WE GOT GAME
How Emory became a sports powerhouse — and why our model for student-athlete success works so well.
BY ROGER SLAVENS
What does it take to build an athletics program where winning, academic excellence and full engagement in college life aren’t competing priorities — where student-athletes can pursue all three without compromise?
Emory has been answering that question for more than 40 years.
Nineteen varsity sports. Thirty-five NCAA team national championships. Two hundred and fifty-four Academic All-Americans. One unifying goal: excellence in every arena.
Season after season, across pools, courts, tracks, fields and fairways, the Eagles keep winning. Emory has finished among the nation’s top 10 Division III athletics programs almost every year since the Learfield Directors’ Cup standings were introduced in 1995. In 2024-25, the Eagles soared all the way to No. 1 and they finished fourth this year.
This past year, the women’s golf team won its third national championship and second in a row, the men’s basketball team reached the NCAA title game for the first time, and both soccer programs made the Final Four, with the women’s team also reaching the title game. In addition, Emory Athletics celebrated two national players of the year — Ben Pearce 26B in men’s basketball and Zimo Li 28C in women’s golf.
While the Eagles have become one of the most consistent success stories in Division III athletics, they’re also winning in the classroom, across campus and in the lives they build beyond sports.
For men’s basketball head coach Jason Zimmerman, academic and athletic excellence have never been competing forces.
“We don’t have to apologize for being great in the classroom and in competition,” he says. “We can do both.”
Carys Code 27B has lived that from the top of the leaderboard. She was the 2025 NCAA Division III individual national champion for women’s golf and also helped lead the Eagles to back-to-back team championships. Off the course, she’s a standout student at Goizueta Business School, one of the country’s best.
“How many places could I get both a top-tier education and compete on the national stage?” Code says. “At Emory, I’ve been able to do both — and it’s an opportunity and experience I’ll never forget.”
Winning so consistently like this, across the board, requires a plan.
Keiko Price Carter, Emory’s newly named vice president for student engagement and dean of Campus Life and outgoing athletics director, is under no illusions. Getting to the top of Division III athletics was hard. Staying there is harder. That work never ends, and it shows up in the students Emory recruits, the coaches it hires, the support it provides and the culture it protects.
BUILDING AN ATHLETICS PROGRAM THE RIGHT WAY TAKES TIME, INTENTION AND COMMITMENT.
When she arrived in 2020 to serve as the Clyde Partin Sr. Director of Athletics, Price Carter brought an elite athletic résumé with her. A former standout competitive swimmer at UCLA who went on to hold leadership roles at major college programs, Price Carter understood what serious athletics demanded of everyone working in the field. She also understood what made Emory unique, and what it could become.
Here, ambition did not have to mean imitation. “We are never going to settle for good enough,” she says. “We always aim to be the best.” For Price Carter, the standard applies everywhere — on the field, in the classroom and beyond.
“I've always been a believer that hard work gets rewarded — and that felt like the moment where all of our hard work finally paid off.”
However, such clarity and commitment did not arrive overnight. Joyce Jaleel, senior director and a longtime Emory Athletics administrator, remembers a department that looked little like the one today. When Jaleel arrived in 1986, the same year Emory joined the University Athletic Association (UAA), the department was still small and undeveloped.
“There were very few sports, and they were unorganized, mostly men’s teams,” Jaleel says.
Joining the UAA, led by the ambition of then-athletic director Gerald Lowrey, changed the trajectory. Emory suddenly belonged to a conference of academic peers — among them the University of Chicago and Carnegie Mellon — that treated athletics as serious intercollegiate competition. “That put us on the map,” Jaleel says.
The move also extended the university’s commitment. Sports were added, specifically women’s sports. Coaches were hired. Staff roles grew. The department had to create the more sophisticated systems that competitive athletics require: recruiting, scheduling, travel, compliance, athletic training and student support, all while fitting within Emory’s rigorous academic culture.
Growth like this required a university that believes athletics is a key part of student life. And Emory’s leadership, across decades and administrations, has consistently made that case.
Jon Howell understood that kind of deliberate work. Like Price Carter, he had been a competitive swimmer before moving into coaching. He came to Emory from Clemson, having previously competed and coached at Kenyon — at the time the powerhouse in Division III swimming.
But Emory was not Kenyon. Howell remembers another coach warning him early that he could not simply recreate that program here.
“In some ways he was right,” Howell says. “If we were going to be successful here, we had to create something that was uniquely Emory.”
The path to national success ran through Emory’s own strengths: its academic culture, its institutional commitment and its ability to recruit students who demand excellence in everything they do.
