Professional volleyball, pregnancy, and maternity leave

Carli Lloyd Transcript

Sabrina Merage Naim
From Evoke Media I'm Sabrina Mirage Naim, with me is Kassia Binkowski, and this is Breaking Glass, a series of conversations with women around the world who are shattering glass ceilings and challenging social norms. They are audacious, gutsy, and their stories are echoed across borders and generations in a rallying cry that is changing the narrative for women everywhere. Today's conversation is about pregnancy and professional athletes. We're talking with professional volleyball player, Carli Lloyd. Her now very public story begins when she was in Italy training for her 10th professional season and then found out she was pregnant.

Kassia Binkowski
Sabrina, what unfolds over the mere hours after she took that pregnancy test is hard to fathom. Carli and her partner didn't even get a chance to process this news personally, before it was thrust into the public view and her contract was swiftly cancelled. Dramatic as it was Carli's story is not unusual. She joins us to reflect on women's rights in professional athletics and the culture shifts being seen across some sports to begin to mandate pregnancy policies and protect maternity leave for mothers. Take a listen.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Carli, thank you so much for joining us.

Carli Lloyd
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Absolutely. So we want to go back to the beginning of your love affair with volleyball for a second, when did you get started in the sport?

Carli Lloyd
I started playing when I was 11, just into middle school. So I was introduced to it, because my mom and my uncle were volleyball coaches and my siblings had played. So it was kind of a...

Kassia Binkowski
So it was in your blood. Yeah. Family sport.

Carli Lloyd
Yeah, exactly.

Sabrina Merage Naim
And it's such a theme that we've been hearing that our parents have such an important impact on the trajectory of our careers. I mean, we just had a conversation with a stand up comedian who, her father said, if you want to be taken seriously in the entertainment industry, you need to be a stand up comedian. And she's a stand up comedian. I mean, do you ever think about how your life may have been different if your parents we're not coaches?

Carli Lloyd
I totally do actually. And the reason I think about a lot is well, I think athletics has been in my family, my mom played basketball. My uncle who raised me from when I was little, he's my mom's brother. He was a football player and a wrestler. And then I had two older siblings that got into sports. And my uncle was the one that kind of told me early on, if you have a dream, or if you really want this to be something great, he taught me like, this is what sacrifice is, and this is what choices look like. And early on, I mean, when I was eight and nine, I was running track and training with him and all these things. But I think about, you know, my dad, he passed away when I was really young. So if my dad had been in the picture even or if I didn't have two parents that were coaches, what would that have looked like? I think my path of life, the trajectory of my life, would have been totally different.

Kassia Binkowski
When did you set your sights on playing professionally? When did it start to feel as if that could be a real possibility for you?

Carli Lloyd
In college. I actually didn't know that professional volleyball was a possibility when I was younger than that. I mean, I'd seen the Olympics and I knew, but I mostly followed beach volleyball in the Olympics, I didn't really see a lot of indoor happening. And then when I got to college, I was told, you know, there's some professional volleyball overseas, not here in the States, because we don't have a professional league here in the States. But overseas, there's a possibility to continue your career and play. And I think it was my junior year that I heard that. And then my senior year was when I actually understood what that would look like.

Kassia Binkowski
Here's what I really love about this conversation. Because we're talking about a sport that has a predominantly female presence. I think it's pretty safe to assume that when most people think of volleyball they think of a women's sport. Of course, that's not exclusively the case. There are absolutely men's leagues, but I know that to this day, the vast majority of US colleges only have women's team and that's in part to comply with Title Nine regulations, but what is the professional industry look like? What is the gender equity at that level of playing look like?

Carli Lloyd
I think everywhere there's a female league there is a male league. Overseas volleyball, after soccer, is the number one sport. So for men and women. Soccer is the number one sport for most countries for male. You'd look at Italy or France or Germany, Brazil, there's their soccer leagues. There's also volleyball leagues, and there's female and male volleyball leagues and all those countries.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Let's fast forward, you now have nine professional seasons under your belt. And last fall, you were in Italy training for your 10th season as a professional volleyball player. And quite unexpectedly, you found out that you were pregnant. And what happened next? Walk us through the next few days.

Carli Lloyd
Oh, my gosh. I found that I was pregnant by taking an at-home pregnancy test. I actually had to seek out a friend that wasn't in the volleyball world to get me a pregnancy test from a pharmacy because if I went it would have been crazy chaos.

