This story initially appeared on Behind the Whistle, the official blog of the IWLCA, and is being republished with permission from the organization. Liz Geyer is the head coach of Bethany College.

Over the past 29 years of my life, I have been fortunate to have amazing coaches, teachers, and leaders.

Most of these people were strong, loud, confident women who told me to speak up, be heard, and be authentic. Their honesty, which was sometimes tough to hear, and often linked with “we won’t need our sticks or goggles for this part,” held me accountable to represent not only myself, but my team as well. If you were one of my coaches, I apologize for how long it took me to get there – I like to think of myself as a bit of late bloomer!

The power of coaching in my life was so significant, it led me to become a coach and influence young women every day to follow their dreams, stay steadfast, and push their limits.

However, it wasn’t until I started coaching, that I started to recognize a pattern that had existed long before I stepped on the field – people that looked like me were really rare on the field, in the stands, or on the sidelines. For those of you that don’t know me, I was adopted from Guatemala and raised in a very loving, but almost entirely white community, playing a very white sport, and taught by nearly all white teachers and professors.

These experiences were great because I was blessed to work with so many caring people, but rarely provided me with opportunities to learn about other cultures from those who had experienced them, to learn about a culture, an ethnicity, an identity that part of me belonged to. I never knew any different and while I’d visited other countries on mission trips, they mostly highlighted my privilege rather than immersed me in new communities.

It was my second coaching position, as an assistant at Concordia University-Chicago, where I saw this could, and should, be different. This experience shook my life and coaching philosophy to its core. When the program started in 2016, 16 out of the 17 players on our team had never seen the sport of lacrosse, before; they were from on campus, walk-ons mostly, and some had played a sport before, others not so much.

Needless to say, after competing in Maryland and Virginia most of my life, where starting in fifth grade had me playing catch up, it was humbling to learn how to teach cradling, catching, and cutting to 18-20 year-olds.

However, quickly following my “wow, this coaching thing is tough!” reaction,  I began to wonder why this was the first time in my 15 years of being involved in the game that I was seeing more than one or two young women of color on the field? We showed up to games with a Black male head coach and a Latina assistant coach as well as a team filled with women of all races and ethnicities. Our sidelines were bilingual, and our tailgates included homemade tamales, the likes of which I will never have better, chicken in homemade mole sauce, Gatorade, and of course, rice crispy treats. And while I knew Chicago would be different from Carroll County, we played other Chicago teams that still looked and recruited the same way as back home. Why had I never, ever, seen a team remotely this diverse?

My answer to that question was largely because none of our players had ever played the game before. They had never experienced the stigma of lacrosse being a white sport. They didn’t show up to a field where all the experienced players and coaches looked the same, played on the same clubs, and came from the same communities. They showed up to a field for many reasons – wanting to meet new people, get in shape, learn a new sport – but nearly all without having ever seen your typical lacrosse environment.

As coaches, we see the trends and hear the comments, sometimes contributing to them.

“She’s raw but fast."

“I bet she played soccer before.”

“She’s athletic.”

We look at our teams and try to bridge the gap to have conversations about diversity while not singling out our one player of color. We have worked hard, especially these last few months, to educate ourselves so that we set the example for our teams. We try to recruit a diverse team but struggle to know if our campus environment offers all of our young women, whether first generation, international, or from lower income communities, the same great experience.

This is why I am challenging my fellow coaches to engage in changing our game from the top down. As coaches, we are the ones recruiting players, hiring assistant coaches, and encouraging young women to stay involved with lacrosse after they graduate.

Many of our dual duties include teaching, admissions, joining campus-wide hiring committees and regularly push us out of athletics to roles that influence our campus as a whole. Our sidelines and our campuses should also be changing, growing, and diversifying at the same time we’re attempting to do so with our teams.

I am so grateful to be a part of an association that not only discusses these challenges but battles them head on with educational resources, trainings, and next month, the opportunity to elevate the next generation of coaches. I ask that each of us think about the young women we can see molding our sport and higher education as a whole and encourage them to consider applying to attend the Future Leaders of the Game: IWLCA Students of Color Coaching Symposium, scheduled for Jan. 4-5, 2021.

The women that attend will be our future coaches, administrators, club directors and referees. They are the future of our sport and I can’t wait to see how they grow this game for the next generation of players who look up and see these roles filled by women who looks like them, had similar experiences to them, and who have made such an incredible impact on the game we all love.

Editor’s Note: For more information on the Future Leaders of the Game: IWLCA Students of Color Coaching Symposium, please visit the IWLCA website. Application criteria and a link to apply are posted on that site. The IWLCA will offer the Symposium free of charge to qualified women’s lacrosse student-athletes. The deadline to apply is Dec. 11, 2020.