It worked. Under Howell, Emory swimming and diving has won a combined 16 NCAA team championships on both the women’s and men’s sides. The program has also developed standout individual champions, including Andrew Wilson, the first Division III swimmer ever to make the U.S. Olympic team and a gold medalist at the Tokyo Games.
What Howell built in the pool has helped inspire sustained success across all 19 varsity sports. Excellence is now the expectation, not the exception for Emory Athletics programs.
STUDENT-ATHLETES WHO CHOOSE EMORY ARE DRIVEN TO WIN — AND TO MAKE THE MOST OF EVERY OPPORTUNITY.
Jaleel has watched thousands of Emory student-athletes come through the program over nearly four decades. What strikes her most is not their talent. It is their hunger.
“They are driven individuals who set high standards in every part of their lives,” Jaleel says. “They want to be the best at everything.”
That hunger is what India Chiles recruits for every season.
Before becoming Emory’s softball coach, Chiles played at the University of Tennessee, was named SEC Player of the Year and went on to play professionally. She knows firsthand what high-level athletics demands — the training schedules, the travel, the competition pressure and the discipline required to perform consistently. She also knows what it looks like when a program takes those demands seriously without letting them crowd out everything else college has to offer.
When she first visited Emory, the athletic intensity she found on the field surprised her.
“Emory, in ways, felt very much like what I was coming from at UT,” Chiles says. “Sure, the stadiums aren’t as big, but you get this feeling that this is truly a sports school.”
In recruiting, she pushes athletes to define the experience they want as competitors and as students. She puts it to them directly: What does playing actually mean to you? What will it feel like? When they describe that feeling, she shows them Emory will give them exactly that and more.
The athletes who arrive at Emory prove the point. They compete because they want to — not because they have to.
“We all start intrinsically motivated,” Chiles says. “They have that drive, that passion to show up and perform. That never goes away here.”
Ben Pearce had plenty of options when it came time to choose a program. But when he found Emory, something clicked. The men’s basketball standout would go on to become the program’s all-time leading scorer and help carry the Eagles to their first NCAA Division III championship game.
“I would still put this opportunity on top of so many others,” he says. “There’s nowhere else I would have rather been.”
Pearce is precisely the kind of student-athlete Price Carter seeks. “We want the best of the best minds and athletic ability on our teams,” she says. “And we’re not going to compromise that.”
And what she and the program demand shows up not just in individual performance but in how those student-athletes make each other better. In men’s basketball, Pearce found that in teammate Tyson Thomas 26B.
“Even if you were to take basketball out of it, Emory is a really, really special place. There are so many great opportunities.”
They were in the same recruiting class, playing the same position. In a different environment, Pearce says, the relationship could have felt adversarial, even threatening — two players chasing the same minutes, the same role, the same recognition.
At Emory, it became something else.
Thomas, Pearce says, was “probably the best teammate that I’ve ever had.” He watched the game closely, shared what he saw and became, in Pearce’s words, “an extension of the coaches.” When the team wobbled, Thomas was often the one pulling it back together.
“He always tells us we’ve got to connect and stay connected,” Pearce says. “We can’t break when things are getting bad.”
That is what exceptional recruiting produces: not only skilled competitors, but teammates who hold each other to the same standard they set for themselves.
Code also knows what the daily commitment between teammates and coaches can produce.
“I’ve always been a believer that hard work gets rewarded,” Code says, “and winning those titles felt like where all of it finally paid off. My teammates and coaches have shown me ways to get better, to work harder and keep pushing for success.”
For Nikki Boon 29PhD, the push is almost the point. A neuroscience PhD student and one of Division III’s most accomplished track and field athletes, Boon has won national titles in the indoor pentathlon and outdoor heptathlon, set Division III records and represented the Netherlands in the Women’s Decathlon World Championships, where she won gold and earned the event’s official designation of “World’s Greatest Athlete.”
“I like to do difficult things,” Boon says.
Here, that instinct has found a team around it. Boon came to Emory as the only heptathlon athlete on the roster, unsure whether that would leave her isolated. Her demanding training schedule — competing across more events than anyone else on the team — became something of a legend. During grueling weekly workouts, teammates would watch her still-unfinished event list from the sideline and joke that their workout could always be worse. “Just look at Nikki’s,” they’d tease.
“I thought I was going to be secluded,” Boon says. “But everyone has been so kind and supportive.”
Sydney Holden’s path back to competition was harder than most. During her first year at Emory, torn cartilage and a femur rotated 30 degrees forced her to confront a fear she had carried since age 5 — that she might never run again. The surgery required breaking the bone, rotating it back into position and inserting a titanium rod for stability. Holden 26C had to re-establish connection with her right leg and relearn to walk, then run, then sprint.