Kassia Binkowski
Which it was anyway.

Carli Lloyd
Which it ended up being anyway. But just for like a little reference, if you're a volleyball player in Italy, you're known. Because it's a sport that's televised. It's a sport that's obviously the biggest sport for females over there. So I played five seasons, or four seasons at the time, over there. I was well known in a lot of places. So I knew I had to be careful about how I was going to go about this. So I took a pregnancy test, found out that it was positive. Big surprise for us. We were planning on waiting a few more years. And then it was like a hundred miles an hour. I called my agent to tell him and he basically, I mean, he was supportive. I'd worked with him for for nine years, so he was supportive, but really stressed and said, "I'm coming to your apartment, we need to figure out what we're going to do". So I think four hours later, we were in the house of my president for the club. I was telling him and his wife in tears. Super stressed, I mean, I hadn't even processed the information at that point. It was like, I was telling my agent because I thought that was the right thing to do right away. Because I knew that he would have, "Okay, these are the steps we take". But the steps that ended up happening were so fast. And every time I think about it, my heart races because it was so emotional. But I told the president of my club, and his wife, who was also part of the club. And then they said, "Okay, we're gonna get you a blood test in the morning. And then we're gonna have to make an announcement" because I was going to miss practice the next morning. And I took the blood tests, and I was six weeks pregnant, so I had been pregnant through this. I had been in Italy for almost four weeks at the time, by that time. I had trained double days, we were in preseason. I mean, I had really no symptoms that I was pregnant. I was training hard, I was taking naps, like I always do, between practices. But that test showed I was six weeks pregnant. And then my agent and my president told me "we would like to release a physical... sorry not a physical. A statement that you're pregnant, and that you don't have COVID because people are thinking you have COVID. You haven't been in the gym for a practice". And they said, "you have, you know, a day to tell your family". And I had already told my boyfriend but I hadn't told my family yet. Because in Italy we're nine hours ahead of the states and everyone was sleeping at the time.

Sabrina Merage Naim
You didn't even have enough time to process it yourself before all of these wheels went into motion. You didn't have the time to even decide how you felt about it or tell the people closest to you in your life. And then you had to make a public statement.

Carli Lloyd
Yes, that is exactly what happened. And the crazy thing about that is it took me months, months to be at peace with how it happened. It's still hard for me to think back and know that this story wasn't beautiful. Because it should... I want to say it should have been. But it wasn't. It was terrifying and really traumatic. And of course there were moments of beauty in there. But the acceleration of having to tell people right away and then having it be public news within 48 hours was... The volleyball world's small. When you're over there, there's FIVB is the Federation of International Volleyball. They have a website, they have their blog, they have, I mean, I was the first story on there, I was the first star on Volley News, I was all over it.

Kassia Binkowski
So we're gonna get into some of the nuances about what happened and what's unfolded since then. But my question is, you're clearly not the first professional volleyball player to get pregnant. I think that's a very safe assumption. So why the massive urgency to push this down, you know, cross the t's dot the i's, why did that all have to happen so fast?

Carli Lloyd
That's a great question. At the time, they told me that it needed to happen this fast because the season hadn't actually, we hadn't had our first regular season match yet it was going to be a week from when I found out. I found out on a Sunday morning, we were going to play our first match the following Sunday. And they told me, you know, the market is going to close, if you're not going to play, we need to get another setter in the gym with this team. So we need it to be public knowledge that you're not going to be able to play the full season, so that they can potentially get another senator before the window closes. And, of course, at the time, I was like, I felt so guilty. I had so much guilt, that was the main thing I felt was guilt and overwhelmed. So I was thinking, "Okay, I have to help the club by doing this, it has to be the way it is, you know, I have to tell everyone, because they have to be able to announce that they need another setter". And I signed as the starting setter. So they needed a replacement.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Let's take a step back for a second. You were in Italy, how long is a season?

Carli Lloyd
Between seven and eight months.

Sabrina Merage Naim
And so you were playing for this league in Italy for, you said how many years? Four years?

I have played, I've actually played five full seasons, this is going to be my sixth.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Five full seasons, and you are in the middle of training for your sixth in Italy, and you spend most of the year there. You're away from friends and family, you are living in a foreign country. And then you get pregnant, which like you said, is supposed to be like a very happy... I mean, depending on obviously the stage of your life. And it wasn't planned, but you have a long term partner and you knew that that's something that you would want with him eventually. And so presumably, you were happy. So all of the craziness, the wheels are in motion, public statement. Then what happened?

