who work in those fields are doing it out of passion. A mid-level marketing professional for a sports team could easily transfer skills to another industry and enjoy better pay and better hours—no question. The same goes for an operations manager at a stadium or arena with extensive organizational skills and the 60-to-80-hour per week work ethic that the job demands. But they don’t: They love what they do too much.

Even getting a full-time, salaried job in the industry is a steep uphill battle. This was one of the first things that I learned as I got my start working game days for my local MLB team in college. I worked there for three seasons while simultaneously picking up a number of other part-time and internship positions with multiple other professional sports teams and facilities. After graduating with my business degree, I made a thousand-mile move to take another internship that I thought would help me reach my professional goal of a full-time position in sports. At one point during my internship, I was working four other part-time jobs, all within the world of sports and entertainment, to bolster my resume. 

I was spending far too much time at work, but I was absolutely loving it. 

Shortly after my internship concluded, I was finally offered what I had been working so incredibly hard for: a full-time position with the sports arena in my hometown. My part-time experience with two MLB teams, two NHL teams, one NBA team, two arenas, one professional sports league, a sports museum and more had finally paid off.

My first full-time opportunity wasn’t in a department that I wanted to be in long-term, but I knew that if I worked hard and impressed my superiors, I’d have a chance to be promoted to my dream position within the organization. For ten months, I worked an average of 50-60 hours per week without overtime pay, just to build up my good reputation and learn about the operations of the arena. Once my dream position opened up, I excitedly applied, interviewed and got the job.

My first three months in the new position—which required a ton of specialized experience that I was incredibly excited to learn—was mostly training and figuring out what the heck to do. As it turns out, there are a lot of steps to be taken to turn an arena from a hockey rink to a concert in under 12 hours! I started with limited responsibility that quickly ramped up as I gained more experience, and I started to really enjoy it as much as I dreamt I would. 

That was at the beginning of 2020. My next five months of work were spent on Zoom, making up tasks to do for an events job without events. Then I was laid off, along with over 230 other full-time staff from the same organization. We are all now jobless. 

From vice presidents to coordinators, no one was safe. 

When I think about the negative effects of the pandemic on the industry that I love, I mostly think about the part-time workers and the students. Besides the full-time staff at my facility getting laid off, over 1,000 part-time workers—ushers, ticket takers, concessions workers, suite attendants, operations employees, box office staff, security staff, stagehands—were now without their usual event gigs. Part-time staff typically have the opportunity to work 300-plus events every year, and while it's supplemental income for some of them, for others the part-time grind is their main source of income. Overall, an incomprehensibly large number of people had just lost their ability to work for the foreseeable future.

Put yourself in the shoes of a sports management student in the current landscape. You are studying an industry that is currently dead, where there are virtually zero jobs. You have almost no ability to get hands-on experience in the industry, even part-time, and there are no full-time jobs available. 

Once large groups can gather again and positions in the industry slowly become available, your application will be up against those with full-time experience who were laid off during the pandemic. Many of the connections you made during your internships are now useless, since your previous employers are also unemployed, or working in a totally different industry. All of the knowledge that you previously gained in your part-time positions has significantly lessened in value, as post-pandemic operations will be vastly different from what you experienced. You dedicated your money and a good portion of your young life to a career that is virtually unattainable for the foreseeable future. 

Now think of all of the sports facilities, arenas, stadiums, theaters and other venues across the country that were forced into a similar position. Not only was your favorite artist’s world tour canceled, but the thousands of laborers, truck drivers, business partners and road staff who make their events possible are without work. 

Not only can you not go to your favorite team’s home games, but the thousands of employees who make a living out of coordinating the events for you to enjoy are not there either. Many careers have ended, many dreams have been crushed and many great people have been left lost due to the effects of this awful pandemic on the sports and entertainment industry. 

We were the first to go and we will be one of the last to come back. 

Money

I Was Laid Off From My Sports Arena Job Because of COVID-19

At first, I had no idea how I’d managed to land the job as the most senior on-site manager of COVID-19 testing for all of the student-athletes and athletic staff at a major SEC school. But nothing is more familiar to the wayfaring millennial generalist than taking wild shots on LinkedIn and applying to jobs for which we are massively unqualified. Occasionally, those shots land, and because it is late-stage capitalism, they leave us with a further disillusioned and shredded worldview.

This is one such story. I had no experience in the medical field, but with a somewhat plausible background managing teams and projects across industries, I figured I could do my part and join the war effort. I’d been working from home since March completely solo, losing my mind from isolation, so putting myself on the frontlines of a raging pandemic felt like just the thing to shake things up. I could have never anticipated the gaslit psychosis, the unbridled exploitation and profound sense of powerlessness that lay ahead.

On its face, the job was simple enough: Test every athlete three times a week to detect the virus early and separate the infected. The reality turned out to be much grimmer, and I left with major doubts that these efforts were for anything but the optics and a fat payday for a few well-positioned companies. We worked 80-plus hour weeks without overtime pay, didn't succeed in preventing the spread in any significant way, and, ultimately, I got chewed up and spit out by one of the USA’s largest COVID-19 testing companies as it raked in major money in this new virus-industrial gold rush without having any real clue what it was doing. 

I’ll delve further into the root cause of those feelings—a healthy mixture of unmasked idiots and unprecedented public health responsibilities thrust onto an extraordinarily unprepared (and possibly criminally negligent) medical startup—but the deeper impact of this story is the plight of the athletes and the athletic staff pushed to similar breaking points. Considering the way I felt as a very minor cog in this million-dollar athletic program, one can only imagine their burden. 

Cases were spiking, the world was in chaos, but rather than just taking some time off to regroup and get through the worst of it all, the powers that be mandated that, in addition to regularly scheduled practices and games (oh, and classes, of course), players also had to get tested three times a week—or, in the event of a player testing positive, every single day. We had stretches of more than 30 days in a row of testing entire teams and even this wasn’t enough motivation for certain players to think they needed to wear masks as they walked through campus.

