How Sheryl Swoopes's Pregnancy Changed Professional Sports Forever

Sheryl Swoopes was at the top of her game in 1997. The year before, she and the United States' women's basketball team won gold at the Centennial Olympics in Atlanta. Shortly after, Swoopes was recruited to play for the Houston Comets and presented as one of the leading faces of the newly-created WNBA. She even received one of the sweetest endorsement deals any athlete could hope for: a partnership with Nike to release the Air Swoopes, companions of the famous Air Jordan line. And then, just before the inaugural season of the WNBA, she announced that she was pregnant. How could this happen? Swoopes says in Swoopes, espnW's upcoming documentary about the basketball star. At the time, very few female athletes had interrupted their careers to have a child--and none at all who were expected to debut a new sports league.

Today, increasing numbers of the best athletes in the world are publicly declaring that they're fitting children into their careers before retirement. Baby announcements and sleek images of nude, pregnant celebrities are ubiquitous. In July, Olympian Kerri Walsh Jennings posed for ESPN the Magazine's annual Body Issue; last September she and her husband announced on the Today show that she'd been five weeks pregnant at the London Games (where she won a gold medal). Those Olympics, heralded as the "Year of the Woman" by Time, also included Malaysian markswoman Nur Suryani Mohd Taibi (seven months pregnant), and field hockey striker Keli Smith (Post-Partum Year One). In 2009, Los Angeles Sparks player Candace Parker discussed her pregnancy, saying, "My whole career has been trying to please people in basketball. Now it's time to please myself." In 2006, there was Olympic slider Diana Sartor from Germany, and the year before that WNBA star Tina Thompson who says in Swoopes, "I don't know if anyone thought that was possible until [Sheryl] did it. Once she did, then it became pretty normal."

The idea of a woman being active, pregnant or not, wasn't always considered normal, or even healthy. A 1912 article from Harper's Bazaar asked if "athletics [are] a menace to motherhood," and less than 75 years later, "Can Sports Make You Sterile?" In 1985, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists published its first guidelines for exercise during pregnancy and advised that women be conservative about movement and avoid bringing their heart rates up. Just three years ago, famed marathoner Paula Radcliffe said it was hard to respond to people who asked her if she was "shaking the baby to death" when she ran during her pregnancy.

Today, though, adverse effects of activity on a pregnant person's body have been negated so thoroughly that researchers have shifted their focus to other areas. Dr. James Pivarnik, director of the Center for Physical Activity and Health at Michigan State, and his colleagues are now examining just how much exercise benefits a pregnant person with regard to diseases like pregnancy-induced hypertension and gestational diabetes. Overall, Pivarnik worries more about everyday women who believe that they, too, can (or should) train like an Olympic athlete while with child.

"People at that level are just different," he says. "Their bodies respond better to training and they can do so much more than the average person physically and psychologically, that pregnancy becomes a mild physiologic distraction. Most of us can only dream of being that skilled, pregnant or not."

Pivarnik also worries about whether pregnant athletes will receive support--not body pillows or a chaise longue, but social support. "These athletes have the same concerns as you and I who aren't going to work out when it's snowing," he says. "It can also be difficult for them in terms of financial ability or having a partner and family to help. But because it's the Olympics they have to figure it out."

Hannah Storm, the director of Swoopes and long-time sports journalist, says having that social support was crucial for Sheryl Swoopes in 1997. Storm chronicled the first years of the WNBA up close as the league's first play-by-play announcer. According to Storm, the league and media were surprised when Sheryl made her announcement, but eventually shrugged it off. "She was coming off this gold-medal win at the Olympics and was such a big star at Nike that it never really occurred to anybody she could get pregnant," Storm says. "But she was and everybody just had to deal." Instead of sulking that its star had performed a natural, biological function without permission, the WNBA decided to market Sheryl as an everyday mom--a convenient hook for the league's effort to peg itself a kid-and-family-friendly outlet. The network filmed her pregnant and shared her progress in promotional material for the WNBA and, more importantly, Houston Comets coach Van Chancellor made it possible for Swoopes to reintegrate herself into the team dynamic just six weeks after giving birth.

