HOT TAKE: BreakThrough Summit Preview, Interview with Mickey Grace and Megan Kahn
In this Hot Take, Burn It All Down previews the BreakThrough Summit, a digital leadership summit to develop and celebrate women in sports. Amira talks with Megan Kahn, CEO of WeCOACH, and Mickey Grace, high school football coach and scouting apprentice for the L.A. Rams, about blazing trails for gender and racial equity in coaching and sports administration, and what brings them joy in their work. Attend the BreakThrough Summit for free December 14 and 15 at: www.breakthroughsummit.live
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Amira: Hey flamethrowers, Amira here with a Burn It All Down hot take. We are still talking about coaching! Back in episode 175, ‘Much Ado About Coaching,’ me, Lindsay, and Jess talked a lot about coaching, racialized dynamics, the way it influences girls dropping out of sports, etc, etc. Since then we’ve continued to think about the subject from a myriad of ways, from my hot take with Dr. Derrick White on Black college football coaches to a special Patreon episode where we talk more about what good coaching looks like. This hot take is very special because we have not one but two interviews coming out this week that continues to further the conversation about coaching. Later this week I’ll talk to women’s soccer coaches at Penn State, Ann Cook and Erica Dambach, about what it’s like coaching through a pandemic and how they came into the profession.
But today I have a very special conversation that is part of the BreakThrough Summit. Now, the BreakThrough Summit is created by Hudl and WeCOACH; it’s in its second year, and it’s a digital summit that I wanna encourage all of you to check out if you haven’t heard about it. It’s specifically organized to think through women in sports. WeCOACH of course is an organization that champions women coaches across many sports, and the summit is happening today, Monday December 14th, and tomorrow, Tuesday December 15th. It is free, so if you want: pause this and run over, register for the BreakThrough Summit at breakthroughsummit.live and check out the conversations that are happening over there. They feature many former guests of the show including Muffet McGraw, Kelly Lindsey, lots of folks that we have had on Burn It All Down and other names across sports like LaChina Robinson and Dawn Staley that of course we talk about a lot on here. So, please check out the BreakThrough Summit, and now to preview the BreakThrough Summit I wanted to chat with two people who will be both presenting on it and instrumental in making it happen. First, the CEO of WeCOACH, Megan Kahn, and I also am so honored to be joined by Mickey Grace, who’s a high school football coach and the LA Rams’ scouting apprentice. So Mickey, Megan, welcome to Burn It All Down.
Megan: Oh my gosh, let’s do this.
Amira: I’m so happy y’all are here. So I just wanna start, and I’ll start with you, Megan – the BreakThrough Summit is happening again and WeCOACH is a co-sponsor of this. For those folks who aren’t as familiar with WeCOACH, can you just really succinctly break down who y’all are and what you do and why it’s so important to mount a summit like this?
Megan: Absolutely. WeCOACH has become the premier organization dedicated to recruiting, retaining and advancing women coaches, specifically women coaches and the unique challenges women coaches face in this industry. I think that would be an entirely different show if we spent all of our time talking about those challenges, so I’ll just fast forward past those. We have been thinking about this for months and we were able to seamlessly align with Hudl who’s really the premier entity in the tech space. So you have us in the women coaches’ community and them in the tech space and it was just a partnership that just aligned and made a lot of sense – gosh, over two years ago now. So last year we garnered a lot of success with the first event and we came back now in year two in a COVID space and we’re like, “How do we not only raise the bar on last year but how do we also separate ourselves from everyone else in the space who’s doing a lot of virtual and digital content. So if anyone listening knows me I have my foot on the gas 90 miles an hour all the time, and so we’re going bigger better and bolder in year two. We have 2 days, we have double the speakers, we have more sports represented across our speaker lineup and we have really really intentional dialogue and conversations laid out that touch every single level of a coach or an administrator of who will be listening, who will be participating. So I think there’s gonna be something for everybody in there.
Amira: That’s awesome, and I’m thrilled that this is happening. I wanna zoom out a little bit here because folks who listen to this show regularly have heard me go on and on and historicize women coaching sports. We’ve talked about Title IX, the good the bad and the ugly, and one of the disparities that arose in the wake of Title IX was pushing women out of administrative positions in the game, both as coaches, as athletic administrators, and so on and so forth, and I feel like WeCOACH is such a fundamentally necessary component of where we’re at, to try to address those disparities and support and sustain the development of people on the sidelines and in the front offices and all that. So I am really thrilled about this summit and the work that y’all are doing. Now, a lot of our conversations have centered around getting women back into the sidelines on women’s sports; particularly we talked about basketball and soccer, etc. But one of the really thrilling parts of having Mickey join us in this conversation is to think about what that also looks like as we are now seeing women go into the sidelines at basketball, and Mickey coaches football, which everybody knows was my childhood dream. So I have much admiration and a little sprinkle of jealousy. But I would love to kind of juxtapose and talk about what are some of the challenges that are unique to breaking into coaching in a men’s dominated sport versus in the women’s side.
