Sarah Martinez, the Loring Family Head Coach of Women’s Soccer (Photo and video by Robert DeSanto).

Sarah Martinez, the Loring Family Head Coach of Women’s Soccer, believes in a holistic, student-athlete-centric approach to her job. While she played soccer in college and considered a career in teaching, becoming a coach was not originally part of her plan. Now, Martinez finds her passion in empowering young women on and off the field.

Title: Loring Family Head Coach of Women’s Soccer
Years in Position: 4 years, nine months
Started at Yale: 2019

What are your current role and responsibilities

As head coach, I oversee all aspects of the Yale Women’s Soccer Program. I have two fantastic full-time assistant coaches, a volunteer assistant coach, and a director of operations. My responsibilities include overseeing all aspects of our women’s soccer program; some of those roles are practice planning and implementation, fundraising, budget management, film breakdown and analysis, and working with the internal teams that make up Yale Athletics. Although the most visible and known part of the job, the actual coaching makes up probably about 10% of my overall role.

My philosophy in managing our program is player-centric; I want the student-athletes on our team to have a voice, and if they have passion in something, I want them to feel empowered to talk about it. Part of my role is to teach them to hone their voice as they go out into the world to live and work beyond the playing field.

Did you always want to be a coach or in the athletics field?

For a while, I thought I would be a teacher. My teammates always said that I was going to be a coach, but I had other ideas for the path I would take. After attending grad school and earning a master’s degree in education, I explored many avenues of college athletics. I dabbled in student athlete development, event management, and operations when I finally realized my passion was to be on the field coaching.

I was incredibly fortunate to have played for a female head coach in college. There are not many of us; less than one-third of head coaches in Division I soccer are women. After playing for and working alongside a coach who mentored, encouraged, and empowered me, I realized that I wanted to do the same for young women through coaching.

What is your favorite part about working at Yale?

We have a philosophy to leave the jersey (and the program) better than you found it.

It’s the people. I am one of the luckiest head coaches in the country to have the support of three strong women: Vicky Chun, the Thomas A. Beckett Director of Athletics; Ann-Marie Guglieri, the executive deputy director/chief operating officer of Athletics; and Mary Berdo, a deputy director of Athletics. Mary my direct supervisor, is as great of a leader as anyone I’ve ever been around. Our relationship is based on mutual respect, and we both want the soccer program to be successful. I’ve picked up many leadership traits from her that I’ll carry with me throughout my career.

How would you describe your leadership style?

Everything I do stems from relationships. I would say I am very ground level and want to empower people around me to achieve things they never thought were possible.

I love coaching and soccer is a huge passion of mine, so to be able to impact the lives of 18 to 22-year-olds through this beautiful game is something I treasure every day.

Something my staff and I believe in is meeting our student-athletes where they are, while constantly pushing them to get where they want to go. We’ve given women in our program autonomy and a platform to lead in ways that are authentic to them, while also upholding our standards. Through a few seasons of trial and error, I see the confidence in them to lead each other. Now, on and off the field, they can handle just about anything without me. I’m encouraging them to lead themselves, while ensuring they don’t fall.

Most collegiate athletes don’t turn professional in their respective sports. How do the lessons and habits learned as a collegiate athlete translate to the professional world?

We talk to our women often about process. You must understand your process as an individual, and stay true to it. Sometimes the hardest part about sports (and life) is you may pour everything into something and still not get the desired results or not get them as quickly as you want. You may put as much time and effort as someone else and not be rewarded in the ways you thought. This is where resiliency comes into play. This is why so many employers want to hire former student-athletes. They’ve been through struggles, failures, victories, competition, and in the end, they keep on working to be better the next day.

What would you say to someone who is looking for a career as a coach or in the athletic field?

Many people looking in from the outside see coaching as a glamorous job. Now don’t get me wrong — I think I have the greatest job in the world, but a lot goes into it. During the season, the coaches and support staff work upwards of 70 hours a week. You must love it, because while it can be incredibly gratifying, it can also be a grind.

I’m so passionate about this program that I often forget to step back from it. To be sustainable in this field, I am learning (much later than I would suggest) that you must find time for yourself. There is always something to do, and as competitive people, you want be the best. But to build something great, you must be the best version of yourself.

Finally, I would tell someone to understand what you are doing is bigger than you. While I am incredibly honored to lead this program, it’s not MY program; it’s the program of the current student-athletes and the alumni who came before them. It’s a program that represents an entire department with hundreds of years of history and tradition. We are a small part of it, but we have a philosophy to leave the jersey (and the program) better than you found it.

Related Articles