Coaches & Leadership
You are building something excellent and the institution is not fully seeing it.
The resources that go to comparable men’s programs. The recognition that is distributed unevenly. The standard you hold and the way it is evaluated against a bar that shifts based on who is being evaluated. You know this and you hold the standard anyway. That deserves honest examination.
Read this passage slowly.
She is clothed with strength and dignity, and she laughs without fear of the future.
Proverbs 31:25 — NIVLet that sit for a second before you move.
She laughs without fear of the future. The laughter here is not denial of the difficulty. It is the response of a person whose foundation is stable enough that the uncertainty of what the institution will do next cannot reach the core of who they are and what they are building. The strength and dignity are present characteristics, not aspirational ones. She is clothed with them now, in the current situation, not after the situation improves.
The female coach who holds a high standard in an environment that does not equitably reward it is building something the institution may not measure but that is nonetheless real: the program that consistently develops athletes well, that produces people of character, that is built on genuine excellence rather than the appearance of it. That standard does not require institutional validation to be worth maintaining.
The risk is the gradual drift toward performing the standard for the institution’s evaluation rather than building it for the athletes’ development. When what you build becomes primarily about proving something to the people who are evaluating it inequitably, the building becomes reactive rather than generative. The standard you hold for your own reasons, because it is right and because the athletes deserve it, is the one that sustains.
The standard you hold for your own reasons — because it is right and the athletes deserve it — is the one that sustains. Building to prove something to an inequitable evaluator makes the building reactive.
What standard in your program are you holding primarily because it is right — not because it will be recognized? Is that standard being maintained with the same rigor as the ones the institution measures?
Honest self-assessment about internal vs. externally-motivated standards.
Hold the standard because it is right and the athletes deserve it. That reason sustains.
Deliver only to female coaches and women in athletic leadership.