Megan: You know, it’s such an interesting question because we think a lot about women coaching on the women’s side, but if you look at the total number of coaching positions women make up only a minuscule percentage of the total number of coaching jobs, especially as we look at what Mickey has been able to do in the NFL on the men’s side, or what say Lindsey Harding – who’s another one of our speakers – on the NBA side. There haven't been women before them, so they weren’t able to see somebody that looked like them, to see somebody breaking through, for their path to be already blazed. So, one, they’re trailblazers in being able to break down doors, and we’re gonna hope that women can see somebody that looks like them and be able to follow in those footsteps. The other knock, and I know Mickey would be able to speak to this, is how many times does she hear, “Well, you never played football at this level, you didn’t have that opportunity. What do you know about coaching men at this level?”
So there’s just so many barriers and gender stereotypes against women getting into that male-dominated side. I would say the third thing is we know, and it’s a lot of times white men who are in those hiring positions, and homogeneous hiring practices are gonna…White men are gonna hire white men. You’re gonna hire people who look like you, and especially also they have their good old boys club. Not a knock against men, but it’s just the nature of the industry still, it’s a good old boys club. So as soon as we can get more diversity in the front office first it starts to diversify even hiring practices, I think, so we’ll see more women on the sidelines.
Amira: Absolutely. Mickey, I’m gonna throw it to you – I just did an episode on Black college football coaches where we talked about Locksley’s program and talked about some of the barriers to entry, and so what has your experience been breaking into football, where there’s already so many barriers and so many efforts to try to get Black men onto the sidelines. As a Black woman occupying that space I imagine it’s been quite a journey.
Mickey: Yeah, there’s so many different ways you get it. The people who I actually coach have no concern. They’re kind of just like, “Listen, we need the keys to feed our families, so we don’t care who has the keys. If you’re willing to give them to me I wanna hear what you have to say,” and that’s been my experience with the players. Coaches eventually respect coaches, whether they have a preconceived notion or not – that’s not my business. I don’t act, it's not my job to disavow that. You’ll figure that out on your own. It’s really the people who aren’t even playing, people who are around coaches, around scouts, around players, who think that there should be a problem or that will be a problem. The only time I really hear, “Well, she hasn’t played the game,” is from people who also don’t play or coach the game. It’s from fans, it’s from other people who are very dedicated to their fantasy leagues and, you know, it’s so wild to think that…My greatest prize is the Super Bowl trophy, right? It’s the Lombardi Trophy. Vince Lombardi also never played in the NFL. So if my greatest prize bears the name of someone who also never played this game at the highest level? Mind your business! That’s not yours to comment on. Someone always comes out, “Well, she played in high school…”
Amira: That part!
Mickey: “Okay, well, she didn’t play in college…” Okay, well neither did Joe Gibbs or Charlie Weis, and you’re never gonna say that they’re not legends. Or Mike Leach. You’re never gonna say that that man, Mike Leach, who has been on the sidelines of the very first Super Bowl ever and is still involved in the game today…I met him when I was in Tampa Bay as an intern. He’s still around, still giving knowledge, still dropping gems. There’s no way you can deny that man’s a legacy, you know? And then they say, “Well, you’re never gonna head coach,” and if that’s the only success of a true coach is winning a Super Bowl that means we’ve only had 52 successful football coaches in history, and that can’t possibly be true, right? That can’t be it. So all these things that they knock against me you could knock against anyone.
Amira: Absolutely.
Mickey: So, I know that I can’t take them personally and I can’t pay too much attention to those because that’s not the reality. On the other side of the inclusion and providing equity to not just women coaches but Black and brown coaches, there’s a whole other conversation about how Black coaches are treated. What’s the hirable percentage? The Rooney Rule, what that really did, did it help us? Did it hurt us in how many people are coaching? The problem with head coaches is you can’t be a head coach until you’re a coordinator and you can’t be a coordinator until you get a room, and when I say in charge of a room I mean a position coach. That’s what it’s called. Like, you’re in charge of your position’s room. You can’t get a room at one of these Power 5 schools or one of these NFL programs until you make the relationship with those who are hired, but those who are hired only make relationships with those who they trust. It becomes a snowball effect of just racist masculinity, like, anti-feminist conversations that I don’t care to be involved in, you know? It’s funny, now I’m at the Rams because I actually impressed the head coach of the Chargers, Anthony Lynn. And I actually impressed him by asking a question that he kind of was a little offended by, but that also impressed him because how can you offend Anthony Lynn?