Carli Lloyd
As soon as the public statement came out, there was kind of a giant uprising happening on social media. We all have platforms as volleyball players, and people use them for different reasons. I'm not a huge social media person, I'm trying to be more active and all these things. But I heard from a teammate that there was some backlash happening on there. There were some people saying really terrible things, and the way she told me she's like, "how are you feeling, like are you so like... how do you feel about what's happening?" And I was like, "What do you mean?" And then I started understanding, okay, there's something going on. What are people saying? So of course I looked and there's fans that are supposed to be true fans of our team and of the sport and they're saying that I'm unprofessional and can't believe I've done this to the club, and I've put them in this situation, and I was already feeling guilty on my own. And then I could see this happening around me. And I was alone over there, I didn't have my family with me. Riley wasn't with me, with COVID there's restrictions. Nobody could enter the didn't have a visa. So we were going through that trying to figure out, how can we get him to be there with me? You know, like we were trying everything but it wasn't happening. So this started, this conversation. I saw some responses from fans that I know personally, people that have watched me play over the last ten years. There were definitely people that are standing up for me, and then players started responding. Other females that have had babies that have stopped playing, women that haven't had babies yet but are in the sport, and they were saying, "this cannot be the conversation we're having right now over Carly". I've played there for five years, I've had a long career, obviously I didn't do this on purpose to the club, it's a crazy surprise for us. And so I didn't respond, I couldn't. I didn't even have the mental capacity to face that at the time. I was trying to find positive things to focus on and figure out if I was going to be able to play. I wanted to stay and play, at least through my first trimester. I felt like my body could do it, I had been training double days already. I was feeling good. And in that moment, I found out from a doctor that they were not going to support me in playing because of the risk of miscarrying the baby and the club didn't want to be responsible for it.

Sabrina Merage Naim
And not only that, but that you would not be paid for all of the weeks that you were already there training.

Carli Lloyd
That I found out a couple of days later, I didn't think that that was possible. I figured that the future, if I couldn't perform anymore, that I would probably not be getting any of my contract because they would need the money from my contract to buy another player. But I thought for the work that I had been there, obviously, they're going to pay me for what I've done so far. When I brought that up to my agent, he was like, "that's not even going to be a conversation, we're not even going to ask for it".

Kassia Binkowski
Would that have been any different if you were in the States?

Carli Lloyd
I would have been paid for the work that I had done with the nationals. I don't know how they handle it once you get pregnant. I know that there are athletes that train through their pregnancy in the gym, and then come back. So I think there's an adjustment to your contract, they find a way to support you through it. Maybe you're not getting paid the same amount, but I think you stay on the health insurance, you have some support there.

Sabrina Merage Naim
So there are a couple of things I want to highlight from what you said, which is that you were already feeling guilty, and that there was a certain amount of shame being placed on you by the league, by the public, because you are seen as a money making athlete, like you are there to perform. And if you can't perform up to the standards, regardless of the reasoning, then shame on you. And the number of times that we've had conversations with women where that shame has been placed on them purely because they are a woman, and because of natural reasons, is shocking. In the retelling of your story on your blog, you take a lot of really deep breaths and take moments to center yourself. And it's immediately felt, how emotional, and traumatic, this was for you. And in describing your experience, you say "I felt like I was being punished for something that most would say is the greatest gift we can possibly be given". And this is something that I felt deeply, that a lot of women often feel. Being punished for being a woman. You started your story by saying that you've never really spoken about women's rights before. You've never been outspoken about it. And my question to you is, would there be another circumstance that you would have been brought into being an advocate for women's rights? If it wasn't something that was so deeply personal to you?

Carli Lloyd
I don't know. Honestly, I just had this conversation with a friend. I'm in shock with myself every day that I wasn't as aware of what goes on as I am now. I've been in this world for ten years, I've been playing professionally. I've played with moms, I've seen a lot of things, and because it wasn't personal, like happening to me, I didn't realize the severity of it.

Kassia Binkowski
Let's talk about that for a second. That first glance, there's a very good reason why a professional athlete might lose her contract if she couldn't play the sport. Like just at surface level that makes sense to me. Without thinking through all of the legalities and the implications of that. What was your expectation as a young woman when you started your career, and then again, in all of the many seasons and the serious relationship that unfolded thereafter? Did you assume that you would be playing while you were still a mother? Did you assume that your career would continue after, like you said, those couple of years later when you had intended to have children?

