Racing Louisville head coach Bev Yanez opens up about her miscarriage and helping others

It was the end of May, and Racing Louisville head coach Bev Yanez was supposed to board a plane to Chicago with her team.

For weeks, she had been telling her husband that she was tired. Not just tired, first-trimester tired. Then, she got hit with a craving for Flamin’ Hot Cheetos — a sign that had foreshadowed her pregnancies with their first two children. So she bought the Cheetos and grabbed a pregnancy test on the way home. Surely, she couldn’t be pregnant — she had an IUD, a hormonal device that is over 99 per cent effective for preventing pregnancies. She was more worried that she had health issues, maybe prompted by the stress of the job.

“I go home, I pee on the stick — full-blown pregnant,” Yanez said. She couldn’t believe it, but ran downstairs to tell her husband. She called her doctor on the way to the airport to figure out the next steps.

After she went through security to join the team, she filled in Racing’s general manager Ryan Dell, because she was still in a state of shock. Then the doctor called back, summoning her to the office immediately. She tried to say she had to go to Chicago for a couple of days, but was told it couldn’t wait. With an IUD, the odds of an ectopic pregnancy are much higher. There was to be no waiting two days — if something went wrong she’d need to be in an emergency room.

So Yanez left. Her husband picked her up at the airport and they drove straight to the office.

“When I get there, they scan me, and they are like, ‘We can’t find your IUD anywhere. You’re pregnant. Eight weeks’,” she said. There are instances when an IUD can migrate into the abdomen, which requires surgery to remove it. Yanez and her husband were bouncing from emotion to emotion, shock to excitement. They heard the heartbeat; they got the printouts from the ultrasound.

“In one day, I peed on a stick, I went from possible ectopic pregnancy to a scan of the baby and walking out with photos and realizing I was eight weeks pregnant,” Yanez said. And then she flew out to Chicago to meet up with her team.

The next day, she told the players at their morning meeting — not the whole story, but enough to explain why they had seen her at the airport yet she wasn’t on the plane. Louisville won the game, 1-0, with a goal from rookie Emma Sears.

Just over a month later, though, Yanez urgently needed a doctor’s care again, heading to the hospital knowing it was an emergency.

“I walked in pregnant, and then I’m just another person. I’ve got my IV. I’ve gotten everything taken care of, but I don’t have a baby and I’m being sent home,” she said.

She had a miscarriage at 13 weeks.

“It felt like such a rollercoaster,” Yanez said. “We just started thinking about if it was going to be a boy or a girl. I’d just got my blood drawn to have the answer.”

She was handed a doctor’s note to explain her absence from work. It was for three days. Yanez couldn’t understand how they had picked three days as a sufficient time frame to “feel better”, whatever that meant, and return to her job as if nothing had happened.

More than anything, she felt alone, even as her husband was by her side. That’s not an uncommon feeling after pregnancy loss, but knowing it’s normal doesn’t make it any easier. She kept thinking it was all a dream. It wasn’t happening to them. They’d wake up, and she’d still be pregnant and none of this would have happened.

She considered flying to North Carolina to watch Racing’s July 7 game against the Courage from the stadium press box. It wasn’t just to keep her mind busy, but because she cared about the team. She thought that she could watch with tactics in mind and radio down to the bench. Then she realized she wasn’t in any state to go anywhere.

“I had a team that was very supportive in that space, and I had a club that was very understanding of what I was going through, whether they had experienced it or not. They could comprehend my heartache,” she said. There was no pressure, just space to grieve. This was bigger than results — bigger than football.

“When everything happened, and I decided that I wasn’t going to be able to travel with the team, I thought, ‘I owe it to these players, and I owe it to this club (to tell them what happened)’. I felt so vulnerable and so uncomfortable in this,” she said.

She met them in the film room, walking in late after everyone was already there. She shared her story. Yanez told them she wasn’t staying for any other meetings or training, that she was there because she wanted her players to hear it from her, not via a text or anything else.

“This is my reality right now, and I’m struggling. I’m struggling massively, but I will be watching. I will be there in spirit. I am just, unfortunately, not in a space to lead you guys,” she told them.

Before Yanez took over as Racing Louisville’s head coach, she had a reputation as being one of the nicest people in the NWSL. Her retirement from Seattle Reign FC ahead of the 2020 NWSL season (a campaign that never happened due to the pandemic) revealed her to be a true pro, a teammate who had garnered love and respect from the rest of her team.

“Bev is one of most genuine, caring, happiest people I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with,” Reign head coach Laura Harvey said in the club’s official release. “The Sunshine Assassin,” one Seattle-based writer called her. A member of the Kansas City Current’s supporters’ group said they loved to shout “overly nice things” at Yanez when she’d take corners, only for her to laugh every time.

She had always wondered who she’d be after her playing career was done. “Who am I without running around on the inside of the white lines? Who the hell am I?” she asked, even as she knew she would shift into coaching. “I didn’t understand I would still struggle massively with an identity crisis because it’s all I’ve ever known since I was five years old.”

Every decision she made was made with soccer in mind from age five on, as she pursued a professional career, first in WPS (winning the 2011 championship with the Western New York Flash) before heading overseas to play in Finland and Japan, then settling in Seattle in 2014.

“It was my identity,” she said. “And then I became a mom, and that’s who I am, and that’s who I’m meant to be.”