But they were having a conversation on Zoom with like 600 coaches about how do we get hired as Black coaches? How do we find the people who are in charge of hiring? What do we do? And head coach Anthony Lynn who is amazing, he’s awesome, he does his best to make sure that his mind is being informed and serving equity, and he was talking about how he works harder to find Black men and brown men of color who are qualified for the role that he has available. So I said, okay, what have you done to find people who are more marginalized and qualified than Black and brown men? Because although Black and brown men aren’t seeing equity in hiring you’re not the bottom of the totem pole anymore. So, what are you doing to find people who are at the bottom of the totem pole? And he was like, “Mickey, for the first time I don’t think I have an answer for you,” and he was like, “Now you and I have to have a conversation.” [laughs] And you’re on a Zoom with 600 people and you’re like, okay, I have to talk to the head coach of the Chargers? Okay, somebody tell me their playbook! Get me ready! Let’s figure this out.
Amira: Right. [laughs]
Mickey: Then actually the Rams’ coaches were on that call and they were like, nah, we’re gonna give you something to do before the other LA team takes you! Like, we don’t want them to have you. And that’s how I got into this LA role, but it was pushing the conversation, which is so poetic if you think about the whole scheme of this. I’ve been trying to get into the NFL for years and I get into it by asking what they do to provide equity to those who are at the bottom of the totem pole now, because it’s no longer themselves. It also gave Black men an opportunity to see, like, “Oh, there are people even more marginalized than me in these roles.” Like, “We’re not getting in, but they don’t even know where ‘in’ is.”
Amira: They’re not even getting a look, exactly.
Mickey: They don’t even know where the door is. They’re outside of it. [laughs]
Amira: Exactly. I really appreciate that narrative for a number of reasons, particularly because I want to think through these pipelines and these kind of pathways, right? I think about coach Vivian Stringer, and I write about her when she was in high school and she sued the school to integrate her cheerleading squad. But when you talk to her, when she talked about it as a teenager she was like, “I wasn’t really into cheerleading – it’s just that’s what put me on the sidelines, and I would be coaching the boys in my cheerleading uniform from my spot on the sidelines,” and thinking about that story has often given me a framework to think about how we make pathways out of no ways to places that it’s hard to even visualize. You can’t be what you can’t see, and like Megan said off the top you’re really trailblazing. So I wanna ask both of you, and Megan maybe you can speak to this on a kind of national level: what are some of the new innovations or new programs or new things that you’re seeing that are creating pipelines and pathways where there have been none? Because so often I feel like it’s these individuals – it’s Mickey Grace on a Zoom call, you know? But how are we going to institutionalize these so that for the next person they can find that door, that they at least have a road map? Are you seeing things that are starting to orient towards these kind of investments?
Megan: I think from my perspective and being able to look at it almost from like an entire 360 degree lens, because what makes her work very interesting is that we focus our work on the challenges that women coaches are facing, but we’re only gonna be evaluated by how much we move that needle in terms of women…So, we have to also drive awareness and create change at the administrative level, even though our core work does not focus at that level. So it’s sort of this 360 degree look, and let’s just scope out…For the first time young girls and young boys are gonna see Kamala Harris as the first Black and South Asian vice president and be able to see somebody who looks like them. It is a lot about visibility and what Mickey’s doing and what Lindsey Harding’s doing and what some of these other folks are doing to create, to be the first, but their job is not to be the last.
There’s things that we’re doing, specifically we launched our WeAMPLIFY initiative which is all about driving the presence, visibility and voice of our Black and brown coaches, specifically women coaches of color, around giving them access to certain things to help level that playing field, to put them in positions where they do have the tools to succeed. One thing that we’re seeing on the women’s side is if they fail they’re out of the game, they’re not recycled. Whereas on the men’s side we see men may not be successful but their buddy’s gonna hire them as an assistant coach and then they’re gonna be back into a head coaching position before long. That’s not happening on the women’s side. So how are we really giving them the tools, the resources, the support mechanisms in place that they might not be getting on campus, that they might not be getting through their sport association.
But they can network, they can build their network, they can be visible, we can amplify those voices and really use those platforms, you know? Diversity and inclusion are two of our value statements, and after everything we saw happen last March and the George Floyd killing and Breonna Taylor, all of that…It’s like, words aren’t enough. What action are we putting behind those words? What discernible thing is our industry – specifically more in the collegiate landscape I think we’re seeing a lot of things move forward. There’s the college coaching diversity pledge, which now more than 60 Division 1 athletic directors have signed. That’s specific to men’s basketball, women’s basketball, and football, but hopefully eventually we’ll see that be applicable to more sports as this movement grows.
