With TrackGirlz, which I founded the same year I started coaching, I started to think about how middle- and high-school years are so formative for girls and how track and field helped me with my development during this time period. So, when USA Track and Field called me about coaching after I retired, for me it was, OK, what can I do to be an example now? My focus shifted from myself to what I’m creating for others, what I’m leaving behind. Mechelle Lewis Freeman | When I was growing up, my mom always did everything she could to make sure my sister and I had access to opportunities. What inspires you to lead women and create opportunities for girls through track and field? Q&A With Mechelle Lewis FreemanĮxperience Life | After the 2008 Olympics, you shifted your focus from your own dreams to those of others. And in her work with the Life Time Foundation, she’s helped pilot the launch of movement programs for schools.įor Freeman, this all adds up to helping as many people as possible discover their own power and potential. She leads trainings for Ultra Fit, Life Time’s performance-focused group training program, teaching fellow coaches the science of moving optimally, so they, in turn, can coach others. She is head women’s relay coach for USA Track and Field. She founded TrackGirlz, a national nonprofit that provides access to track and field to middle- and high-school girls. In 2007, she won gold at the world championships in Osaka, Japan, and took home two silver medals from the Pan American Games - momentum that helped her secure a spot on the women’s track-and-field team for the 2008 Olympics.Īfter retiring from competition in 2010 and returning briefly to the advertising world, Freeman refocused her career - now to support new generations of athletes. “I realized if I wanted to make the Olympic team, I had to 100 percent commit to that vision,” she says. Soon she saw her athletic dreams hadn’t died after all. But she’d been considering it again, so she started training. At that point, it had been four years since she’d run competitively. ![]() “That was a time of understanding myself and coming into my power,” she adds.Īs her sense of self became clearer, plan A reappeared.įreeman’s college track-and-field teammates had continued to compete and were qualifying for world championship teams some had made the 2004 Olympic team. “It was a time of pure isolation,” she recalls, noting that the lessons she’d learned from her parents - move from a foundation of faith, get clear on her values, hold herself accountable to her vision - guided her through the period. She moved in with a coworker, completed the internship, graduated, and was offered a position with the firm. ![]() Rather than leave New York brokenhearted and empty-handed, Freeman found a way to make her plan work. She’d moved to the city for the internship and was planning her wedding when the engagement was suddenly called off. Two weeks into an unpaid practicum, however, her plan B threatened to unravel. She set her sights on a master’s degree in marketing and communications and imagined herself settled in a corner office of a New York City advertising agency. When an injury sidetracked her running career at the University of South Carolina, Mechelle Lewis Freeman wasted no time launching her plan B.
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