It’s well-known that the “powers that be” (ahem, NCAA) has come under fire for raking in huge profits while at the same time prohibiting the athletes that provide its foundation from receiving compensation. My short time inside the machine made me realize this culture of casual exploitation didn’t end with the athletes, but was predictably passed down the line to the overworked coaching and training staffs; to armies of interns more than likely paying the academic institution for the credit to be there; and to the contractors who kept the whole production on the rails. When such an unprecedented challenge as COVID-19 erupts into a system that’s already failing to address glaring inequities, there’s an exponential compounding of problematic oversight that translates to human suffering, and not just the emotional or financial kind.

I saw a number of infected staff members sidelined for weeks fighting serious symptoms but forced to return to work (in my unprofessional medical opinion) way too soon. I saw interns getting paid a flat salary of $1,200 per month working 80-plus hour weeks and bearing the full burden of making sure every player hit their required testing numbers.

In addition to uncapped exploitation on the athletic side, the blind were truly leading the blind on every level of the medical testing side. We were stretched extremely thin and, as a result, tons of mistakes happened in plain sight. People’s samples got switched or just lost entirely. Non-medically-licensed staff members were forced to swab players after medical techs had been sent home. The main rule we broke on a continual basis was using rapid antigen testing in place of PCR tests when we were crunched for time because the team was set to travel. Antigen tests are a lot less sensitive, but since the lab was in a constantly overwhelmed state, this was the easiest way of obtaining a negative result in time to participate. 

I was sure my company would send a higher-up to help sort this out, but apparently, that person just didn’t exist within our organization or wasn’t deemed a high enough priority. All we got was a stream of middle managers who would come to observe for a single day, make toothless suggestions and offer platitudes before jetting off to the next school to continue being ineffectual. It was infuriating that these problems didn’t seem to matter and it became evident that we were only going through these motions so that the NCAA could say, “Look, we’re doing everything we possibly can!”

There was also some shady nepotism. The primary contract holder for all of the SEC’s testing was a prime government contractor with no history of medical testing. Hence they subcontracted this job to my employer—an accredited medical company, sure, but also lacking substantive experience testing at this scale. I don’t know how they obtained the initial contract, or how my company wound up subcontracting, but something really didn’t add up in the equation. I know that we conducted millions or tens of millions of dollars worth of tests in the span of a few months, and all I can say is that I, and better people than myself, got kicked to the curb when we rocked the boat about our horrible labor conditions.

I suppose my experience is pretty typical for the American workforce. Labor rights have continually eroded since the Reagan era and my employment was “at will,” meaning I could be excused at any time without any reason. Coincidentally, it was. I was let go without any warnings or reason given, with a piddling one-week severance. In a way, it was relieving not to be gaslit into thinking I was somehow not a good enough leader because of so many things beyond my control. I just feel a bit shattered and lost for hope having seen the efforts being made to curb this pandemic.

But, hey. Football! Tailgating! The show must go on.

Insiders

NCAA COVID Testing: What It's Actually Like on the Front Lines

“Your team,” my friend Diego told me, giving his head a sad little shake. “It’s just not any good.”

Diego wasn’t being cruel. He was simply stating an unfortunate truth. My son’s third-grade soccer team was pitiful. The neighborhood league was supposed to try to balance teams, but something had gone horribly awry in our case. My son was one of the better players, in that he would mostly stay in position and if you rolled a ball right at him, he could kick it generally forward. Most of his teammates wandered around in an abstracted daze, fitfully dashing toward the ball and then running away if it headed toward them. Diego’s son dribbled around them like they were particularly ineffectual shrubs and scored at will. We, on the other hand, never scored a single goal all season. 

It didn’t help that the coach of this sad sack team was equally useless. That coach would be me.

My dismal and brief foray into coaching was the dead-end of a lackluster career in athletics that had begun before I was even born. My father was obsessed with basketball as a kid and had wanted to play professionally. When it became clear that wasn’t going to happen, he tried to be a coach, until he discovered that he couldn’t take the stress. Rather than yelling fitfully at college players, he turned that neurosis gently toward his children. Many of my earliest memories are of him demanding to know why my brother and I were sitting around the house reading when we could be out there playing ball.

“When I was your age, I’d be out there shooting hoops! Go on, get out of the house and shoot some hoops!”

To be fair, we weren’t completely averse to the game. I liked sports OK, though never as much as reading about, among other things, sports. I remember getting Wilt Chamberlain’s extremely R-rated autobiography out of the library when I was around eight. I thought the fact that he had scored 100 points in a single game was awesome, but all the stuff about how he had a giant mirror over his bed left me confused. (Despite my dad’s occasional crankiness, my parents pretty much let me read anything I wanted, bless them.)

My actual forays into sports were considerably less precocious. I played youth basketball indifferently, despite being tall for my age. My clearest memory from that time is of being assigned to guard an innocuous, dull-eyed, much shorter kid who didn’t look like he could find the basket with a road map and GPS technology. I mostly left him open, because what was he going to do? Someone passed him the ball, and I remember his face clearing, like some sort of basketball Buddhist awakening. Up the ball went, down through the hoop and swoosh, right into my gray matter, so I could watch it even 40 years later, whenever my brain decides it’s time to remind me that I suck.

I also swam and played soccer. I enjoyed them both a lot—it’s exhilarating to have your body strain at its limits and almost miraculously do what you tell it to do. But alas, the limits of my body’s miraculousness were always extremely circumscribed; as a swimmer and a soccer player, I was skinny, asthmatic, poorly coordinated and mediocre at best. I played soccer in youth leagues and through high school, but after eight years I still couldn’t really kick with my left foot. Coaches kept moving me from position to position, trying to find some place where I wouldn’t do much damage. Even as a senior on our crappy high school team, I never played varsity. My brother—a much better player— claimed I was robbed and that my coach didn’t know my full potential because my brother is a sweet guy who loves his sibling. But the bench is where I belonged. I just was not very good.

Like my father, I had some vague hopes that my own son would somehow have more athletic prowess than his dad. I wasn’t dreaming of professional or even Division I level talent. I just thought it would be nice if he was good enough to score a winning goal a time or two. So, with fingers crossed, we pushed him out there onto the field with all the other cute little soccer strivers. Go play ball!