Amira: Absolutely. Mickey, do you wanna jump in on that?
Mickey: Yeah, I mean, I know there are programs that I’ve been involved in or I’ve even kind of helped shape. So, I know you talked before about the National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches, which I know…The only ones I know are specific to football because that’s the world I’m in. Megan is down for all coaches, so shoutout to Megan! [laughs] But I don’t have Megan’s brain. My brain is very one-track on football. So the National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches that coach Locksley started just in August, and then we went into the season, and so we’re all over the place. But it started because he realized that out of 130 FBS head coaches only 14 of them were Black. None of them have women on their staff. We actually have like one woman who’s even sort of in a coaching role. But it’s really hard to find places to get equity. So now coach Locksley even admitted that he only started this when he was on the “back nine” of his career. You run into the challenges that oftentimes Black people have to risk everything when they want to speak their minds, when they want to speak up and be a point person almost. Like, if you decide to talk about equity you will automatically become a spokesperson – not that you asked for that, not that you asked to represent you, your intersection, any of those things. You just will become it.
And so Locksley decided, okay, if I’m gonna do this let’s figure it out, let’s do it right, and that’s how we started the National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches, which is used to promote and prepare Black and brown coaches for those coordinator roles, for those roles where you are in charge of a room. And that’s what it’s for: to prepare. So that when we do get in these roles – because also once we do get in these roles, if we don’t do these roles perfectly to a tee, your forgiveness…You know, the margins are tiny, and for me they don’t exist. The moment I mess up or make a typo it’s, “See, this is why…” You know, versus with men it’s like, “Don’t do that again.” For Black men it’s like you got one time to make a mistake, but you have to produce. You have to do these things. You have to validate and make our people who we’re fighting against, you have to shut them up. I can’t do my job, I have to worry about being perfect.
So besides the National Coalition of Minority Football Coaches there’s also the women's football form from the NFL front office that is put on by Sam Rapoport every day, who has just been a champion for women in football. I went to the forum in 2018 and the relationships I met there are still providing me spaces now to be in football. I was named Miami Dolphins’ Bill Walsh fellow this year, before COVID in March, early March. But I got that from Scott Pioli, who’d been a champion for us – and also I was going to use Scott Pioli’s family foundation who provides scholarships and grants. Scholarships and grants, right? He gives women in football money so that we can live because oftentimes we have to take jobs that either don’t pay us anything or pay us very little, and how can we survive? So he gives a grant and scholarship so that we can survive while we take the jobs you have to take to get into the roles we eventually wanna be in. So those are three of the biggest groups and foundations that I’m a part of – the coalition, the forum, the Scott Pioli family foundation – that has really just shaped my entire career.
Amira: One of the barriers that we see with women in sports on multiple levels is the issue of childcare and support, especially when you think about coaches and the lower level infrastructure – it requires frequent moves, it requires low pay, varying amounts of health insurance. What does that look like when you also are in a position where you might be parenting? Then we’ve also seen women who are coaches who come back very early after childbirth, right? and while the media’s running with this story like, “They’re badass! Let’s glorify this,” you know? Pat Summitt touching down on a recruitment trip to have her son. But also it’s like, these are forced choices, often, and so I’m wondering on this particular one kind of barrier…I know Mickey that this is something that you have contended with as well. But what are we seeing on the front in terms of support specifically for childcare, the infrastructure for women who are choosing to parent or are parenting as they’re trying to transverse these structures that often feel like they are diametrically opposed to being able to maintain a family in that way?
Mickey: Yeah, and this is actually something that we’re gonna touch a little bit about on the BreakThrough Summit, so I hope you guys tune in to see the answers and the questions we have around equity around motherhood and coaching, so I’m really excited to touch on that during the summit. Also, we don’t know, right? We don’t know, we don’t know. And the illusion is that moms know – because men pass the buck to us, normally, right? There’s always someone to pass the buck to. But there’s no one for moms to pass the buck to. The buck stops at us. So what no one else does, we have to do. I think that motherhood has always been about your bench, like, think about a basketball bench. And you’ve gotta be ready, on any given day, if you ask a mom out and they say, “Okay, lemme ask the babysitter,” chances are they’re not asking one babysitter, and the person who ends up babysitting probably wasn’t one or two – they were probably like your sixth man of the year, [laughs] like, that probably who they were because moms have to have a bench of people for different things. Some people wanna support our kids, like, “Oh, let me know, I’ll take your kid,” and other people just want to support me and don’t wanna support her. Some people wanna support us and you gotta kind of use people’s willingness around you, that community that you can find, whatever your village is, and you really depend a lot on them.