Two years of competition lost. But not lost alone.
“My coaches and teammates kept me involved and encouraged me throughout my recovery,” Holden says. “From day one, they helped me manage my schedule and athletic commitments, offering advice and sharing laughs.”
She bounced back. This past indoor season, Holden earned all-region honors as part of Emory’s distance medley relay team. Now a double major in human health and integrated visual arts, she is more determined than ever to become an orthopedic surgeon and to help others reclaim what she nearly lost herself.
What student-athletes become starts with who they are when they arrive. But it depends just as much on the coaches and staff guiding them along the way.
COACHES HERE DEVELOP ELITE ATHLETIC SKILLS AND INSTINCTS, ALONG WITH THE RESILIENCE AND CHARACTER TO MATCH.
The coaches at Emory are more than in-game tacticians. They are recruiters, teachers, planners, mentors and culture builders. They ask students to pursue championships, but also to grow enough that the journey changes them.
Jaleel sees that work happening across programs and between them.
“The coaches feed off of each other,” she says. “They pick each other’s brains.”
One program breaks through. Another studies how it happened. A coach asks a colleague how to handle a slump, a leadership issue, a recruiting question or the pressure that comes with winning. Around Emory, Jaleel says, “success breeds success.”
That cross-program momentum can make a breakthrough season look sudden from the outside. Jason Zimmerman knows better. The men’s basketball run this season may have marked new territory for the program, but Zimmerman does not describe it as a one-year surge.
“I think it’s grown from many, many years of sustained work from our staff, our players and our alums,” he says.
Howell has spent nearly three decades proving the same point in swimming and diving. At a time when college programs can rise and fall quickly, Emory’s strongest programs have been developed more patiently.
Sustained success can look automatic, but it is not.
“We can never take our success for granted,” Howell says. “It’s always something we earn.”
That is why, even in a program accustomed to winning, the work never stands still. Recruiting demands shift. Training science advances. Athletes arrive with new expectations and coaches have to meet them where they are.
What stays constant, Howell says, is the community of people committed to improving themselves and helping those around them do the same.
For Howell, coaching at Emory also means paying attention to everything outside the pool. He and his staff are trying to help students become the best swimmers and divers they can be, but he believes they underperform if that is their only focus.
Such conversations stretch well beyond practice: research opportunities, medical school applications, internships, wellness, confidence, leadership and life after graduation.
“I probably have more of those conversations than I do swimming conversations at some points of the year,” Howell says.
That broader view shapes how he measures success. The best memories are not always the national championships or personal records set, he says. Instead, they come from the students who arrive uncertain, struggle, grow and leave stronger.
“I arrived on campus with 80-plus teammates who were my friends from day one. My memories with them, coaches and others mean the world to me.”
He thinks of one swimmer who had a rough freshman year and missed the travel squad entirely, then returned as a sophomore transformed — an All-American, an All-UAA swimmer and someone beginning to think about how he could lead.
“It’s not about winning,” Howell says. “It’s about how we support each other and grow.”
That idea, that the sport is a means, not just an end, runs through the coaching culture Howell describes.
Bridget Disher 18C 20PH lived it first as a player and now carries it as a coach.
When she arrived at Emory as a student, women’s tennis had already won six national championships.
“I felt this very palpable connection to that legacy,” she says. “There’s something in the air — the confidence that comes from what those teams built, but also the responsibility I had to carry with it.”
Now, as head coach of the women’s team, she is the one teaching the next generation what that level of excellence requires. She sends books to recruits before they arrive. A written code of values is posted in every locker. The culture, she says, is a conscious effort.
She knows her players are after rankings, titles and lineup spots. But the larger purpose is what tennis teaches along the way.
“We care, of course, about the results,” Disher says. “But what we really care about is the people that they become when they leave this program.”
The tennis, she says, “is a vehicle for that.”
Disher’s path points to something larger — coaches who could have gone anywhere and chose to build something here.
“A lot of people ask me if I ultimately want to coach somewhere else,” she says. “I love coaching, but what I really love is coaching at Emory. I can’t see myself doing much else.”
Softball coach Chiles came to Emory having experienced other program environments and chose something different. “I feel like I hit the jackpot with her,” Price Carter says.
Chiles walked into a program that needed it. When she was hired, the roster had only nine players, barely enough to field a team.
Chiles did not come in trying to erase what existed. The players who were there had stayed for good reasons. But the program needed depth and a clearer sense of what it could become.
Her first goal was modest but essential: get the team above .500. The next was postseason. Both happened. The deeper work was helping players see they were capable of more.