And he did. And he was fine. But the experience was not. He got put on dreadful team after dreadful team; he didn’t win a game in three years. 

The last of those was the year I coached. It was painful enough that I’ve repressed most of the details. I know that my carefully planned drills all disintegrated into kids running after balls they’d missed, or staring glassy-eyed, or wandering off to do something more fun like roll in the mud. The team soon realized that they were helpless and that I could not help them, so kids very reasonably stopped coming to practice or checked out while they were there. 

When it became clear that every game was going to be an exercise in humiliation and misery, I started suggesting to other coaches that maybe we should just acknowledge that my team was going to lose from the beginning and shuffle players around so that the kids on my team got a chance to maybe experience a competitive game once or twice. The problem was that our team was so bad from front to back that there generally wasn’t a way to make two equal teams. The games were always lopsided blowouts anyway.

The high point of the season, if you want to call it that, was when I realized I scheduled my vasectomy on the day of a game. I went for the procedure and then headed for the field, wearing sweatpants because, with the gauze and padding around my bits, I couldn’t fit into jeans. When I got to the game, I learned that my son had apparently told everyone exactly why I was late, so there was lots of good-natured snickering as I limped back and forth on the sidelines. All in good fun!

That was the last year of soccer for us. My son has had no interest in continuing, and neither have I. These days, at 17, he’s an artsy theater kid who sneers at “sportsball” and reads Shakespeare and Edward Said, not Wilt Chamberlain’s autobiography. He lifts weights, and before the pandemic, he enjoyed PE units on swing dancing and even volleyball. But while he is better at most things than I am, or was, or ever will be, his experience with sports is even more lackluster than my own.

I read somewhere that it can take multiple generations to achieve a career dream; when you don’t quite reach your goal of being a writer or an actor or a great mathematician, you pass the dream and the connections and the expertise down to your kid, who may make a better run at it. 

By the same token, it can take a few generations to give up on a goal completely. My dad wanted to be a professional basketball player; his kids just wanted to maybe do OK in high school or Division III sports. My son has given up on even that. And if he has kids, he’s not going to be urging them to go play hoops. I wish I’d managed to instill more of my love of athletics and soccer in him, and maybe if I’d been more passionate or a better coach I could have. But that’s the thing about sports. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose.

I Was So Bad at Coaching That Now My Son Doesn't Like Sports

Drugs & Alcohol

Up, up and away! Time to get out of the house with The Doe.

Travel

Stories that can only be told from the land of the free, home of the brave.

American Stories

LGBTQ Voices

Motherhood

Earth Day or any day, let's celebrate our planet. 

Mother Earth

Tearjerkers

The Doe celebrates its authors this Black History Month.

Black Voices

Extra, extra, read all about it! The news-media industry has shifted dramatically over the last decade—heck, within the last two years. Between print journalism, podcasting, social media and infotainment, The Doe turns over every rock in this evolving ecosystem.

Media

Stories of starting over and finding the fresh.

New Beginnings

The ol' nine to five has changed quite a bit in the past couple of years, from working remotely to, well, not working at all. This month we take a look at how cash still does rule in our capitalist society and what the future of business and money might just look like.

Lord help us: They say it's not polite to talk about religion or politics, but—hey—we've already talked politics, haven't we? Prayer's up.

Religion

Following in someone’s footsteps can be a blessing or a curse. For the most part, following in my father's footsteps has been a blessing. People call me his twin—our looks, personalities and professions are very similar. Some traits he passed down are good, like his generosity, hardworking attitude and positive perspective. Some are not-so-good, like his impatience and stubbornness. But I like to think we’ve both used this stubbornness to our advantage. 

My father and I were never the best at our sports. We didn’t have talent like some others, but we did have a competitive spirit (the stubbornness) that pushed us. We may have not won the individual accolades, but we both gained an even bigger sense of fulfillment by reaching our potential. In our own respective ways, we were able to prove people wrong and show them what we always knew and believed: that we deserved to make it on the world’s largest stage, the Olympic Games.

Our roads were extremely different. My father grew up in a tiny town. He didn’t even have a proper training facility but still managed to become an outstanding swimmer. He gained enough recognition to be offered a scholarship to college, his way out. On the other hand, I had all the resources and ingredients for success, but I wanted to pursue two sports—water polo and surfing, nowadays a suicide mission due to the high demands and rigorous training schedules. This was the beginning of people questioning my commitment and writing me off. 

Because my dad was a two-time Olympic swimmer, he started me in the pool at a young age. But there was something missing. I was never excited to race against times and stare at a black line—especially not for the next 25 years of my athletic career. What was missing was being a part of a team. What was missing I found in water polo. To this day, I believe working toward a goal with passionate people is one of the most fulfilling parts of the journey. 

Surfing, however, came very naturally into my life. No one in my family surfed, but I grew up blocks from the beach. As a competitive tomboy, I wanted to compete with my friend group. The latest hobby at that time was surfing, so I fell in love, and the hobby grew into a passion that soon led to a career.

Even while I surfed, I managed to gain enough recognition in water polo to be recruited by the University of Southern California, my dream school, where my father attended. However, being a two-sport athlete hindered my scholarship opportunity. I used it as motivation to prove the coach and everyone else wrong—just as my father proved that a small-town kid could keep up with those in his collegiate program. We both gained enough respect to become captains our junior and senior years and led our teams to national championships some 45 years apart. 

My father came to campus a lot during those four years, partially to relive his glory days and partially to watch his daughter enjoy hers. I remember many times walking around campus and listening to his stories. You could see how proud he was that I was able to embrace the same culture, school spirit and competition that he did. 

If only my younger self would have realized how fast those days would go and how truly special they were. My father gave me subtle reminders to give it my all, to leave everything in the pool, reminding me that it goes by in a blink. I’ve saved some of those text messages to this day. Fortunately, both of our careers didn’t stop after college. We worked our way to the Olympics not once but twice. It’s a feat that we don’t talk about often but both recognize it as one of the most special shared experiences. 