For me I had to have a conversation with my village, like, “Listen!” I have one with them before every football season. “Alright, pregame talk! Bring it in. Listen, this is what it’s gonna look like this year. This is what I’m going to need. Who’s willing to do what?” And I’ll have people say, “Hey, I can do Saturday if you’ve got Saturday games,” and when I’m coaching high school they’re like, “I can do a Saturday game, I can sit with her in the stands.” I’ll ask volunteers to do things, but I also know she is the only human I can hear that’s not on the sideline naturally, and I’m like, okay, she’s cool, I’m cool, lemme focus on my defense. But it’s a lot of who can replicate for a short amount of time the care I can give to my kid while I give my care to everyone else in the world? Also, sometimes it forces men, when I’m in their lives, it forces them to look at the social and gender roles in their life and their house – which some are not ready to look at! Some are not interested. I remember talking to a coach who was so frustrated that I was a parent and I was on the road to take this interview with him, because he’s like, “Where’s your kid?”
Amira: Where’s YOUR kid!
Mickey: I was like, right! I was like, do you know that one of your coaches has 12 kids? And I guarantee you some of them you don’t know where they are. If you can name all 12 of them, of your defensive coordinator’s kids, I will tell you where my kid is right now. And he couldn’t. Also, he realized…And he called me later, like, “Mick, my wife does the parenting – all the parenting, not half the parenting, not some of the parenting. She does it all. And I have stopped her from doing things that she wanted to do in her life because she had to take care of the kids because I refused to give up or meet her at any part of this. So if I hired you and let you live out this dream I would have to face the reality that I’ve sat her for my whole life.” And I was like, okay, so because YOU didn’t provide equity in your house, you can’t provide me a job I’m qualified for? So when you go 2 and 13 next year, like you did, call me and I’ll tell you why your defense sucks. Because you had an opportunity to be better and you chose not to for fear of who you’ve been.
Amira: And for comfort, and for ease.
Mickey: For comfort, for ease, yes! I like those words.
Amira: Megan, do you want to add on?
Megan: Yes. I’m not a mom…I’m the world’s best aunt there is! I know I’ve been around my sister and her two little guys, and my sister in law and her two little girls, and my hats are off to all the women out there in our profession, in other professions, that are carrying the load. Especially in coaching, as Mickey said – it’s 24/7, it’s 365, there’s not a lot of barriers and boundaries for moms because the buck does stop with them. I think that is one of the things that we hear for women who wanna stay in the coaching profession, is how can they do both, right? How can they do both? Mickey alluded to we’re gonna discuss it in the summit. We have another panel that’s gonna specifically talk about how are we supporting women in the coaching industry? And this is definitely gonna come up, even from an administrative perspective. What are you putting in coaches’ contracts that allow them to do both and thrive in both positions, as a mom and as a head coach?
Are you paying – especially if they’re a nursing mom or they have a toddler – are you paying them to go on road trips with the team when mom has to travel? Are you paying, are you allowing them to come to practice? Do you create a really flexible department culture? For dads too, right? What kind of a culture are you creating within a department that makes it family friendly-oriented? In the Power 5 schools and those with money that can better support women, women certainly have a better opportunity to do that. But I think that’s one of the things that we’re seeing separate. Even if you look at our women in college coaching report card, which is in partnership with the Tucker Center, and what schools are getting As on those report cards is a byproduct of the culture they’re creating within their department. Are they supportive of women? What are they putting in women’s contracts? How are they allowing women to take those head coach positions?
Amira: Absolutely. And thinking of the infrastructure of care that is built in and baked in and sustains so much of these coaching things is what people don’t wanna have to confront, which is what I really appreciated about that kind of vision of it, that it’s unsettling, right? When you have to turn the mirror on yourself and the systems that you’ve upheld.
Mickey: That’s a really good point. COVID has forced people to see into their own homes–
Amira: Absolutely.
Mickey: –like they never have before. People have been, like, “How do y’all do this!?” and it was like, oh.
Amira: Right!
Mickey: Oh. You’re welcome.
Amira: Exactly.