“I worked a lot on their mental game,” Chiles says. “I just tried to meet them where they were emotionally and mentally and build them up. I let that be the catapult for success on the field.”
What also makes that work possible at Emory, Chiles says, is what she doesn’t have to fight. She has nursing majors on her roster — students whose clinical schedules run 12 hours at a stretch. At many programs, that would be a nonstarter.
“That’s easily the number one ‘no’ you get in other college athletics programs,” she says. “I don’t say no.
And those athletes in nursing are also my top performers on the team.”
That support matters everywhere. At practice. On the road. In the classroom. And in the moments when the most driven students need someone beside them.
CHAMPIONSHIPS REFLECT A WINNING CULTURE. COMMUNITY AND BELONGING ARE WHAT SUSTAIN IT.
By the time they arrive at Emory, most student-athletes already know how to push themselves. They have spent years chasing faster times, cleaner strokes, sharper swings, better grades, more challenging classes and one more level of achievement.
What they do not always know yet is how much they will need one another.
Crow Thorsen 25B 26C found that almost immediately. He came to Emory as a swimmer with the same ambitions many Eagles carry: compete at the highest level, succeed academically and make the most of everything the university could offer.
The culture that drew him in started before he even arrived.
“I chose Emory because I loved the swimmers and coaches I talked to throughout the recruiting process,” he says. “It meant a lot that so many upperclassmen took the time to connect with me, even though we wouldn’t be overlapping on the team.”
That sense of belonging only deepened once he arrived.
“I arrived on campus with 80-plus teammates who were my friends from day one. My memories with them, coaches and others mean the world to me. I’ve learned that it’s all about relationships,” Thorsen says.
With such support, he became a national champion, record holder and 13-time All-American in swimming.
For Jaleel, that web of support is both cultural and structural. Culturally, it starts inside teams, where student-athletes arrive as strangers and leave as lifelong friends, bound by shared early morning practices, road trips and exam weeks. Beyond that human core, it extends structurally through Eagle Edge, Emory’s student-athlete development program, which helps athletes navigate the academic, physical, emotional and professional demands of college life.
The goal is simple: no student-athlete should have to face everything alone.
Price Carter has been deliberate about what that support looks like in practice. She has invested in resources that go well beyond what many programs offer, including an embedded mental health clinician available to student-athletes. Nutrition programming, sports psychology support, massage therapy and strength and conditioning resources — many of these made possible through the generosity of Emory’s donors — round out a support infrastructure anchored in one core conviction.
“I think it’s really, really important to have those types of supports and systems in place,” she says, “so that student-athletes can feel like they’re getting the best well-rounded experience through our department.”
The facilities must reflect that commitment. A new track, resurfaced tennis courts and updated locker rooms and training spaces are all part of an ongoing effort to match the program’s competitive ambitions.
The commitment extends beyond facilities and resources.
“Keiko sets the tone and gives us the freedom,” Chiles says, “but it’s up to each of us as coaches to make sure these students are being taken care of and that they have the mental support, the physical support and the emotional support so that they can succeed on all fronts.”
That culture of care extends into how student-athletes engage with student life more broadly. They are encouraged to engage fully with the college experience by joining student organizations, finding leadership opportunities and creating communities outside sports.
“The student-athletes themselves formed many of these groups,” Price Carter says.
“I've learned to stay grounded and appreciate the opportunities I have.”
Leah Wang 27B is one of them. A history and business major on the women’s soccer team, Wang founded Emory’s Asian and Pacific Islander Student-Athlete group while also balancing varsity athletics with advocacy work that has taken her before Congress in support of Title IX. Her efforts earned her recognition as a Billie Jean King Youth Leadership Award regional honoree.
“We Eagles have a strong sense of camaraderie and mutual support,” she says. “Whether it’s studying together, showing up for each other’s events or building friendships off the field, the student-athlete community plays a meaningful role in my Emory experience.”
For Wang, managing it all has been a lesson in perspective as much as discipline. “I’ve learned to stay grounded and appreciate the opportunities I have,” she says.
Belonging, at Emory, becomes something larger than friendship. It becomes the foundation everything else is built on. That is what all of it is ultimately for. Not just the student-athlete. The whole person.
EMORY STUDENT-ATHLETES SET THE PACE IN THE CLASSROOM — AND GRADUATE READY FOR THEIR NEXT PURSUIT.
What makes Emory different is the scope of what student-athletes can pursue here: serious athletic competition, an exceptional education, research opportunities, professional development and a campus community that supports all of it. Price Carter expects them to take full advantage of every bit of it — and the results show they are.
