Double Duty

Pregnant With Twins and Pushing Her Team Toward a Championship, Terps Basketball Coach Brenda Frese Has Her Hands (and Belly) Full

Back in the fall, Brenda Frese, head coach of the highly ranked University of Maryland women's basketball team, revealed a secret to her players in the locker room. The scene was captured on video to be used by the team's marketing department.

"We're really excited, because we have got two verbal commitments that are going to be coming and being a part of our team," said Frese, 37, a blond motivational machine in sweat clothes.

The two new people, she said, "are close to my heart."

Not knowing what to expect, the players were apprehensively quiet. "I wanted to show pictures to you guys because they are going to be here this spring," Frese said, reaching into a folder.

She pulled out photocopied sonograms of the fraternal twins she is carrying.

The crowd, as they say, went wild. "You're pregnant!" The players whooped and screamed and exchanged high-fives and hugged Frese and each other.

Only now, 12 games into the season and 6 1/2 months into the pregnancy, is reality setting in. Having a child -- um, children -- is a tectonic-shift event. No matter how super-womanic Frese may be, she is being forced to scale back her coaching and her career.

This becomes apparent if you watch her on and off the court for several days. Already she has stopped running the practices and pacing the sidelines during games and screaming at the top of her lungs for defensive players to get back in position. Looking calmer than most any other coach you've ever seen, she sits through games in a black leather office chair. There's a pillow at her back to cushion a bulging disk. Standing rarely, clapping occasionally, she disseminates her court wisdom through assistants. During timeouts, her chair is rolled to the front of the bench so she can sit while instructing the team.

Of course many women must learn to juggle childbirth and workplace, but coaching high-level college basketball -- an increasingly competitive, high-profile, lucrative sport -- is unusually demanding, physically and psychologically. And the coaches interviewed for this story agree that someone who does it successfully is a rare bird.

Life is metaphor for sport. The college basketball season -- from the first chance to recruit in July to the tournament mayhem in March -- mirrors the nine months before birth. A game day, like the birth process, begins slowly, builds swiftly and crescendos into an outburst of controlled chaos. A full term lasts 40 weeks; a game, 40 minutes.

There are obvious upsides to having children while running a major college sports program: "I know what kind of role models our players are," she said, "and just how wonderful they will be with kids." She also thinks her children will be good for the team.

There are downsides. Rival coaches, Frese says, are using her pregnancy to persuade potential players to avoid coming to play for the Terps. "Some people try to spin it as 'How long will she be out?' That's a terrible thing. We're talking about two miracles of life here, not about a basketball game. It's irritating."