Mickey: I thought that was gratitude…
Amira: I pose this question a lot to think through, like…I had my daughter really young. I had her when I was a freshman at Temple and people were like, “How did you go straight through, right into your PhD?” So I invert the question. I’m like, the question is not how did I individually do it but what was around me that allowed it to be possible, right? So when you were saying that about huddling your team, that was me. Like, my husband’s frat brothers were clutch. Would I ever leave my kids with them now? No! I have better quality recruits, let’s say, [laughs] to choose from. But at the time it was this kind of everybody stepping up. You just kind of piece it together. But it shows you what infrastructure you do need to replicate on an institutional basis to make it happen. I think that with this time in COVID one of the things that has happened when the world kind stopped, all of a sudden we had this magnifying glass on how systems work. Mirrors were held up and a lot of our disillusionment about or our romantic notions of things have been abruptly stopped. One of the difficulties is that as we are talking about diversity and equity and inclusion in coaching ranks, we’re also dealing with a time where…How do you responsibly coach during a pandemic? How do you weigh safety with what your goals are and what your job is, and we’re seeing more and more coaches be vocal about the fact that their teams are tired.
You’ve had people talk about opting out of bowl games. People are talking about the exhaustion, they’re talking about the rising numbers, and I’m really interested about how we have these conversations about pushing into positions of power, which is part of what it means to coach. All of a sudden you’re in a different position in the whole scheme of things. In something like a global pandemic where you are juggling these small opportunities, like, you have an opportunity this year in a season that’s…What is even happening? How do we juggle all of these concerns to think about what pandemic sports look like and what it’s gonna look like on the other side?
Megan: I’ll speak from the collegiate space. Infrastructure of college athletics is so dependent on that revenue we’re seeing and have seen since March Madness was in play last spring. We’re seeing that crumble. So those making decisions on campus and in conference offices are between a rock and a hard place. I don’t envy anyone in those positions right now. Everyone is being forced to make extremely difficult decisions, weighing the financial aspects on one side and student athlete experience. We’re seeing and have seen the mental health of professional athletes and college athletes plummet in this time period, and they’re being forced in isolation, all these things, these very difficult positions. Look at, I think, Coach K – he just said Duke’s not gonna play anymore non-conference games the rest of this year. They’re being forced to prepare for games and a few hours before game time the game might be cancelled because of positive results. It’s physically exhausting, it’s mentally exhausting. The amount of money being spent on campuses to do all of this testing for safety and try to put our athletes in positions to be able to play safe is…There’s no playbook for what anyone is going through right now, and so it's trying to make the best decisions in real time but also having a lot of pressure behind those decisions and trying to weigh all of these different factors that are coming at us in real time. It’s extremely difficult.
Amira: Absolutely. COVID is a mess, it’s just a mess. I think about this moving forward…We’ve talked about pandemic sports and what happens in the wake, and when I was talking on the episode we did about Black male football coaches a few weeks ago one of the points that Derrick White made was that oftentimes – especially we were talking about coaches in the Big Ten – they get their job on the back of crisis, right? So, Locksley comes in to Maryland after they're dealing with the fallout of killing Jordan McNair. Obviously James is here after the Sandusky scandal, essentially, and that times of crisis open up opportunities because A) there’s less of a rope, but then in that kind of mess it’s like, almost, “Oh, we’ve hit the bottom, what do we have left to lose?” And I think about this with my friend Candice Lee, who now is the AD at Vandy where I very much felt like it’s like, “Here’s your position, and also here’s a lot of mess coming your way.” I’m kind of looking at this moment with youth sports being impacted, with collegiate sports being impacted, with professional and Olympic sports being impacted, it wouldn't surprise me if more increasing coaching opportunities also come out of this. How do we contend with these doors opening in this mess knowing that the kind of safety net is going to be barely there and that we’re putting people in positions to get their opportunity when things are really really tough?
Mickey: Anyone who kind of gets in these jobs and realizes that the safety net is missing probably also was already aware that there was really no safety net for us anyway. Like, the people who are getting these jobs out of whatever reason, we kind of can’t be concerned with something that isn’t ours to uphold anyway, you know? We don’t get the safety, we don’t get forgiveness, and I mean minorities in coaching and scouting…Our leash is almost non-existent anyway. So now it’s just, “How well can I not make this more messy? How well can I just respond, just make the best decision?” It almost forces you to elevate who you are, so it makes you…I hate that I’ve internalized this “to make me better,” but it has, you know? It makes me a better coach because now I have to think of things that are in my blind spots naturally anyway. I have to think of responses, I have to think of interpretations to something that I’m trying to do and make sure that it’s as universal as possible. I think that the pandemic has been horrible; it was also the only reason that I’m with the LA Rams now, because they started a scouting apprenticeship in response to the death and murder of George Floyd. So they saw fit to provide a space for minorities to learn a skill that gets taught through being in it, but we can’t be in it if we don’t know anyone in it and then you won’t learn. They realized where the snowball was and they needed to stop it before it got too big. So this was their response to that.