Carli Lloyd
Yeah, I actually have, many times, thought "I'll have my first baby..." The conversation I had with Riley before I left for Italy this last season was "okay two more contracts for sure. Then we'll try for our first, and then maybe I can play two or three more years after that, while the baby can still travel and doesn't need to be in one place for school, and I'll end my career at like 36 or 27". That's great, you know?

Kassia Binkowski
So had you seen women around you do that?

Carli Lloyd
I have seen that, yes. I've seen, both in our USA national team gym as well as overseas, I've seen... my best friend actually just decided to come out of retirement after having her first baby. And she's playing right now. So I've seen it and I definitely had a plan in my head that it would look a certain way. It wasn't going to look like this.

Kassia Binkowski
And what would that trajectory have looked like? What did it look like for your best friend? Do their contracts get paused traditionally, and then they, like you said, step out of retirement and resume a contract? Let's talk about the legalities and logistics of how all this usually works.

Carli Lloyd
So usually you sign with a team for one year. You're kind of a free agent every year. Very rarely you'll sign a multi-year deal with a club team. But usually you sign one year, and then there's a transfer period between seasons and you sign with a new club. So for example, for me in Italy, I played two seasons in one club. And then I went and played in Azerbaijan, a different country, for a different team. And then I came back to Italy and played for a different club team in Italy for two seasons. And then I went to Brazil. So this transfer happens a lot. So for my best friend, for example, Julianne she decided to retire because she wanted to have a family. She felt like she had to be done playing volleyball. And she wanted to start her family. And she was retired for two years, had her son, and then got an itch to start playing again. And I kind of helped her get in contact with someone to look for a contract again.

Kassia Binkowski
So this is fascinating to me, because, and we could unpack this baby a lot longer, but that all sounds really good and lovely if family planning always worked. And as somebody who's been on the other end of this, who struggled for years with infertility, I'm like, "fuck the system", it doesn't always work when you plan, I can't plan on that two month window between contracts to try and plan my pregnancy so I know if I should sign with another team? It doesn't work that way. That's crazy.

Carli Lloyd
I know, it's actually, because it's so normal for us, when I talk about it like, this is what we have to do. We have to plan, okay, if I want to have a baby, I would really try to get pregnant in May, because May is when our season ends. And then I would hopefully just get pregnant in May. And then I would go through nine months of my pregnancy and then I would have the baby. And then I would be able to come back in two and a half months and start the next season. I mean, girls do that for the Olympic cycle. We've had so many conversations in the gym about, "well when are you going to try?"

Kassia Binkowski
That's wild.

Carli Lloyd
It is wild. And it's even crazier now, because after this happened, I asked my agent, which countries, which leagues are supporting women in maternity, through maternity. Who can sign a contract and know that if something were to happen, and there's two countries right now out of fifteen or sixteen or seventeen, that will support an athlete if she gets pregnant during a contractual season. And the help comes from the government. It's not the league, it's a law, that if you're a professional athlete, and you're under contract and you are pregnant during that contractual season, you will get some support from the government. It's 60% of your contract or something like that.

Sabrina Merage Naim
So what you're talking about actually is really important because you are an independent contractor, right? So, while many American laws protect against this, many professional athletes being treated as independent contractors are denied broader protections. What can you tell us about your particular contract? Are you protected by any? I mean, you're saying that there are only two countries that actually have protections. So does that mean that your contract has no verbiage about what happens if you get pregnant? It's just you get pregnant, you're out, the end, breach of contract?

Carli Lloyd
I've looked back now on my contracts, because before I wasn't so concerned with it. In some contracts, there is verbiage that says the club has the right to break contract if...and there's some terms. It's like if the athlete tests positive for doping, if the athlete doesn't show for a match or practice, if they break the contract of performance, or if the athlete is pregnant. It'll say that. That the club has the right to break the contract.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Because being pregnant is on par with doping. I just wanted to highlight that.

Kassia Binkowski
Yeah, right.

Carli Lloyd
In others, it's not even written. It's just known. It's known knowledge. So for example, in my contract this season, it was a pre contract. I was still in the... I had signed my contract, it had all the terms in there. But usually you sign the second contract after a certain amount of time that is more specific about all these things you have to do for the club and all these things. And in this pre contract that I signed, there was no verbiage around it. And I asked my agent, "what's the law?" And he explained to me, volleyball is considered an amateur sport. As an amateur athlete, you have no protection, if you become pregnant. So the club has the right to cancel your contract and use that money for whatever they would like, to get another athlete.