I still remember the day. My college coach organized individual meetings to tell us if we would make the Olympic team or if our dreams were shattered. You could feel the tension in the air as you walked on deck. Four years for this one moment—but by that point, you have a pretty good idea of who is going to make the team or not. I was pretty confident with my position, but it’s still a scary place to be until it’s official. 

After being told I was an Olympian and tears were shared, my coach said, “Your phone call with your dad will be a special moment.” He was right. I gave my dad a ring from my car and, like many of our conversations, we didn’t speak much. Instead, there was just a mutual feeling. “I’m in,” I told him, and you could hear his voice crack and sense him holding back his tears as he congratulated me and told me how proud he was of me.

Throughout the chaos of celebrating my biggest wins—an NCAA championship and Olympic gold medal—my father locked eyes with me from the stands seconds after the pool buzzer sounded. It didn’t matter what was happening around us, we were going to find each other and lock in. That eye contact, even for a split second, said it all. It was the acknowledgment of the journey that we’ve shared together. The acknowledgment of all the good and bad that comes with reaching the top and sharing it with your family.

The overwhelming feeling of reaching your lifelong dream is indescribable. I remember raw emotion taking over my body and tears rushing down my face. Mostly tears of joy but also of exhaustion and relief. After winning, the team jumps into the pool to celebrate, you wave to your family in the stands, you’re rushed to change into your podium gear, the award ceremony happens, the gold medals are placed on your neck as the national anthem plays. As soon as that’s over, you run to the stands and finally get to hug and cry with your family, and then, you’re rushed away again for drug testing while reading a million texts on your phone. It all felt surreal. Did this really happen? Did we just win a gold medal at the Olympics? Did we achieve our lifelong dream? Six years have passed and I sometimes still ask those same questions. 

Being the daughter of a two-time Olympian may seem like pressure, but I am so thankful for the way my dad mentored me throughout my journey. It was never forced nor planned. He gave me the space to create my own road and for that, I’m forever grateful. I just so happened to make similar choices, which ultimately put us in similar places. Being able to compete for the same university and on the world stage makes our father-daughter relationship unique and special beyond words. 

Thank you, Dad, for being a role model, paving the way and loving me through it all. Happy Father’s Day.

Ancestry

I'm an Olympic Gold Medalist: How My Dad Made Me the Athlete I Am Today

It was early summer, and my family and I had gone to a small horse show near our town. It seemed like a fun activity, and I was excited to go. When the show started, I was enraptured instantly. The riders looked like the definition of grace, in harmony with another living being that didn’t even speak their language. I fell in love immediately. Little did I know that there was something rotten behind that flawless facade, something that would become a blight on my conscience and follow me every time I sat on a horse until I'd finally had enough.

After that day, horseback riding quickly became an obsession. I begged my parents almost daily for riding lessons, but they were prohibitively expensive. With no outlet for my newfound interest, I turned to the internet, where, in the online equestrian community, there is a much larger breadth of opinion about horseback riding. Soon, I started seeing ideas that were considered to be radical. 

My YouTube idols were the people taking a stand against stalling (the widespread practice of keeping a horse in a solitary, small room in a barn, supposedly for “safety” and convenience), the use of particularly strong bits (the mouthpiece of a bridle) and the demanding, uncompromising attitude toward horses that is widespread in the sport. Though these online influencers faced heavy abuse for their opinion despite the countless scientific studies they had to back them up, the controversy only attracted me to them more. Because of my participation in this online movement, I entered the actual horse world with a much different perspective than most others. But I didn’t realize that lesson barns would likely disagree with my opinions, and any doubts I had were overridden by my sheer excitement about horses.

Finally, after months of pleading, I convinced my parents to let me enroll in lessons at a local barn. This barn soon proved to be the epitome of the types of places my online heroes would stand firmly against. It had room to turn the horses out into pastures but still kept them in their little boxes. You could frequently see them swinging their heads up and down, pacing and chewing and sucking on the wood (these behaviors are literally called “stall vices”). My trainer was instructive but impatient and didn’t have much sympathy for my inability to put a halter on my horse, especially when he pinned his ears at me, so I recruited the more experienced riders around the barn to help me. 

I’ll always remember when a girl forcefully haltered the horse, dragged him out of his stall and gave him a swat on the nose. I watched open-mouthed and, when she noticed my expression, she gave me a hasty, flustered smile. The type of bit that my horse had was aptly called a twisted-wire bit, and it was as disconcerting to look at as its name is to hear. The lessons did not go well—I enjoyed them at first, but my lack of athletic prowess and the intimidating environment left me leaving the barn feeling discouraged and sullen more than anything else. I left after about a year, taking a long break before finding another barn. 

The new place was better—the instructor was much kinder and the horses were treated better—but she worked multiple jobs and was often too busy. It eventually fizzled out, and I took another break from the sport.

At my third barn, I thought that I had finally found a place where I could ride happily. It was focused on eventing, an equestrian sport that I had always been interested in. The paddocks were small there, just like the first, and the horses were kept inside too much, but at least they were turned out for a few hours on most days. My new trainer was friendly. For the first few months, everything was better. Of course, I saw the problems that I had so loathed at my first barn, but the lessons were going too well for me to care. I had just turned 16, and I progressed quickly. 

The trouble came when I got switched to a horse that was more difficult to ride. It was as if he was a robot—he just slogged forward, barely paying attention. One day, I spent almost the entire time trying to get him to trot to no avail. My instructor handed me a whip and encouraged me to use it liberally, urging me to “give him a good smack." I had never laid a hand on an animal in my life, and even as I willed myself to tell her I wasn’t comfortable with it, I felt so exasperated with the horse that I listened to her. 

“Trot!” I said to him. Nothing. Smack. Nothing. I clucked with my tongue. Smack. Still nothing. Guilt surged through me anew with every smack of that whip, but my frustration overpowered my conscience, compelling me to obey my instructor. I would later learn that what that animal was experiencing was a psychological phenomenon called "learned helplessness." Knowing that he couldn’t escape the unpleasantness no matter what he did, my mount had simply given up, resigning himself to his fate of endless demands by simply shuffling duly forward.