I have a GM who is really invested in not stopping it here and making sure that this is an annual occurrence for them and really pushing for us to be in it and grow and do the best we can. I just feel really blessed to be at the Rams, but also people have gotten jobs because they were someone’s next door neighbors, because they were related, had the same bloodline as others, and so if I get it because a social crisis – that was already in my life, something that I was well aware of, always, but you just found out we were in a social crisis – if I get a job because of that reason, whatevs. Okay, cool. We’re gonna continue to respond socially but also now I have the opportunity to do a job that I would’ve never had been able to do otherwise, you know? They’ve operated in that patriarchy for so long that now them attempting to be human-like…? Cool, great. Great, you’re human now? Lemme out-work everybody, because that’s what I do, you know? So you kind of can’t think differently about a job because of how you got it, because they certainly would not.
Megan: And Mickey, I’m gonna piggy back on that. It’s such an interesting question too because in our industry, probably more so than any industry I can think of, failure is normal. Like, failure in terms of only one coach wins a championship – how many coaches have a losing season? It’s normal to get fired. So normalizing those failures in our industry is like one chapter closes and the next door opens, and so regardless of how you got into that position I don’t think it matters what you do once you get into that position. It is where the rubber meets the road and the pandemic I think is just magnifying the challenges of our industry – or the entertainment industry is probably very similar, anything that has large crowds and has physical contact and all of these interactions. So kudos to the Rams for what they’re doing to put and give opportunities to somebody like you, Mickey. I think that’s awesome.
Amira: As we conclude here, what I always wanna do is so often for those of us who are marginalized or trailblazers, all of it, a lot of times the questions get redundant, right? It’s, “Recount your trauma, here’s your pathway, what are your barriers, what are the obstacles?” But I really wanna know why you love your job, what the joy is, what the payoff is, what you love about it. When I started from the top and said touchdown was my first love, right? My goal in life was to marry Emmitt Smith and then be the first husband and wife in the NFL. I was like, that’s a little unreasonable. I’ll just be the first woman coach in the NFL, right? That was my dream for so much of my childhood. The joy for me in that was I love this sport, I love bossing people around, I can’t not shout when I’m watching things. I was like, I was made for this! But one of the things that I think is so important is to also hold space for why we push into these spaces in the first place and where the joy is, what makes people wanna do it, and what their greatest hope for the future in their field is – away from just thinking about all of the cards stacked against them. So I would love for, Megan, you to tell me about what was it about athletic administration. What drew you to WeCOACH? What do you love and what is your greatest hope for the future?
Megan: I have had the privilege…I was a college student athlete, I coached in Division 1, I served in two conference offices, I’ve run 2 NCAA women’s final fours, and then I came to our non-profit world. So when my world expanded from basketball to all of these sports and I understood that so many women were having the same challenges regardless of what ball they shot or what stick they used, and I saw that they were creating community and support and really that’s what WeCOACH has been able to do. We’re literally building something from the ground up. Anyone that knows me knows that I’m a builder and I’m a dreamer. So I look at it…We’re not only building an organization, we’re building a movement. We’re walking right alongside with the women’s empowerment movement. One thing I’m really proud of, and I think it probably comes back to my why and how I thrive and why I continue to wake up every day never feeling like this is a job…The women that attend our events, whether it’s our NCAA Women Coaches Academy, BreakThrough Summit, or mentoring programs, there’s one word. They always use this word “transformative,” that their experience was transformative, either personally or professionally or both. So I that’s really what continues to fuel me in making a difference and helping to drive for women in coaching.
Amira: That’s great. Mickey?
Mickey: Yeah, I think for me it’s two very different buckets why I’m involved in football but then why I’m involved in providing and educating and disseminating information about equity for women in sports. They’re two different things. Football, literally the first moment I knew I was going to be involved in football was like, “I should join the football team!” and someone said, “You can’t join the football team,” and I was like, okay, well, that’s it. That was like the moment when the music in the movie starts playing and and you see the flip book of my work from then to now. But that was just kind of a moment, and then it was just playing football. But then it was, okay, how do I get back to football? How do I get involved from the ground up? I played rugby, I tried to fake it for a second, but it didn’t work. Then when I got into coaching I wasn’t getting into coaching, I was volunteering at my high school that was going through a traumatic experience back then. That was in 2012.
Amira: Oh, when they merged Germantown?
Mickey: They merged Germantown with Martin Luther King!
Amira: The rudest thing in the world.