Sabrina Merage Naim
It makes me wonder a little bit, if these contracts were written by women, how things would be different.

Kassia Binkowski
Yeah, absolutely.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Right? There's more empathy, there's more of an understanding of the actual, natural female needs. And that just doesn't exist right now. Right now, it's bottom line, the end,if you're pregnant, you're out. So then what unfolded since September?

Carli Lloyd
So obviously, I came back to the states. My contract was cancelled. I didn't get paid at all from that contract. And I do want to say, although my situation was super traumatic, and for me, it was really, really hard to navigate the space, I was actually treated really well by the club. My president was supportive of me. Although my mom or someone that loves me would say, "but how can they force you to do that?", so there is that with it, which is really hard. But knowing how other clubs have treated athletes, I was a lucky female coming from Italy, which is crazy. But I am thankful that my club didn't target me, that they were supportive of if I wanted to play, they were going to try to help me by getting a message from the states, from a doctor here, all these things. But when I got back here, so my contract was cancelled, I didn't get paid for my club. My agent started this conversation about, there's a government, there's a fund that Italy opened in 2018 for female athletes. If you're a professional athlete, at the professional level, you can get a thousand euros a month for ten months as support through your pregnancy. But you have to qualify and the club has to advocate for you. So he told me, they're saying they're going to try. They're going to try this process. What are we in March? I still haven't... I've seen the progress, they're trying, and it's quite possible that I'll be qualified, but I haven't seen anything yet. From what I understand they're doing everything they can. So there is a possibility that I get this money from this fund. The cool information that I just found out recently is after what happened with my case, as well as a couple other ones that happened during this season, and then the history that this has been going on. Every year there's a conversation about this. There's a few women in politics that started hearing about it, and they started asking questions. And so they took it to the Olympic Committee in Italy, and basically started advocating for females and saying "this can't be what they go through, this isn't right". And so there's a law hoping to be passed in 2022 that will state that volleyball or this sport, at least, these athletes are considered professional and I don't know what this specific terms will be, but that they have some sort of support if pregnancy were to occur during their contractual season.

Kassia Binkowski
So sadly, your story is obviously not unusual and pregnancy has been called the kiss of death for female athletes quite publicly by different athletes. But a quick Google search turns up dozens of similar stories. What have you since learned, in the past eight months or whatever it's been, about contract protection or lack of protection for female athletes in other sports? Are there sports that are doing this better than others? There's a couple of athletes that we'll definitely talk about, including some friends of yours, but what are kind of the norms? Is this normal?

Carli Lloyd
So I'm still trying to learn more about that. I feel like it's still new to me. And since I started speaking about my experience, I've heard from some athletes and the truth is not a lot of athletes that write me tell me specifically what happened. They'll say "I had a similar similar experience". But it's really hard to get athletes to talk specifically about what they've gone through. Whenever I hear stories, it sounds like this is a common problem across sports still. But I don't know. I have, for example, my plan. I wanted to talk to a soccer player here in the states that has a contract and I want to talk to a basketball player, but I haven't seen them yet. I don't know, like what that looks like. But I'm really curious how these contract situations are taken and handled here in the states. I don't know, actually. I feel like I still have a lot to learn. And I think that, you saw how long it took for me to actually share my story. It took me five and a half months to process and get comfortable enough to say something, and so I'm still totally a learner, absorbing so much information. There's so much to learn, so the fact that we're having this conversation really sucks. A part of me says it sucks, because we should already have this figured out, you know?

Sabrina Merage Naim
Absolutely. Perhaps one of the most public parallels is that of your dear friend, Alysia Montaño, a professional runner and Olympian who lost her Nike sponsorship when she announced she was pregnant. She then wrote an op ed for the New York Times, which resulted in a public outcry. And Nike has since launched a series of beautiful ad campaigns, and that's what they are. They're just ad campaigns about gender equity and embracing motherhood. But in the fall of 2020, they actually announced a new maternity policy for all sponsored athletes. Which my guess is, Alysia had a big part in that. Her coming out and being public about her experience. And frankly, if you Google her, and you see those pictures of her eight months pregnant, running down the track, and every single muscle on her body is like, bam, bam, bam! And then, pregnant, but she's doing it and she's killing it and how incredible that is that she still has that drive. My question is, how unusual is it? Now that you see Nike has kind of embraced this new policy and this new world. Are there others that are following suit?

