Take Her Word for It: Sports Cultivate World-Class Leaders

By Kathleen Ralls

Women athletes of all ages have an incredible capacity to be dynamic leaders who can choose between taking a step back to see the big picture or leading with curiosity and creativity.

In Take He

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: May 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885042154

Book preview

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Voice Empowerment

Coaching Up

Role Models

The Supportive Lead

The Choice Is Yours

Timing and Time

What People Want to Hear

Motherhood Moves the Goal Line

Speak Up

Together We Move Forward

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Foreword

My first thought when Kathleen approached me to write her foreword was, Why me? I’m not a writer (unless my third-grade poem in the Anthropology of Poetry for Young Americans counts) nor am I a VP or senior leader at a Fortune 500 company, but I couldn’t turn down a request from Kathleen, especially one with a topic so near and dear to my heart. As I read more, I realized I was reading my life story and I imagined how it would have felt to have read this book in high school, college, or in my twenties, and how powerful it would have been to read these stories and see myself in them, to get an overdue reminder that we women need to see ourselves as leaders first, no permission needed.

I had the pleasure of meeting Kathleen through one of her athletes, who was on the college team I was (assistant) coaching. Through the stories and the way she talked about what a dedicated and fun high school coach Kathleen was, it was clear Kathleen set up her athletes for long-term enjoyment of the sport.

I cannot think of anyone better than Kathleen to bring these voices to life. She has spent decades around girls in sports—first as a teammate, then through observation as a sportswriter, and currently as a high school coach and active marathoner. Kathleen has been around sports her entire life, and like any great coach or writer, she observes everything. Not only has Kathleen studied and researched the topic extensively, but she’s put it into action and empowered women for years.

Sports and coaches like Kathleen changed my life. How else did a brown girl from public school in the suburbs of Maryland go on to become a Stanford graduate and school record holder? The obvious answer is the scholarship, but that’s only part of the story: sports allowed me to dream bigger than the life I had and life I saw around me. I learned to set goals and work toward them, to persist in that pursuit through injuries or bad races. I learned the definition of hard work would change every year. I learned that to be extraordinary, you can’t do what everyone else is doing. I went from tentatively stepping on a podium in an Aw shucks, I don’t know how I got here kind of way to a Thank you, I belong here declaration. My inner voice was expanding, and it gave me the courage to apply to Stanford, to declare I am worthy to myself, but also to an institution like Stanford and to my classmates.

Don’t be fooled, that confidence didn’t come after one race, one year, or even all in high school. I went from being a big fish in Maryland to a little fish on the Stanford campus, and the self-doubt crept in every day. What could my voice contribute to a classroom full of literal geniuses or on the track with All-Americans?

I found my voice through my feet (a.k.a. running fast), but when I hung up my spikes and started my first job, I felt lost again. One of my favorite parts about track is the objectivity of it. You always know exactly where you stand among your teammates and competitors, thanks to the clock, but in the office, I had no clue how I was performing. The measures of success for my role were vague and ever-changing, and my peers all shined in different ways. I was fortunate enough to find my way to a (woman) team lead who gave my voice and my quirks (like rewriting the song lyrics to 24K magic) an equal platform. Her acceptance reactivated the rest. I would later have a different (woman) team lead who questioned my voice and abilities, which rattled my confidence but did not shake it because I had depended on myself so many times before and delivered.

Sports provide the tools, but they do not automatically confer confidence or a voice. It is a choice. A daily choice to show up. A choice to silence the voice that says, Are you ready? A choice to choose yourself. I think athletes get to practice that more frequently on a court than we’re able to in the classroom.

Sports also create authentic leaders. You can’t hide on the court. You and you alone are responsible for your actions. There’s no hiding from your teammates. They see you at your hungriest, crankiest, and most tired. Eventually, you realize there’s no hiding from yourself. People in high school would have probably described me as quiet, but by college, I was the loud and outgoing girl on and off the field. I think that kind of authenticity with oneself engenders a self-confidence people can easily pick up on and trust.

A truly self-confident person isn’t the loudest voice in the room because they value their own voice. It’s not the one publicly listing off their own credentials or achievements because they already know how good they are. That’s why woman athletes make such great leaders: they show up, perform, hold themselves and others accountable, and bring the team along with them.

Although the circumstances or people change in every new season of life, the lessons of sports stay with you forever for you to draw from and apply to new situations, and if you forget, this book will remind you. That’s why I’m so excited this book exists now, to give space to the many unique voices. It’s a must-read for every girl who’s currently playing a sport in school and the woman who is years out from organized sports but can still immediately recall the smell of a locker room. This book will remind you we can change the world.

Lauren Centrowitz

Eight-time all-American, former school record holder and American record holder at Stanford, where her team captured three NCAA titles.

Introduction

How many laps? Margaret asked.

Eight, said her son.

Margaret, a global leadership development associate director for Eli Lilly and Company and mother of three boys, stopped to ponder. There was no way her eight- and nine-year-old sons could possibly run eight laps around a quarter mile track. They must be miscounting their laps. Of course, not being a runner herself, she had no real concept of the effort and energy it takes to tick off tours around a track. But her kids were insistent, and in the days that followed, she could not let the idea go that maybe they were right, and she was wrong. So, the next weekend, Margaret made a decision.