In each of Price Carter’s five years leading the department, Emory student-athletes have recorded a higher GPA than the general student body. At a university built on academic intensity, that is a rare and telling distinction.
The postgraduate record makes the case even more sharply. In 2026, swimmer Sven Becker 26C, women’s tennis player Izzy Antanavicius 26C and women’s cross country and track and field runner Madison Tiaffay 26C brought Emory’s total number of NCAA postgraduate scholarship recipients up to 136 across program history. That includes 119 since 2000, second in the nation behind Stanford. The award recognizes student-athletes who excel academically and athletically while serving as leaders on and off campus.
At Emory, the combination of athletic and academic excellence is more the norm than the exception.
Lily Kennedy 26C is one example. She came for the basketball and stayed for everything else. A biology major and guard on the women’s basketball team, she earned UAA Winter All-Academic honors and received the Emory Pathways Center Domestic Award, which funded her summer research at the university’s Draganova Lab in biochemistry.
“Athletics originally drew me toward Emory, but the amazing academics ultimately convinced me this is where I wanted to go,” Kennedy says.
The support she found went well beyond the classroom.
“Our coaches are incredibly dedicated to helping each player succeed,” she says, “like sending us information on networking events and internships.
“My teammates and I spend time together outside basketball, support each other in our personal and academic lives — they provide a shoulder to lean on when you need it.”
Carl Suddler has made it his mission to make sure student-athletes see that possibility before their time runs short. An associate professor of history, Suddler shows up at games, mentors athletes and connects them with community opportunities across Atlanta. In his classes, sports become a way to examine power, culture, race, community and responsibility. He teaches students to see how the visibility they gain through competition can be used well beyond the playing field.
“Education is about freedom,” he says.
He has watched that awareness take hold in ways he didn’t always expect. Suddler knew Pearce since his first year at Emory — encouraging him, crossing paths across campus, always suggesting he take one of his classes. In his final semester, Pearce enrolled in Sports, Power and Society, an interdisciplinary course Suddler co-teaches that uses Atlanta as a living classroom to examine how sports shape culture, power and everyday life. After their last class meeting, Pearce pulled Suddler aside.
“I really wish I had taken one of these classes sooner,” Pearce told him.
“Athletics originally drew me toward Emory, but the amazing academics ultimately convinced me this is where I wanted to go.”
By then, Pearce had already begun putting the ideas into practice. He founded the Emory Sports Business Association, a student organization focused on the sports business landscape, and co-founded the Atlanta Sports Business Symposium with teammates, drawing more than 250 attendees to its inaugural event this spring.
He was named an Arthur Blank 100 Scholar and used his name, image and likeness (NIL) rights — the framework that allows college athletes to profit from their personal brand — to run a basketball skills camp in his hometown.
For Suddler, it comes down to this: the platform student-athletes earn through their sport, combined with the faculty access and educational depth available at a place like Emory, can become what he calls “a superpower of support” as they move into the next phase of life.
Pearce felt that beyond basketball. Even setting aside the record-setting career and the championship run, he says, the experience held up.
“Even if you were to take basketball out of it,” Pearce says, “it’s a really, really special place. There are so many great opportunities.”
This is what sets the Emory experience apart: not just the chance to keep playing, but the chance to keep expanding.
Winning is the visible part. The records, the championships, the postseason runs — these are the proof that the program has learned how to compete.
But the deeper measure is what happens after the whistle, after the season, after the final game: student-athletes who leave Emory with degrees, faculty mentors, research experience, internships, alumni connections and a clearer sense of what they can do with everything they have built here.
Sports may bring them to Emory. But, in turn, the university gives them the world beyond it.
John Baker Brown and Daniel Christian contributed additional reporting for this story.
THE MEASURE OF EXCELLENCE
Emory Athletics’ Sustained Success
Emory Athletics has built one of Division III’s most successful programs — a culture of excellence across 19 varsity sports and spanning more than 40 years. The numbers tell the story.
A Perennial TOP 10 Program
Emory has finished among the nation’s top 10 Division III programs 25 times in 29 Learfield Directors’ Cup seasons, including a first-ever No. 1 finish in 2024-25 and a fourth-place finish in 2025-26.
35
NCAA NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIPS
Emory’s first NCAA championship came in women’s tennis in 1996. The most recent is women’s golf in 2026.
Emory Sports Teams by NCAA Championships
12 Women’s Swimming and Diving
4 Men’s Swimming and Diving
6 Men’s Tennis
8 Women’s Tennis
3 Women’s Golf
3 Volleyball
136
NCAA Postgraduate Scholarships
Among collegiate sports’ most prestigious honors, NCAA postgraduate scholarships are awarded to student-athletes who excel both academically and athletically. Since 2000, Emory has produced more NCAA postgraduate scholarship recipients than every institution except Division I Stanford University.
