The Pink Jacket Wasn’t About Pink

If you’ve been around Better Pickleball for a while, you know that I’m most known for teaching, coaching, breaking down mechanics and strategies and guiding players to play their best pickleball. But today I want to talk about something a little different — something that sits underneath all of that. And if you’re a female pickleball athlete, you may know exactly what I’m talking about.

This is about belonging in sport. And what three very different sports taught me about what that actually takes.

I am a professional skier, a PGA Golf Pro, and now a pickleball coach. Three very different sports, spanning more than 50 years of my life. And through it all, there has been one constant: I have always had to fight just to be seen as an athlete.

That’s not a complaint. It’s just my story. And I think it’s worth telling.

My Mom Said It Best

My mom’s senior yearbook quote was, “Ski, and I’ll ski with you. Study, and you will study alone.” (That alone should tell you something about how I was raised 😂)

She’s 83 years old. I talked to her this morning before I sat down to write this, and she was on her way to the mountain. Skiing wasn’t a hobby in our house. It was just life.

Both my parents were ski patrol, and I grew up at our little “mountain”. To keep me out of trouble while they were working, my parents put me in the racing program. And I was pretty darn good.

But here’s the thing about being good when you’re a little girl on a chairlift: it doesn’t always mean people see you correctly.

I can’t tell you how many times I rode a chairlift with a stranger and they’d say something like, “How’s your day going, son?”

I was less than 10 years old. And I had this sharp little edge in my voice when I’d correct them: “I’m a girl, not a boy”. That usually made for a very quiet rest of the chairlift ride. Not the most graceful approach, I’ll admit. But I was a kid. And what I was learning, even then, was that being skilled at something wasn’t enough to be seen accurately.

The “Pink Jacket Decision”

That lesson followed me through my entire skiing career. Into my 30s. And honestly, it didn’t really shift until I was around 40 and I just got tired of it.

I never cared much about what I wore on the mountain. Functional jacket. Functional pants. Nothing particularly feminine about them, but not because I was making a statement, just because ski wear did not have much of a feminine design for the majority of my life. But after being called “dude” repeatedly — and at that time, dude meant male — I made a deliberate decision.

I went out and bought a Pink Jacket. My sister laughed when she saw it because it was so unlike anything I’d ever chosen before.

I want to be clear: any gender can wear pink. That’s not the point.

For me, it was a calculated signal. I can ski like crazy, and I might not be who you think I am. And the part that still sits with me? I had to change how I looked to get people to stop misreading who I was.

The Golf Course Taught Me the Same Lesson

I became a Golf Pro in 1989. I’ve been a proud member of the LPGA and PGA of America for decades. And the golf world had its own version of the same thing.

Whenever I played at an unfamiliar course, there was always a starter on the first tee, think of it like a host standing at the door to welcome you. And I can’t count the number of times I walked up to the tee, and the starter immediately directed me to the shortest tees on the course, or at that time, more commonly called the “women’s tees.” Just like that. No conversation. No question about my game. Just an automatic assumption based on how I looked.

Here’s the thing: I could consistently hit the ball farther than most men playing the “men’s tees.” Sometimes even the players on the tee furthest back or the “pro tees.” But that didn’t matter because they hadn’t watched me swing yet. They saw a woman and made a call.

That’s what it felt like, over and over: being underestimated for how I looked, not for what I actually brought to the table as an athlete. Sidenote: that little bit of shade usually made me play out of my mind!

And it happened off the course, too. I was playing in a Wisconsin PGA section tournament.

Since there are only three women in the section, it wasn’t unusual for me to be the only woman in the field. After the round, we were told there would be food and drinks sponsored by the tournament. I followed the directions they gave me. And the door I ended up in front of had a plaque on it that said: Men’s Locker Room.

I remember thinking: Did they really?

I went back to the pro shop and asked for the directions again. Just to be sure I hadn’t misread them. I hadn’t. Just another way of saying, the room just wasn’t built with me in mind.

I think that’s actually the quieter, more pervasive version of this problem. Nobody was trying to be cruel. But nobody had thought to include me either.

And Then There’s Pickleball

I want to be honest with you: I hoped pickleball would be different.

And in some ways it is. The culture is more open. More welcoming. More community-centric, different from all those other sports, and that’s why I love it.

But some things carry over. The thing I hear most from women in pickleball — and I hear it constantly — is the unsolicited advice. The coaching they didn’t ask for, from players they didn’t ask it from.

I get it too. Despite having spent tens of thousands of hours developing my coaching skills, despite running Better Pickleball and everything we’ve built here, I still get unsolicited advice on the court. And a fair amount of it comes from players who aren’t operating at my level.

I always find myself asking the same question: would they say this to a man with the same credentials? My gut says no. Not at the same rate. Not with the same confidence that the advice was needed.

It’s just another signal from the environment saying: You don’t fully belong here. And it adds up. Slowly. Quietly. But it adds up.

What Pickleball Can Actually Do About This

I’m not sharing any of this to vent or to point fingers. I want to be really clear about that.

I’m sharing it because I think pickleball has a genuine opportunity here. And I think it’s worth naming.

Pickleball is still a relatively young sport. The culture is still forming. And that means we — all of us, every player in every group we play in — get to have a hand in what that culture looks like. We don’t have to wait for some governing body to fix it. We can decide, in our own little corners of the pickleball world, what kind of environment we create.

What happens when we stop assuming a player’s level based on what they look like? What happens when we ask before we advise? What happens when we just make space for someone to play their game, and see what they bring?

More players feel like they belong. And that’s good not just for the game but for everyone.

The Lesson That Has Guided My Coaching

I want to end with something that has been at the center of my coaching for my entire career.

When I was a young golf pro working toward my PGA membership, I attended a teaching seminar. The pro stepped on stage and said the first thing he was going to share was probably the most important lesson in the room. He said: The person is always more important than the golf swing.

That’s a cornerstone of my coaching. Players aren’t their mechanics. They’re not their ratings or their win count. The person is always more important than the shot, the strategy, the score.

And on the days when I’m at my best as a human being, I try to take that further. The person is always more important than whatever fills in the blank.

Pickleball is a small thing in the grand scheme of what’s happening in the world right now. But small things, done consistently, with real intention, change environments. They change cultures. And cultures change lives.

So if you’ve got a story to share about your experience as a female athlete in pickleball, I’d love to hear it. The comment section below is open. Come share what you’ve been through. Because I genuinely believe that when we hear each other, something shifts. For all of us.

The person is always more important. Let’s act like it.