"The day [Sheryl] came back was a big deal. No one had ever done that before--especially not on a team sport," Storm says. "Cynthia Cooper deserves credit for being such an exceptional leader and player that season. Sheryl deserves credit for making it normal, and Coach Van Chancellor deserves credit for allowing all of the women on his team to be women."

Treating them like women meant not treating his players like "babies or little girls." Curfews for women's teams were more common than curfews for men's--but not with the Comets. The women could go out at night, Sheryl was allowed to bring her baby along on the team bus and breastfeed during halftime, and she gradually regained her place on a team that had actually been succeeding without her. "Van Chancellor had strong women with strong personalities but he was never overbearing or abusive," Storm says. "He was so cool about it, and so accepting. Just a very laidback Louisiana edge that gave Sheryl and the rest of the team enough leeway to work it out, and they did."

That mindfulness is spreading to the world of collegiate sports where players' age and circumstances often make them more vulnerable to judgment and abuse if they become pregnant. In 2007, the NCAA reviewed its policies concerning student-athlete pregnancies after an episode of Julie Foudy's recurring ESPN program Outside the Lines drew national attention to the hardships of pregnant athletes. In "Pregnant Pause," several athletes revealed that coaches included scholarship agreement clauses outlining that pregnancy was a reason to forfeit their student aid. In others cases, coaches actually asked students to have abortions if they wanted to keep their scholarships. The resulting furor in the media was referenced in a 2008 article called "The Invisible Pregnant Athlete and the Promise of Title IX" published in the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender. Author Deborah L. Blake wrote:

The question of how to treat pregnant athletes exposes a central and unresolved issue in the discourse about sex equality in sports more broadly: whether sports, a social institution designed for all and still largely populated and controlled by men, can or should accommodate women to the extent that they differ from men. Pregnancy poses this question so starkly because it is the quintessential sex difference. [...] One could imagine a model of sports constructed for women from the outset that would build in space for athletes to become pregnant without marking them as deviant or unwelcome.

In response to the controversy, the NCAA quickly devised a set of gender-neutral guidelines for collegiate athletics programs across the country. Nancy Hogshead-Makar, senior director of advocacy at the Women's Sports Foundation and author of the guidelines, said that addressing the stigma surrounding student-athlete pregnancy was crucial.

"When we were writing this, two NCAA student-athletes who got pregnant hid the babies, had the babies, and killed the babies--all because there was this shroud of shame," says Hogshead-Makar. "Athletes on scholarship are usually unmarried and their babies unplanned. Our society is not kind to young women who are pregnant, particularly to women of color, and women without a job. Certainly from a societal perspective, keeping them in school is best."

The NCAA's resulting handbook, "Pregnant and Parenting Student-Athletes," is a surprisingly comprehensive response to student-athletes' unique circumstances as members of elite communities on campus, and young people in need of a degree. Of note: Female athletes in collegiate programs should not be given rules like curfews that male athletes are not also instructed to adhere to. Additionally, no athlete should lose her scholarship simply for becoming pregnant but, instead, presented with a standard amount of time to recover and meet her athletic benchmarks--as in the case of any other recovering athlete--as well as an extra year in which to meet her academic obligations. Finally, though no allowances are currently made for male athletes whose partners become pregnant, Hogshead-Makar notes that transgender student-athletes like Kye Allums (who cannot receive hormone treatments due to NCAA regulations) are given the same options as other female teammates. In the future, Hogshead-Makar hopes to see more awareness of these guidelines among all students, whether they play sports or not.

"For anybody, having a child is a huge life event that changes fundamental relationships," she says. "Recognizing that this is a really big deal was important. It's great that all of these schools have moved to provide counseling and academic services, but then to have a kid be so ashamed they don't take advantage of them? The issue is about educating students so they can still parent if it happens to them, still participate in sports, and still keep their scholarships and get their degree."

Since the passage of Title IX 40 years ago, women's participation in collegiate sports has increased by more than 500 percent, and female athletes have been represented in every Olympic sport. And in the 14 years since Sheryl Swoopes gave birth to her son, Jordan, Hannah Storm says the WNBA has become a "mom-friendly" sport. Superhuman athletes having kids has arguably become just another tally on the board.