She piled her sons into the car and drove to the track. Upon arrival, the boys jumped out of the car and hopped onto the track.

The boys raced through one lap.

And they kept going.

As Margaret watched, they ran a second, third, and fourth lap.

That’s one mile, Margaret thought. Surely, they are too exhausted to continue.

But they were not. They kept going and going. Their persistence led to a revelation for Margaret. If her sons could build such physical endurance through consistent practice, imagine how that same principle could be applied to her own life.

As a child, Margaret was discouraged from participating in athletic competitions because she has type 1 diabetes. Growing up in the 1980s, intense exercise had uncontrollable effects on her. Intense exercise caused her blood glucose to plummet below normal levels, which resulted in unconsciousness and seizures. For Margaret, intense exercise was associated with danger—until now. Seeing her sons’ joy in running and leveraging the technological advances of insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors, she was curious to test out her own athletic ability.

Margaret’s family trained for and ran a half marathon (13.1 miles) together. Amazed by this achievement, she went on to complete her first marathon (26.2 miles). Although many people are introduced to sports in childhood, Margaret did not unlock her athletic resume until her thirties. Her revelation did more than improve her physical stamina; Margaret discovered confidence gained in sports training translated to greater self-advocacy and self-confidence in life.

In this book, you will meet women living in four countries who have followed a variety of career paths, including law, education, consulting, social work, and professional sports. The women share their stories of how they not only embrace their unique voices, but also how they identify themselves as leaders. These women’s stories demonstrate the fragility of growth and the danger of stagnation. These stories need to be shared to set the world on a different course wherein women leadership is the norm.

Undoubtedly, you will find more than personal inspiration in these stories. You will also further your own path to a more equitable world. Currently, women leadership is considered an outlier. It is not simple for women when it comes to finding ways to build success. Certainly, there has been progress but not enough.

In 1960, the world’s first democratically elected woman head of state was Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who became Sri Lanka’s (or Ceylon, as it was known then) prime minister (Bhardwaj, 2020). The longest serving elected woman head of state as of 2022 is Chancellor Angela Merkel, who led Germany for sixteen years (Bosley and Fokuhl, 2021). During her time in office, Merkel was the most powerful woman in the world, though she had few women counterparts. In 2021, the Council on Foreign Relations found only 22 out of 193 countries had women heads of state in 2021.

In the US, Vice President Kamala Harris is the first woman elected to the executive branch. At the same time, 28 percent of congressional seats are held by women (Congressional Research Service, 2022). This percentage is far lower than the number of women currently living in the US, but it still represents a 50 percent growth in national women’s leadership in just one decade.

More women are in decision-making roles in government, but what about women in business and education?

According to Pew Research Center, only 7.4 percent of Fortune 500 companies had women CEOs (2018). Although that statistic is painful, it is an increase from—gulp!—0 percent in 1995. This vacuum of women’s leadership in the CEO’s office is more exasperating when one considers The Leadership Research Institute found companies with greater women in leadership roles are more likely to be profitable, more competitive, and most definitely reflect the marketplace, where women purchase 83 percent of consumer goods in the US (2013).

In education, in 2016, only 30 percent of university presidents were women, which is triple the total in 1986. The National Center for Education Statistics found in a 2017–2018 study although 76 percent of public school teachers identified as women (of which I was one of them), that number drastically dropped at the administrative level, where 54 percent of public school principals identified as men.

I equated my time as a teacher to being on a seesaw—skillfully soliciting one voice while simultaneously silencing the other twenty-five voices in class. Teachers must use Jedi skills to read the nineteen minds that want to be anywhere but in school.

And don’t forget the voice in your own head, weighing the merits of appeasement both historically and in that very instant of your life. Women leaders in all professions can relate to this internal struggle.

I often wondered if I was losing control of my history class when I allowed for more of the student-to-student dialogue that was constantly teetering on the fence of irrelevancy. Could I dig up the dandelion that sprouted out of these spiraling student conversations to make it all worthwhile, or would students just see it as a colossal time eater?

At the heart of this internal debate was one word: fear. That old Machiavellian question of whether it is better to be loved more than feared rang true for me. I genuinely cared what my students thought of me, and I fed off their energy. Did they think I was a weak teacher because I did not micromanage every moment of their learning? Or did they see a teacher who really valued what they had to say?

As a professional educator, I trained in the era of student-centered learning that celebrated less lectures and more group work. The theory was schools needed to prepare the next generation to learn how to work in teams. I embraced this model because I am hardly ever the first person to speak, the loudest person, or the person to talk the longest. I do not garner attention that way because it makes me uncomfortable. In moments of doubt in the classroom, I had to tell myself that though my voice was not loud, it did not mean my message was lost.

My experiences convinced me I was not alone.

My research established a direct connection between sports and voice empowerment.

A widely published study by Ernst & Young identified a single key trait held by 94 percent of C-suite level women leaders: they all participated in sports (Ingram, 2020). As athletes, their exposure to the competitive nature of sports has helped them carve out a steady work ethic