TWO
PLAYERS OF THE YEAR
Emory student-athletes earned top-of-their-sport national accolades in 2026, adding individual excellence to another standout year for the Eagles.
Zimo Li, Women’s Golf
Ben Pearce, Men’s Basketball
232
UAA Championships
The University Athletic Association, formed in 1986, is widely regarded as Division III’s premier athletic conference.
254
ACADEMIC ALL-AMERICANS
An annual national honor for the country's top scholar-athletes — Emory ranks among Division III’s all-time leaders.
OXFORD COLLEGE’S WINNING FORMULA
As Emory Athletics continues to thrive nationally in Division III sports, another championship culture is flourishing 31 miles east of Atlanta.
Since 1999, Oxford College Athletics has grown into one of the National Junior Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NJCAA) top nonscholarship programs, sponsoring 10 varsity sports. This spring, athletic director and head men’s basketball coach Roderick Stubbs was named the 2026 NJCAA Athletic Director of the Year.
Stubbs, who joined Oxford in 2005 and became its athletic director in 2013, has emphasized long-term student-athlete development over hardware. “Winning national championships is not the end goal; we want to be able to provide that excellent athletic experience for the student-athlete,” he says.
That philosophy has produced results both on and off the field. For 14 consecutive years, every varsity team has maintained a cumulative GPA above 3.0, with student-athletes earning 492 NJCAA Academic All-American honors. On the competitive side, teams have captured 24 national titles during Stubbs’ tenure, including both men’s and women’s tennis championships in 2024-25, when the program also finished 16th nationally among 160 nonscholarship programs in the Daktronics Cup standings.
“I want Oxford to keep growing,” Stubbs says. “We’ve built a strong foundation, and the next step is expanding our facilities and enhancing the structure that supports our programs.”
ALUMNI PROFILE
MAKING THE CALL
From a student-athlete at Emory to a pioneering voice in women’s sports, Jenn Hildreth has built her career around storytelling, helping to drive attention to the games and athletes she covers.
The ball hits the back of the net. For a split second, everything else stops — the crowd caught between silence and eruption, players frozen before the moment breaks loose.
Then an excited voice cuts through: “Roddddmannnnn!”
Soccer star Trinity Rodman has just scored a stoppage-time winner in her return from injury for the Washington Spirit. For the audience watching on TV, the moment doesn’t belong just to the player. It’s elevated by the voice behind it.
That voice belongs to Jenn Hildreth 99C — an ESPN play-by-play broadcaster whose calls have carried the FIFA Women’s World Cup, the NCAA Women’s Basketball and Soccer Tournaments, the Olympic Games and the National Women’s Soccer League.
Last year, she added another role: published author. The book she co-wrote, “Tough as a Mother,” explores the realities of motherhood through the stories of professional and amateur athletes, coaches and media professionals balancing demanding careers with their roles as mothers.
Long before the national broadcasts and book launch, though, Hildreth was a student-athlete at Emory, figuring out what she was going to do with her life.
“Just being at Emory really exposed me to so much more of the world than I’d ever had an opportunity to taste,” she says. “To come to Emory and hear from these people who come from all these different backgrounds and experiences — it really opened my eyes.”
FINDING HER VOICE
Hildreth arrived on campus in 1995 after growing up in upstate New York. A three-sport athlete in soccer, basketball and track, she quickly found community through competition. “I found my people through athletics, as you so often do,” she says.
At the same time, she was beginning to see storytelling as a possible career path. Her journalism and English coursework pushed her in that direction, as did a class trip to South Africa that proved to be one of her most formative experiences at Emory.
The class learned about the South African history and culture before visiting the country for three weeks. Hildreth used the time to produce a profile on women in sports there — an early glimpse of the work that would later define much of her career.
After graduating from Emory in 1999, Hildreth joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) as a reporter, following an internship with the newspaper. Though she cut her teeth as a print journalist, she found herself drawn toward television. She joined the AJC High School Sports Show, a weekly program covering local prep athletics.
Hildreth learned the business from the ground up. “I was pulling cable at Georgia Tech games, logging tape, just doing whatever I could,” she says.
A connection to Fox Sports South followed, beginning a decade-long run in regional TV. At the time, however, opportunities for women in sports broadcasting looked very different than they do today.
“Where I saw women in sports television was largely on the sideline,” she says. “Very rarely did you hear or see them in the booth. So I didn’t even have any idea that could be something that I would aspire to.”
