From Volunteer to Assistant to Head Coach - Marisa Arce

Marisa Arce is in her 5th year as a head women’s tennis coach and has nearly completed her first year as the head coach at Depaul University. She started her college coaching career as a volunteer assistant at the University of Oklahoma in 2012 shortly after graduating from the University of Illinois. In this episode we discuss her decision to start her career as a volunteer, if it was worth it and how she has transitioned from volunteer to assistant coach and on to becoming a head coach. We discuss the challenges of combining college coaching and parenting and how she is navigating her new job, her new-born baby and all the other obligations she is facing at this point in her young coaching career. Key points of this conversation have been indexed for easy listening here: 2:14 - When did it dawn on you that your career would be as a college tennis coach? 4:20 - What was the feedback you were getting from the programs that you were applying to? 8:35 - What was different about moving into a full-time assistant role? 17:05 - "Better Allies" by Karen Catlin - 37% of Women's Tennis coaches are women. 18:20 - Do you think that a male athletic director would have hired you knowing that you were nine-months pregnant at the time? 23:23 - How do you deal with the struggle of having a family and being a coach? What adjustments did you have to make? 29:05 - Are there any lessons that you apply today that you learned from any of your coaches along the way that you're applying to your team today?