That day was a turning point for me. I went home and hid in my room in despair. From that day on, I could no longer ignore my problems with the equestrian world, shove them into the back of my mind or selfishly enjoy the feeling of riding. Throughout each lesson, all I could see was the stall vices, the lesson horses looking miserable, the casualness in my fellow riders’ tones as they called their horses “stupid” and “naughty” and “disrespectful." On social media, I saw people joking about their horses’ stall vices and laughing as they whipped and scolded them. With each post I saw, I felt more shame burning in me, and I even left a few hate comments. 

In a diary I kept of my lessons, each entry is filled with only a few words about what I had worked on that day; mostly, they are disjointed, despairing rants. My parents grew sick of the long spiels I would deliver on the way home, and my twin sister commented that I never seemed to be happy after I rode. After significant dithering, I finally texted my instructor that I was quitting, citing a busy school schedule. I felt relieved that I was finally free, but crushed that I could never again experience the freeing feeling of riding—the rhythm of the horse beneath me, the wind in my hair—without feeling guilty. 

My experiences have convinced me that this is a systemic problem with the equestrian world, not just a localized thing. I know that the horse world teaches you to disregard not only your conscience but your plain old common sense—the kind that tells you that keeping a roaming herd animal in a tiny solitary confinement cage all day is inhumane and that yanking on a metal bar in an animal’s mouth is uncomfortable. The positive reinforcement movement, spearheaded by dolphin trainers armed with whistles and gallon-buckets of fish in the 1980s and 1990s, had smashed through the ancient barriers of tradition and superstition in the pet training and zoo worlds, becoming the dominant form of training in virtually every field that involved animals in educated countries—except for the equestrian community.

I’m not saying that riders don’t love their horses. Of course, they do. But the culture that surrounds them is so dedicated to tradition that they are never taught the truth. Discrimination, pretentiousness and cheating are things that impact every sport, including equestrianism, but this problem is unique to the equestrian world.

I still love horses, and I always will. Maybe one day I’ll get back in the saddle, but for now, I stand on the sidelines. The thing that frustrates me the most is that non-riders have no idea that this is going on. If we had their support, we could put a stop to the cruelest practices by putting pressure on equestrian sporting bodies. If we band together, we can start making real changes in the sport for the better, but it starts by acknowledging that it is deeply flawed. Only then can we begin to change it for the better.

I Love Horses, but the Equestrian World Crushed Me

As a student in college, the outlook on your professional future is mostly rosy. You’re excited about your classes, and looking forward to getting a job and working your butt off doing what you love. Rarely do professors in the classroom address gender stereotyping before students enter the field. Athletics is no exception. Working in athletics seems awesome, and for the most part, it is. You get to travel with the team, work with athletes, cover the games and practices, and share in the victories and defeats. 

However, one not-so-awesome aspect of athletics, that isn’t often discussed, is gender stereotyping, as well as unequal treatment because of gender faced by the people who support the athletes. 

As a female athletic trainer working at an NCAA institution, I know that unequal treatment and gender stereotyping are more prevalent than one might think. 55 percent of athletic trainers are female yet only 17.5 percent hold Division I head athletic trainer positions. The profession is still widely viewed as very male-dominated, and despite being in the minority, males frequently hold these positions of power.

Transitioning from student to clinician is not always smooth. Working independently as a clinician can be a harsh contrast to working as a student underneath an athletic trainer. While transitioning from student to professional, there are a few different scenarios that can play out. Your confidence can soar—you can feel like you’re on top of the world, living out your dreams and doing exactly what you wanted to do. Or it can seem not that different from when you were a student—the transition goes smoothly, and life goes on as normal. Or life comes to a screeching halt, your confidence is crushed, and you question why you wanted this job (and most of your life choices leading up to this point). 

My first boss coming out of undergrad, who oversaw my work as a graduate student earning my master’s degree in kinesiology and recreation, is not the type of boss anyone should have—or their first job or otherwise. The environment he created as head athletic trainer undermined my confidence through manipulation, lack of empathy and questioning every decision made by myself and my female coworkers (but not the male ones). His training room was a mentally unhealthy working environment, and the attitude he fostered in the entire athletics department was not of mutual respect and understanding, but of coaches (mostly male) holding power and using it to crush everyone else. 

We graduate student athletic trainers were treated as dispensable. The administration didn’t feel they had to listen to our thoughts, ideas or desires because we’d be gone in two years, and a new class of grad students would take our place. But I trudged forward through my doubts and lack of confidence, thinking that this is just what happens when you get a new job in a new place, unaware that this is not always normal. 

My male coworkers were never treated the way my female coworkers and I were, never questioned the way the females were for our plan of care regarding our athletes. I developed crippling anxiety of giving a definitive answer about the condition of my athletes to coaches, or even the athletes themselves, for fear of doing or saying the wrong thing. My female coworkers and I were judged much more harshly than the males were. One time, a male coworker sat and watched Hercules at his desk and my boss said nothing about him slacking off; that same week, I left baseball practice for five minutes one day to grab a coat and dinner from the athletic training room and was reprimanded for neglecting my job to fulfill basic human needs of food and warmth. 

My boss wasn’t the only issue, though. 

More often than not, when visiting teams came for games, their staff assumed the male student athletic trainers were the certified athletic trainers, and would approach them directly—while brushing me off as if I were a student. Male athletes on the teams in my care would approach my male peers with injuries or concerns before coming to me. They called me “mean” for holding them out of play due to injuries when my male superior did not care enough to back up my decisions. Undergraduate students wouldn’t respect my authority as their preceptor regarding rules and standards. Coaches would ignore me or refuse to learn my name, even when I was the main clinician in charge of care for their team. And they'd be confused and dismissive when we were traveling and I'd request a separate hotel room from the male staff. 

I didn’t get much support from other staff members either. When I brought up my concerns about the working environment and the head athletic trainer, the answer I always received was, “There’s nothing we can do until he retires.” It only reinforced the cycle of shrugging our shoulders and brushing off gender inequality and mistreatment.