Yanez joined Racing as an assistant coach in November 2022. A year later, she earned the head role after the departure of Kim Bjorkegren following another ninth-place finish for the team. Her reputation followed her into coaching; as soon as the head coach role opened, her name was an immediate choice from fans, and the chosen one from the club following “an exhaustive month-long search that included candidates from across the globe”.

Yanez was upfront with Racing when interviewed for the role about how she planned to balance the demands of the job with the demands at home. By the time the draft came around in January, Yanez felt prepared for the specific challenges of such a results-driven role. Above all, she was focused on providing stability for her players and staff. That meant understanding who she was, the headspace she was in, and how that would influence her environment no matter what the result the weekend before was.

“How do I create that stability?” she asked, ahead of that draft. “When all eyes are on me, can I please everybody? No. No, I can’t. But what I can do is try my best to create an environment where they still feel valued.”

In July, Yanez leaned into that open dialogue again. This time to a wider audience. She wanted to explain publicly why she’d be absent from the sidelines, even as the club offered to shield her from having to share the news of her loss. “I said I would like people to know what I’m going through. I would like people to know I’m not in any form ready or able to lead and provide anything that’s needed,” she said.

Racing announced on July 7, ahead of their final regular season match before the Olympic break, that Yanez would not be in North Carolina with the team.

“My family and I are heartbroken with the miscarriage of our baby boy,” Yanez’s statement read. “We are grieving and healing as a family at this time. It is an indescribable hurt that, through sharing my story, I am realizing many have gone through. I’m so grateful for the support around us as we heal our hearts.”

She turned on the game at home, trying to keep herself occupied, and she saw the wristbands the team was wearing, blue and pink ones in her honor.

“Emotionally, I just felt so supported and so loved,” she said. When she returned to training with the team as they participated in the NWSL Summer Cup after the mandatory week off, she thanked them.

“Sometimes, in our world, it’s so, ‘Football, football, football’,” she told her players. “I just want to thank you guys for removing my title for a quick second and treating me like a human being, understanding what I went through, and supporting me in that way.”

Yanez talks about her environment a lot. She thinks about it constantly and what she has to do to ensure it is working the way she has designed it to. After the miscarriage this summer, she knew that she couldn’t be that version of herself that could lead anyone. When she left the hospital with the absent note, she couldn’t understand how they thought she’d be fine in three days. Racing’s leadership gave her space, though, and told her to take the time she needed.

When she returned, one of Yanez’s first conversations was with the team’s communications director. “If there’s anything that I can do in this space,” she told him, “this is where I’d like to speak.”

Louisville was already the first club in the league to provide fertility benefits for their players, in 2021. And while Yanez left her playing days four years ago, she had a call early into her head coaching role with Kentucky Fertility Institute to understand how they were ready to support the club and her players.

On October 16, Yanez and Racing announced a fundraising drive to support women and families experiencing pregnancy loss, with donations open through the end of the month. All money raised will be donated to Resolve, a non-profit that provides support, education, and resources for pregnancy loss and infertility, as well as advocates for expanded access and coverage of medical treatments such as IVF. Kentucky Fertility Institute has pledged to match $5,000 in donations.

Yanez knows she still has a platform and how she wants to use it. But the platform, as a concept, changed considerably since those days with the Reign. After she retired and moved into coaching, Yanez got some important advice that she has carried with her: she’d never have the platform to explain herself or defend her decisions as a head coach, but she’d always be on the platform.

She still has her social media accounts, but is off them completely. She’s not interested in what people might be saying online, and she doesn’t need it either.

“I need to be focused on my job, and I need to be focused as a mother and a wife in my house, and that’s my number one objective. Balancing all that is really important — and then obviously, using your platform for good.”

But just by sharing what happened in July, Yanez has already made a difference. She’s still blown away by the support she received and the conversations she’s having with people who have gone through pregnancy loss or struggled to build their families. She gets stopped at other NWSL stadiums by fans who want to talk to her about this.

As Yanez said, there’s the sense that nobody speaks about it and that people who experience pregnancy loss feel the pressure to brush it under the rug and carry on.

“Why? Why do we have to just carry on? That’s really where it came from,” she said of her desire to release that statement in July. “I’m always going to wonder about ‘the why’. Why did this happen? You feel that guilt. What did I eat? What did I do? Was my job too stressful? What was I doing?”

All those questions did nothing. But turning their story into a positive, that could do something. It could do a lot.

As the fundraiser comes to a close, so does the latest international break. Racing are in ninth place with 28 points, hoping to book their first playoff spot on Sunday, the final day of the NWSL regular season, at second-bottom San Diego Wave. They first need bottom side Houston to come up big against Bay FC, in eighth with 31 points, on Saturday.

Whatever results come, there will still be that memory of watching that game she missed at home, seeing her players in wristbands meant for her. She’s forever grateful for that moment. No one asked them to make that gesture; they just did it. It was much bigger than what she was going through at that moment.

“You never know who was watching that game that day, maybe somebody who has lost a child, and what inspiration the players may have brought to them, and what comfort. Maybe they’ve never told anyone before, and they got to see it on national television and they got to feel supported for the very first time,” she said.

“So very proud to be a part of this team, very proud to be in this group. And that was one of the biggest life moments for me, for sure.”

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Racing Louisville FC, NWSL, Culture, Soccer

2024 The Athletic Media Company