Carli Lloyd
Yes, there are. I think I've always seen mothers coming back to volleyball. Like I see moms coming back and they have their kids in the gym. But being outspoken and vocal about it, I haven't noticed that as much as I have recently. Alysia is a great example, and the organization she started, And Mother, if you look at their Instagram and what they are doing, Allyson Felix just became a part of the board. She's a mom, and I think Athleta is her sponsor, and they're doing great things for runners now. And there's some serious movement happening. And I think, I was just talking to a friend about this, it's happening because someone like Alysia, who has courage, and who will share her story and not try to keep a relationship through it. She didn't have any reason to protect Nike, and that she was advocating for herself, for her family, and for other women that follow her, and it's starting a trend. I think that just in that, in the runner's world, they're doing amazing things. That's the only place that I'm seeing it happen so vibrantly. But there are some things happening in Italy. There's a really terrible story that happened with another female athlete that got pregnant this season, and her club is actually suing her because they're saying that she caused them to lose money in sponsorships this season, and she actually ended up having a miscarriage. But she came out months later, shared her story, and now there's this extra push for this to happen in Italy, this change to happen. So I don't know if it's just that now that I'm in it, I'm hearing it more, or if it was always happening, and I just didn't see it, but I feel like there's a lot more energy around it. I really, and maybe it's just me hoping that there's going to be a permanent change across all athletics with women and supporting motherhood and career and saying "you can totally do this, we want you to do this, this is the baddest thing ever", you know.

Kassia Binkowski
And I know that you're super involved with the nonprofit And Mother, and your story is obviously very, very much unfolding. I think at the time of recording, you said, you're, what, five weeks away from from your due date? What do you want? What are your own professional ambitions right now as you lean into this season of motherhood, as you were forced out of it? What do you look forward to, what do you hope unfolds over the next couple of years?

My first hope is that I have a healthy birth and that my body handles it and that I can recover. I feel like I will be able to, but you just never know with with birth. So I would love to play again. I miss volleyball. I've played beach volleyball, which is totally different than indoor. It's a very different sport, but gave me the joy that I've been missing. I played up until I was almost seven months pregnant, and I loved it. And I realized that I miss playing overseas, I miss by teammates, I miss the camaraderie of being on a team, I miss growing in the sport. I feel like I still have years left, and I feel like I still have growth that I haven't fully achieved yet. And that's why I just kept playing the last few years. I went to an Olympics, I had that amazing experience. But there's still more for me in the sport. And the thing is, I don't know if it will happen, because there's also this conversation around, once you have a baby, you're not considered as high in value, so your contract will automatically be cut, to the worst that you were before.

Kassia Binkowski
Just flat out, it has nothing to do with performance, nothing to do with that, just, it's a ding against you?

Carli Lloyd
Yeah. Because you're different. Now you've gone through something that changes your body.

Kassia Binkowski
Is that being worked on?

Carli Lloyd
It's kind of almost like you have to reprove yourself, like to show what your worth is after it. And then they'll evaluate how much you can get paid moving forward.

Kassia Binkowski
How is that unfolding? Are there any cases or momentum to change that?

Carli Lloyd
No, that's kind of just part of it. I don't know, if it's across all countries. I know that that's kind of a conversation that I had with my agent about like "Okay, looking at contracts, what would it look like?" And he told me the range and it's significantly lower than what I've been making the past nine years. But it's, again, when I had that conversation at the time I was like, "Okay, I guess that's like normal", you know, I have to prove that I can play and prove that I can get my body back in shape. But it's kind of a bummer to have to deal with that huge pay cut already having lost a season because I'm pregnant and I cannot perform. And so it's like there's a lot to process. So I don't know exactly what it will look like, how hard it will be. We just don't really know. For example, I think about my child, if I have a girl and she wants to be an athlete and she wants to be a volleyball player, if she has aspirations, I want to be able to say "yeah, and you you can do everything you want, there's no barrier for you. Dream big, go for it. You will be an athlete, a mother, you'll have a career". Of course I want that for our future generations. So it's great that this conversation is happening.

Sabrina Merage Naim
Breaking Glass is a production of Evoke Media. Evoke is a nonprofit organization that exists in order to elevate the people and stories that are working to make the world a more unified and equitable place. Learn more at weareevokemedia.com