This environment affected me in such a way that by the time I finished graduate school and left that job, I was completely questioning the entire profession, and whether I wanted to continue working in collegiate athletics at all. It took a lot of time and discernment, but I decided that I wouldn’t make a decision for my future based on the treatment I received at the hands of someone else, but on my own dreams, desires and convictions. And I’m glad that I did. Since graduating with my master’s degree, I’ve entered a new role as an assistant athletic trainer at another university, where the work environment is a stark contrast to what I experienced in graduate school. 

Here, there is both a female head athletic trainer and a female athletic director. The working environment is one of collaboration and respect among administrators, staff, coaches and athletes. I’m valued for what I bring to the table because I work hard and I’m good at my job, irrespective of my gender. The coaches for my teams actively seek out my advice and input for the care of their athletes, and everyone on staff is treated equally. I was relieved to find that the environment and treatment that I experienced at my first job is not the be-all-end-all in collegiate athletics, or even athletics in general. How athletes and staff members are treated is all about the environment that is created and fostered in the athletics department by the athletic director, head athletic trainer, administrators and coaches. 

Any job can be a bad job, but don’t let it tarnish the dreams you have for your career and life. Any job can have gender stereotyping, inequality or mistreatment. It’s about changing the conversation to one of equality and hoping—knowing—that there are places out there that are getting it right. 

I Trained Athletes in a Toxic Environment

In the summer of 2011, nearly 14 million people watched the United States fall to Japan in the FIFA Women’s World Cup final. Less than a month later, a handful of those same U.S. Women’s National Team silver medalists, including newly minted superstar Alex Morgan, stepped on a field in Rochester, New York for the Women’s Professional Soccer league final to a crowd of 10,000. 

It was the last game the league ever played.

WPS was far from the first women’s soccer league in the U.S. to go under. Sponsorship money was scarce and sustainable interest, despite the blips on the radar such as the rabid World Cup following, wasn’t to be found either.

However, in the WPS’s wake, U.S. Soccer helped forge a new league. The National Women’s Soccer League started play in 2013, and despite multiple teams folding along the way—and having to walk some oft-thin ice along the way—the league is on the verge of its ninth year, with more sponsorship money, fan support and media coverage than any of its previous iterations ever had.

The next two years will be critical for women’s professional soccer in the U.S. NWSL Commissioner Lisa Baird revealed in January that U.S. Soccer’s guidance of the league has now moved to an informal role, meaning the safety net that has helped keep it afloat is now gone. However the timing, in conjunction with what’s happening on the field with U.S. Soccer, offers the league an opportunity for truly unprecedented growth.

First, it’s important to understand the league is already growing bigger and faster than it’s ever been. While jumping on now would still likely let you claim “I was there before it was cool” in the long run, you’d certainly not be getting a seat at the front.

In many ways, women’s soccer interest looks like the stock market. There are peaks and valleys, but if you zoom out over time, there has been steady growth. While sports leagues across the country suffered immensely from COVID-19, the NWSL saw ratings rise 500 percent year over year in 2020. (Yes, you read that right: 500 percent.) This was thanks to a television deal with CBS Sports that saw league games on a major broadcast network for the first time. The league’s other broadcast partner is Twitch, the Amazon-backed streaming platform which is growing rapidly on its own. Twitch pushes the NWSL’s product, and recently saw viewership peak at 35,000 during the 2021 NWSL Draft.

These broadcast deals, along with major sponsorship deals including Verizon, Google, Nike, Budweiser and Proctor & Gamble, were all signed in the aftermath of the 2019 World Cup.

This brings us to the here and now, on the verge of the Tokyo Olympics and the 2023 World Cup to be co-hosted by Australia and New Zealand.

The key for the NWSL is to capture the upcoming peaks to speed the growth of the curve. The Olympic delay caused by the pandemic actually serves as an opportunity, as the league won’t have to shoulder all the work to hold the attention of the women’s soccer world for the next three years until the sport’s marquee event. By narrowing the gap to just two years, the NWSL—and other world leagues, which are also quickly growing with increased investment—can highlight the stars people know in places they might not.

This should be made easy by a league that has become extremely star player-driven. As has become the norm in the NBA and even the NFL, players are having their way with where they get to play. U.S. National Team stars Crystal Dunn, Becky Sauerbrunn and Kelley O’Hara all pushed trades in the last two years to land in more desirable locations for personal reasons. Dunn and Sauerbraun joined Portland while O’Hara moved home to Washington, D.C.

There are also two new crops of young players that the world will get to know over the next three years. The first already has World Cup and/or Olympic experience, and includes the players most experts would agree are currently the best in the world. 

Lindsey Horan and Julie Ertz are the two most notable of those players to firmly be in the NWSL right now. Horan, 28, will spend 2020 in Portland while Ertz, also 28, and admittedly already well known for her key roles on the 2015 and 2019 World Cup squads, will suit up for Chicago Red Stars. Emily Sonnett, 28, was traded to Washington Spirit in January after helping the U.S. win the 2019 World Cup. Meanwhile, Rose Lavelle (25) and Sam Mewis (28) have opted to play overseas for now but are expected to eventually return to the league.

There’s an even younger group that could challenge for Olympic and World Cup spots this time around, but is likely a few years away, and will instead spend their summers making a name for themselves in the NWSL. The last five number one overall picks—Sonnett, Lavelle, Andi Sullivan, Tierna Davidson and Sophia Smith—all were in the U.S. National Team’s January camp. That list doesn’t even include Ashley Sanchez or Morgan Weaver, who both starred in the 2020 NWSL Challenge Cup in Utah.

The U.S. Women’s National Team’s run of dominance is far from over and many of its stars—both current and future—are going to be playing a lot of soccer all over the U.S., often outside of a U.S. uniform.

Washington saw crowds of nearly 20,000 at Audi Field in the fall of 2019. Before the pandemic, Sky Blue FC (New Jersey) announced their home games are moving to Red Bull Arena in anticipation of significantly larger crowds, and there is no reason to believe that promise won’t be fulfilled in a post-COVID world.

The NWSL is growing. There are seats on the bandwagon available, but they’re going fast. Now is the time to hop on before you get left behind.

