Coach’s Wife, Sport Mom...and Players-Coach’s Wife, Oh My!

In this episode of the Unit3d podcast, Dr. Jesse Steinfeldt sits down with Rae Ann Inge to get an in-depth and behind-the-scenes perspective from a Coach’s Wife in the hectic world of NCAA Division 1 Power 4 college football. William Inge is currently an assistant football coach at University of Tennessee, and Rae Ann shares a range of logistic, emotional, and psychological impacts that are associated with supporting her family, her husband, and his players across their moves to ten different teams/cities/coaching jobs. We touch on the impact that these multiple (and often unpredictable) moves have on her, on her family's well-being, and on coach mental health, in addition to sharing the creative and compromising strategies they have had to adopt to make it all work. All coaches with families will learn something from this episode, and fans will emerge with more empathy for everything that coaches’ families go through in this process. 

Additionally, as Rae Ann discusses her role as a Sport Mom, she shares some heart-warming and hilarious youth sport stories that illustrate the relationship-building and memory-generating dynamics that sport can optimally provide. Athletes, coaches, and parents will be able to connect to the stories she tells--without a ‘you had to be there feel’--due to her engaging story-telling style, the transcendent nature of youth sport, and the commonalities that sport parents face as they work to support their children's athletic development. Finally, we talk about how these roles collide, as her children evolve from youth athletes into Division 1 college athletes, in addition to touching on her extensive above-and-beyond efforts to support her dozens and dozens of college linebacker children that Coach Inge coaches and who Rae Ann adopts in her special calling as a “Players-Coach’s Wife”.