Mickey: Devastated.
Amira: My husband’s from Philly. [laughter]
Mickey: I was devastated. There’s a documentary about it called We Could Be King, so feel free to look it up. It was devastating. It was also dangerous because we spent years putting people by block – not ZIP code, by block! – separating into these two rival schools for safety reasons. But I went back because those seniors were freshmen and sophomores when I was a senior playing. Some of them were my teammates, some people I played against before, you know? So I was just here to help, I was here to be a voice. It took me another three years to call what I was doing “coaching.” I was teaching the defense I played, but it took me three years for someone to be like, “So, you’re a coach?” and I was like, uh, not really. And they asked me, like, “What are you so afraid of?” and I didn't have a good answer. And I always have a good answer! I pride myself on having good answers. And I didn’t have one. So that’s when I became Coach Mickey, and that acceptance of myself is now why I continue to be in it. It’s why I continue to do it, because this is who I am. So I’m just here to really accept who I am in life, and that’s being a coach.
And being a coach seeps out into the world, it seeps out into my athletes, my NFL players, my high school students, to learn to be good people, to provide for themselves, their families. It just goes on and on, it snowballs. It’s like a sneeze, it goes in like a million different directions and you really have no idea how you’re helping people but you know you just show up. People think parenting is you need to read the books and do all the things…90% of parenting is just showing up! Looking at you, dads! 90% of parenting is just showing up. Show up. Show up. Show up wrong, show up mis-dressed, show up embarrassing, just show up for them. So showing up for my athletes, for my kids, for my room, is the reason why I’m still in football. But also I had no idea what I was doing any step of the way. No idea. I was feeling around in the dark for a decade. I was visiting people and trying to learn and finesse and maneuver and I had no idea where to go, ever. And how to make big moves and play the cards I was dealt – when I have like two cards! Where do I go? What am I doing here? Like, I have no options.
So I now I also hold a small group called ‘all things forward’ where it’s me and a bunch of other women in football who are trying to learn how to move up because if I didn’t know I know women still don't know, right? There’s not enough paths. When you walk in the snow behind someone you can walk in their footsteps, but if they haven’t walked in deep enough or long enough the snow will cover up before I can get to them. So how can I continue to show people where those steps are, to follow behind women? What do they do? Who were they around? How to figure out if the programs I thought I deserved to be at, programs I thought that, “This is my program!” didn’t work, and I was devastated. Now what? What do you do? How do you find a needle in a needle stack? That feeling of “I have no idea” is the reason why I’m in education and providing equity for women in sports and being involved with people who have no idea what comes next, because none of us have ever known what came next.
Lo Locust is the assistant defensive line coach for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Two years before that her and I were playing, coaching against each other in women’s football and the Women’s Football Alliance, you know? She didn’t see it coming, it just came. It came from years and year and years and years of being ready and staying ready and just doing what you love no matter what the cost, no matter where you are. Even if the sacrifice that she made was, “I’m gonna coach for women’s football and keep my job,” and then when she went off to the Bucs it was like, okay, there’s your moment. But it also took her 30 years to get there.
Amira: I think that is so critical because part of the conversation that we miss sometimes when we tell these stories is those who couldn’t sustain that, and part of the really important work that WeCOACH is doing is that for every Mickey Grace there’s, you know, a handful of people who on year eight called it quits, or on year seven couldn’t do it anymore, you know? What happens when that burnout, when that struggle…When you’re not on the other side of that, when you’re not saying, “This made me stronger and now this opportunity came.” Who have we lost along the way? So part of the importance of the work I think both of y’all are doing, with the work that WeCOACH does and the work that the BreakThrough Summit and the conversations that are necessary to have, is that we can catch those people who otherwise we render disposable, who would fall through the cracks, who we don’t have those safety nets for – we can create our own safety net to continue to help people along the way, so that when we tell these stories it’s not the “only” anymore. It’s as much about the joy as it is about the things you had to traverse to get to that position. That is my hope, and I really appreciate all the work that y’all are doing to make that the future that we’re heading towards and to get people into the game in whatever way they want to be in the game and showing up and connected to this work.
Megan: Thanks so much for having us. I hope all the listeners sign up for the BreakThrough Summit at breakthroughsummit.live and watch with 5000+ of your closest friends on Monday and Tuesday, December 14-15th.
Amira: Yes, yes. Please check it out, flamethrowers. There are conversations you surely do not want to miss. I know that we will be following up with many of the participants and keeping our eye on WeCOACH and Hudl and tracking both Megan and Mickey, because once you’re flamethrowers we’ll never leave you alone again. So thank you, thank you, thank you for taking the time today.