A SEAT IN THE BOOTH
Hildreth spent years working as a sideline and feature reporter covering ACC and SEC collegiate games before a producer encouraged her to try play-by-play. “I was terrified to try it,” she says. “But I did.”
The shift changed her career. “It truly is an art,” she says of play-by-play announcing. “It is not just calling what you see. You’re telling a story, but you don’t know what that story is until the game happens.”
That approach carried her from regional broadcasts to some of the biggest stages in sports, including multiple Women’s World Cups and March Madness.
Over the course of her career, Hildreth has watched women’s sports move from the margins toward the center of the sports landscape. “Twenty years ago, that was really pretty true — you’d watch women’s sports in maybe the Olympics or a World Cup, but there was not nearly the buzz around it that there is now,” she says. “Now you see so many more people getting their eyes on the sport and waking up to what we’ve known for a long time, which is that the product sells itself.”
Hildreth is honored to have been part of that growth. “I’m really proud to be a female voice that calls women’s sports,” she says.
TALES OF MOTHERHOOD AND SPORTS
The experiences that led to “Tough as a Mother” came from another side of her life entirely. “I was in all these crazy scenarios and situations,” she says.
At the time, Hildreth was traveling constantly while raising young children and trying to navigate an industry that had not fully adjusted to the realities of working motherhood. “I remember sitting on a suitcase in the middle of a bathroom in Hartsfield-Jackson pumping milk — not even in a stall,” she says. “I was scared to show the struggle because I didn’t want anyone to look at it as a weakness. I didn’t want anyone to think, ‘Oh, she’s a mom now — she can’t handle this type of work.’”
Eventually, those experiences became the foundation for the book she co-authored with Aimee Leone, a longtime media executive at Fox Sports. “We wanted people to be able to hear these women’s stories in their own voices and to connect with them,” she says.
The title reflects the central idea behind the project. “You think about mothers as these soft, nurturing, graceful, loving, gentle people,” she says. “All of those things are true — but we are also tough and gritty and determined.”
That mix of vulnerability and resilience is something Hildreth still tries to capture in the stories she tells on air. That instinct, she says, traces back to her years at Emory. “I think Emory gave me the perfect opportunity to dream big and to dare to fail,” she says.
ALUMNI PROFILE
A CAREER FULL
OF CURVEBALLS
When injuries cut short his baseball playing days, former Emory pitcher Connor McGuiness forged a different path to the big leagues — as a coach
and analytics guru for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Like most kids who grow up playing baseball, Connor McGuiness 12C dreamed of one day becoming a World Series hero. He often imagined himself on the mound under the bright stadium lights, fastballs popping into the catcher’s mitt in the chill autumn air, the crowd roaring with every strike.
Years later, a version of that dream came true. McGuiness has won three World Series championships as a member of the Los Angeles Dodgers — not as a pitcher, but as one of the coaches who helped guide the team to October glory.
He serves as the Dodgers’ assistant pitching coach, a role at the forefront of baseball's analytical revolution. Part strategist, part teacher and part psychologist, he studies pitch spin rates and player biomechanics, dissects high-speed video and helps stars like Shohei Ohtani and Clayton Kershaw make the tiny adjustments that win games and championships. It’s a role that barely existed in Major League Baseball a decade ago.
It might not be the path he once imagined. But it has brought him exactly where he always wanted to be.
FINDING EMORY
McGuiness grew up in the Washington, D.C., area and considered other strong academic schools before choosing Emory.
“It was in the South. It was warm. And the educational opportunities were immense,” he says. “On the baseball side, the team was coming off an NCAA Division III College World Series run. And when I visited campus during an alumni weekend and saw how many former players came back, that sealed the deal.”
He arrived in Atlanta with ambitions of pitching professionally. Unfortunately, his body had other plans. Shoulder. Elbow. Back. “I was the guy who was always hurt,” he says.
The injuries pushed him toward studying the game from an unexpected angle. With no dedicated pitching coach during his junior and senior years, McGuiness began helping teammates with mechanics and game planning while he was sidelined. “By default, I kind of became the pseudo pitching coach,” he says.
McGuiness graduated in 2012 with a degree in economics and a passion for analytics. A course on game theory and strategic decision-making taught him to think about pitching as sequencing and anticipation — a constant chess match between pitcher and hitter to find an advantage.
Connor McGuiness (left) watches Los Angeles Dodgers ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto during a bullpen session.
Connor McGuiness (left) watches Los Angeles Dodgers ace Yoshinobu Yamamoto during a bullpen session.