The Superstars Next Door: The State of Women's Soccer in the U.S.

Strains of my high school’s fight song echoed down the hallway. The teachers shooed my classmates into the gym, where they sat shoulder to shoulder on the bleachers. As my class wandered down the hall in the direction of the pep rally, I ducked into the orchestra room to hide. 

Despite growing up in a football-worshipping small town, my interest in sports hovered somewhere between copying from the dictionary and going to the dentist. Pep rallies represented everything I despised about sports: a maniacal loyalty that always seemed to involve screaming at a television, games full of boring rules that dragged on for hours and the glorification of a hyper-masculine culture that I didn’t care to understand. 

I didn’t like participating in athletics any more than I liked watching them. I hated sweat, exercise and anything that required me to wear tennis shoes instead of ballet flats. One of the best parts of graduating from high school was the end of mandatory phys ed classes. Never again would anyone make me change into ugly gray clothes, run laps or memorize rules to a sport I didn’t want to play in the first place.

My dislike of sports continued through college and beyond. I attended a small liberal arts college where like-minded peers shared my disinterest in organized athletics. Occasionally a friend would drag me to the gym, but for the most part, I avoided exercise the way most people avoid parking tickets or spam emails. I thought I had escaped the world of sports. Then a sudden severe illness in my 20s caused my muscles to atrophy almost overnight.

After my diagnosis, my doctor prescribed high-dose steroids. The steroids were my only chance at surviving, but they also temporarily worsened some of my symptoms. They increased the muscle weakness my disease caused until the muscles in my legs and arms were completely atrophied. Less than a month after I first got sick, I was bedridden. Too weak to lift a coffee mug to my lips, I drank out of a plastic travel mug with a bendy plastic straw shoved through the hole in the top. I was too weak to even lift my feet from the floor, so when I got up for my weekly doctor’s appointments I had to shuffle the few feet to my wheelchair. My legs felt like noodles under me. I was terrified of falling because I knew I wouldn’t be able to get back up if I did.

I’d lay listlessly in bed while my peers went to work, hung out at bars and walked effortlessly wherever they went. My caretaker helped me stack cartons of books, snacks, medication and water in the bed beside me. Even sitting up in my wheelchair was exhausting. I needed three days to rest and recover after each doctor's appointment. I couldn't walk, sit up for long periods of time or even knit. But I could prop my laptop on some pillows on my stomach and watch YouTube videos. One day, a video of a gymnast named McKayla Maroney popped into my feed.

Since then, I've watched that clip more times than I can count. McKayla stares down the runway. A green light flashes. She pulls one foot back, stretches her arms in front of her, then charges fearlessly towards the vaulting table. After a round-off onto the table, her body shoots into the air, reaching an impossible height before she twists down toward the mat. She sticks the landing. Her face bursts into joy as she jogs off the podium. 

Something about her performance resonated with me. At a time when even getting out of bed seemed impossible, it amazed me that this gymnast had trained herself to do something that also seemed impossible. After watching McKayla’s vault, I began binge-watching gymnastics videos, starting with the greats. I saw Nadia Comăneci earn the first perfect ten. I watched Shawn Johnson flip her way to Olympic gold on beam, Dominique Dawes tumble on floor and Nastia Liukin fly between the uneven bars with ease and grace. Before, when I thought of sports I’d always pictured grunting men in football helmets and screaming matches between referees. But gymnasts wore hair ribbons and lipstick—no ugly tennis shoes in sight. It combined elegance and strength in a way that made sports make sense to me. I had never known that they could be so beautiful.

I also devoured the training videos gymnasts posted. Most elite gymnasts train between 20 and 40 hours a week. I watched them perform routine after routine, climb ropes using just their arms and walk on their hands across the gym. I watched them fight through torn tendons and broken bones. Their determination was the fuel that pushed their bodies to flip and twist through the air in a way most people couldn’t even imagine. A spark of inspiration grew inside me. If these young women could train themselves to achieve the impossible, maybe I could achieve my own impossible dream of relearning how to walk.

Six months after my diagnosis, I was finally well enough to start tapering off the steroids. My muscles were still weak, but I began to feel a lightness in my limbs rather than the wet-noodle feeling I’d grown used to. I’ll always remember the day I climbed out of bed and shuffled to the couch in the living room for the first time. My caretaker brought me coffee in my favorite mug to celebrate. When I realized I was still too weak to lift the cup, I stuck a bendy straw in the top. Then I watched more gymnastics videos and vowed to make lifting the mug my next goal. After walking to the couch got easier, I started walking to the kitchen, then to the mailbox, then to my car, which had been parked in the garage for almost a year. My recovery was painful and littered with setbacks, but watching gymnastics gave me the courage to fight my disease and reclaim my life. Two years after my diagnosis, moving my legs began to feel as easy as it did before I got sick.

In 2015, the USA Gymnastics sex scandal broke. Over 150 gymnasts including Rachael Denhollander, Mattie Larson, Aly Raisman and Jordyn Wieber testified against team doctor Larry Nassar, who was convicted of serial sexual abuse. McKayla Maroney revealed that she had been molested by Nassar the night before she won her Olympic silver medal. From the second-floor apartment I’d moved to after I regained the use of my legs, I watched young woman after young woman testify at the trial. Their stories were shocking and the trauma they’d endured showed in their words and in their expressions. But their voices rang out strong and determined. 

These days, I’m able to work, climb the stairs to my apartment, walk my dogs and go out with friends. I cheer on my favorite NCAA gymnastics team every weekend of the season. I do Pilates and yoga to keep my body healthy, even though I’ve resigned myself to being the worst in the class. But I still have days when the traumatic memories of my illness feel more real than the friends that surround me. Some days, recovery feels like a never-ending road. On those days, I think of McKayla Maroney, Jordyn Wieber and the other gymnasts who testified. 

Despite the superhuman strength they displayed on vault, bars, beam and floor, their true power showed when they spoke their truth with the world watching. Aly Raisman and Simone Biles have talked openly about going to therapy. They are recovering, too, just like I am. I’ve realized that each of us is facing our own impossible challenge. No matter how healthy someone looks on the outside, on the inside every one of us is fighting to rebuild.

The Lessons I Learned From Sports May Have Saved My Life

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” We’ve all been asked that question. I wanted to be a veterinarian. Then I was told that school was expensive and takes a long time, so that dream went quickly out the window. 

My senior year of high school was difficult, especially when my friends were all pretty sure where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do, while I was completely lost. Looking back, I am very thankful for the adults who pushed me to keep moving forward, even when I was stuck (and even when I didn’t want to be pushed). Eventually, I got into an out-of-state school. 

During our freshman orientation, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was, however, intrigued by this major: sports management. I had never really played sports, but I was fascinated by the idea of working behind the scenes. I attended the breakout session, and an hour later I knew what I wanted to do with my life. When the professor asked us what we wanted to be when we “grew up” (cue flashback to being eight and not knowing what to say), I’m pretty sure 80 percent of the students said they wanted to be the general manager of a team. 

It didn’t bother me that most of the students were male, or that sports themselves are perceived as a very male-dominated industry. I wanted to do something where I would enjoy going to work, and I’d get in one way or another.

The major itself was part of the business school, so I was also able to learn about marketing, sponsorship and sales, the “stepping stone into sports.” While this is a path that a lot of students fresh out of college take, it's also a love-hate road. I followed it to my first job out of college, at probably one of the greatest teams in sports to work for. 

My year there was everything I wanted it to be, and maybe more, but I also learned a lot of hard professional and personal lessons. It taught me to learn as much as you can from as many people as you can, in every department. I learned to not take things for granted and also to give yourself a chance to reflect and appreciate everything around you. I also learned that while I get the job done in sales, my passion was more toward the client service path. But I didn’t have the opportunity to do it there, so I had to rethink my plan for what I was to do next. 

My next opportunity was in sales for an NFL team. I figured I could use this position as a stepping stone toward the job I really wanted. That place taught me a lot—a lot of good and a hell of a lot of bad. I learned it was possible to have a true friendship with someone and still maintain a professional relationship. I learned that sometimes maintaining a positive attitude is very difficult, but it impacts the people around you—and so will having a negative attitude.

I could go on for days discussing the bad stuff. Suffice it to say that not everyone can be a manager, or should be. And that’s 100 percent OK. Managing others is a huge responsibility, and while not all have the same characteristics, I experienced the bad ones with a few of my managers and colleagues. I don’t really need to list them off—if you’ve been to a leadership seminar and seen a list of negative attributes, that’s pretty much it. There was no professional development guidance. It was more of a situation where you were supposed to feel lucky to make it to the next level. And that’s only if you stuck around for so long. 

The worst part of the experience was the sexual harassment. 

Mostly that meant inappropriate comments by men—married men with daughters my age—about my attire and my looks, but there were also misogynistic comments from three different men about “a woman's place.” I guess I was “lucky” because my female colleagues experienced this a lot more. After a few of these “passes,” I was able to stir up some courage and tell them that I did not appreciate these comments and they should stop. And they did stop—with me, at least. Other women in the office weren’t so lucky.

I would continue to hear those comments, and I would try to say something when I could. I remember having a male colleague in my department call me to his office to tell me that I should “stop policing people” because I would put myself in a position that could potentially get me fired. I remember feeling proud that calling people out for their inappropriate behavior could really make them feel like I was the problem.

About a year later I was given the opportunity to speak with someone in legal about my experience, hoping something would change. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until two years later that any change was actually made. And the work still isn’t done. 

You might ask: Why didn’t I go to human resources? Only the people who worked there can understand how helpless even our HR coordinator felt. They witnessed so much but could do very little to fix it. Rarely were people disciplined for inappropriate behavior. It felt like anyone with a manager title or above was untouchable. 

I felt helpless for a long time and even more so after having a team of talented executives join, and then less than eight months later, watch them be pushed out without warning—without truly having a chance to turn around the culture and business operations of the team. We had high hopes for the executives, but the rug was pulled out from under them as well as everyone who believed in them. I felt like I really tried during those eight months to give it my all. I felt exhausted, hurt and done. 

That place made me feel like I was only good enough to work there, and that I wouldn’t be able to succeed anywhere else. So when my time came to leave, I was sad to say goodbye to four years of routine and people that I grew to care about like family. I was also unsure about what was going to happen next. 

Still, I felt a weight being lifted off my shoulders. I’m now in a better place, mentally and financially, and have found my confidence again. I realized that when people talk about sacrifice and working hard to get to where you want to be, that shouldn’t mean putting your mental health at risk, tolerating sexual harassment and inappropriate comments, or feeling like you’re in a toxic environment. For what? A title change, with no pay increase? Thank you, next.

I Hated My NFL Dream Job: How I Survived the Toxic Environment of Professional Sports

My face was buried into the sweat-soaked mat, my tears making the already damp surface even slicker. Fighting through the pain, I realized just how unbalanced sports in public schools are. 

I wrestle at a school that also has an award-winning football team. My team itself includes a large number of football players who join each year after their season is over. We live in Texas, so football means a lot here. But not many people understand the consequences of placing so much attention on it. 

Recently, I sprained and tore some muscles in my right bicep and deltoids while practicing with my wrestling team. The pain was immense, making every single movement excruciating, no matter how small. Following the other wrestlers’ advice, I went to get it checked by the athletics trainers. When I stepped into their office, I was immediately met with eye rolls and dismissive glances, as though I was bothering them for no reason. I mustered up the courage to explain my pain and ask if they could help me. At first, they told me that it was probably nothing, just a typical ache or pain that comes with strenuous physical activity. When I attempted to describe the feeling in my arm, which had been growing worse over the past couple of days, they brushed it off. 

As I was standing there explaining my case and cradling my arm—since each time I let it hang at my side it felt like it was getting ripped out of my socket—a well-known football player came in. The trainer immediately turned to him, and listened intently as he explained that he jammed his toe during the workout that morning. He wanted a note to excuse him from workouts for the next few days, since he could (allegedly) barely walk due to the intense pain he was in. The trainer all too willingly obliged. 

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