AN UNCONVENTIONAL PATH
After a year exploring options postgraduation, McGuiness was recruited back to Emory as a pitching coach. He helped guide the Eagles to back-to-back Division III College World Series appearances, including a national runner-up finish in 2014. He later joined the coaching staff at The Catholic University of America while earning a master’s in business management. He spent a lot of that time immersing himself in baseball’s rapidly evolving analytical landscape.
In 2016, he attended the league’s Winter Meetings and found Dodgers officials describing the same problems he’d been thinking about. “They told me, ‘Yeah, we have all of the data. But none of our coaches know how to use it,’” McGuiness says.
The Dodgers began sending him video and scouting assignments, then offered him a role in its minor league system — an unconventional hire in a sport that had long favored former major leaguers for coaching positions. He cut his teeth with low-level teams including the Great Lakes Loons and Rancho Cucamonga Quakes, working with young pitching prospects such as Walker Buehler, Dustin May and Julio Urías.
McGuiness believes one of the most important parts of coaching is understanding individual pitchers rather than forcing everyone into the same blueprint. He points to Urías as one example. The young left-hander had spent years trying to emulate Clayton Kershaw, but McGuiness thought he was fighting his natural delivery. “I told him, ‘Your curveball doesn’t have to be 12-6. It can just fit your natural arm path,’” McGuiness says. “He replied, ‘I’m allowed to do that?’ I said, ‘Yeah, man. You’re allowed to do anything you want.’”
Urías trusted the adjustment. Three years later, he was on the mound for the final out of Game 6 of the 2020 World Series — the Dodgers’ first title in 32 years.
BASEBALL’S NEW FRONTIER
In his 10th season with the Dodgers organization and 7th with the big league club, McGuiness now works inside a pitching operation defined by screens — video rooms, motion-capture rigs, biomechanics dashboards. “The amount of information in today’s game is unbelievable,” he says. “My role is helping pitchers make sense of it without overwhelming them.”
Every day, he reviews reports generated by systems such as Hawk-Eye, which uses radar and high-speed cameras to track every pitch and every movement on the field down to fractions of an inch. The data piles up by the inning — spin rates, release points, the precise angle of a wrist at the moment a curveball is born.
McGuiness’ job is to translate it. He might pull a young starter aside to show how his glove flares open a half-second before every changeup — a form of “pitch tipping,” where body language or arm angle gives away what’s coming to the batter. He might walk a reliever through video frame by frame, pointing out a subtle drift toward third base that’s flattening the break on his curveball. Or he might suggest a pitcher could squeeze a tick more velocity out of his fastball by driving harder off his back leg, then sit in the bullpen until it clicks.
But technology is only part of the equation. Kershaw, the future Hall of Famer, has 17 years of MLB experience — the kind of hard-won instinct no algorithm can replicate.
“I’ll have Kershaw next to me during a game watching the opposing team’s pitcher. Before the pitch, he’ll say, ‘This is 100% a slider right here.’ And of course it’s a slider. He almost always nails it. There’s no book or analytics that can replace his experience on the mound.”
Regardless of how much data McGuiness has at his fingertips, he knows the game always has more to teach — especially when you’re standing next to some of the sport’s most seasoned veterans. Surprisingly, he says there’s not a lot of difference between coaching student-athletes at the Division III level versus coaching Ohtani, Kershaw or last year’s World Series MVP Yoshinobu Yamamoto. “Their bankrolls are different,” he says. “The cars they’re driving are different. But the same issues pop up." Confidence. Fatigue. Preparation. Trust.
For all the information now available in baseball, McGuiness believes coaching still comes down to reading people — understanding how different players think, communicate and respond under pressure. The best adjustments, he says, are often as much psychological as mechanical.
STILL A FAN
Even after three championships, there are moments
McGuiness has to pause. “Sometimes I catch myself zoning out and being a fan,” he says. “I have a front-row seat to one of the greatest teams ever assembled.”
One of those moments came during Freddie Freeman’s walk-off home run in Game 1 of the 2024 World Series, when Freeman predicted exactly how the at-bat would unfold moments before the swing. “As soon as he hit it, all of us just lost it. It was such a cool moment,” McGuiness says.
Then there’s Ohtani. “Shohei is incredible,” McGuiness says. “His actions speak volumes. And he’s always thinking.”
What impresses him most is Ohtani’s curiosity. Even as one of the biggest stars in sports, he constantly asks questions about teammates, pitching design and player development. Interactions like that still catch McGuiness off guard. He grew up watching players like these. Now he coaches them.
It is not the version of baseball success he imagined as a kid. But somewhere between the data, bullpen sessions and October celebrations, McGuiness realized he had found something just as meaningful — a place in the game he never stopped loving.
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