Interview with Julianne Sitch

University of Chicago head coach Julianne Sitch joins me for a conversation about setting standards, balancing life as a soccer coach, and dealing with large rosters.

Coach Julianne Sitch (simply known as Sitch to her friends and players) was kind enough to talk with me a few weeks ago. Sitch is from the Chicago area and played at DePaul University where she set school records for points, goals, and assists while leading the program to their first NCAA tournament and racking up league and national recognition. She played in the Women’s Professional Soccer league and National Women’s Soccer League, winning a Playoff Championship in 2009 with Sky Blue FC. In the offseason Sitch played in Australia and Sweden where she led Hammerby FC to promotion.

As a coach she worked with U16 girls at Chicago City Soccer Club, ODP, and in the national team system. She was an assistant coach for the Chicago Red Stars and the University of Chicago women’s team before she took the head coaching for the boys program at the school in 2022. In her first season she won an NCAA Division III Men’s Soccer Championship making her the first female coach to win a national title with a men’s team.

Coach Sitch, thank you so much for taking the time to chat! Before jumping in, I have to ask… Which one of these was better – leading Hammerby to promotion, winning the National Championship with Chicago, or winning the Playoff Championship with Sky Blue?

Oh geez. Winning the Sky Blue championship is different and unique in its own way because the women’s league was the second one to be created in the US and it was a lifelong goal of mine to play professionally.

What made winning the men’s national championship so cool is that I got to watch the guys celebrate together and have that moment of pure joy after winning. That moment of celebration, with the hugs and the smiles, was so cool for me because I was fortunate to have that experience as a player and I’ll remember those moments forever. So to watch them celebrate and go through that was really special to me because I know it’s something that they’ll never forget. They’ll always smile when they think of that day and how they had the moment of celebration as a team. So I think that one holds a little bit more weight just because I know what that feels like from my playing experience.

That’s awesome. We’re diving in here now, but is there anything that upsets you as a coach?

Not really, no. If I’m getting angry it’s because there’s a lack of effort. That’s the one thing that makes me upset -- you’re not working hard or you have a bad attitude.

What do you do when that happens?

Well we have pretty clear expectations and a strong culture of who we are, and because of that identity it’s easy to go to that player and say “Hey, this is not who we are.”

Then you have to take it case-by-case. If they’re struggling because they’re stressed or something, you just have to say “It’s okay. Take a breath. We can handle this.” People are going to make mistakes, things won’t be perfect, and there’s going to be off days. Even off weeks. And when players feel that way, they don’t need to be dug into the ground even more. So it’s about understanding what’s happening and approaching those situations in a way where we can then move forward and be better for it.

Creating those standards and that sense of culture goes beyond just speaking to your players. How do you create accountability or ensure there’s high standards with the staff you work with?

Those are conversations you have in the interview process when you’re hiring an assistant coach, or if you’re taking over a program and talking to the assistant coaches there. You normally work with people who have a lot of the same standards and expectations that you have, so then it’s just making sure that everyone is one the same page moving forward. That’s incredibly important because you want to make sure you’re relaying the same message across the board and it’s not coming in different ways.

Doing this with all the players and staff seems like a lot. Does it ever get tiring?

Well the season can be a lot. You play eighteen games in a short amount of time, and for us at the Division III level, we fly to almost all of our conference games. So we’ll leave Thursday and come back Sunday and you just kind of hop from one game to another. But it’s important that on our days off we take a bit of time for ourselves, so I try to prioritize coming home and having dinner with my wife. I need that moment where I can come home and not talk about soccer – which doesn’t always work because my wife used to be a college coach – but we try to have that moment where we’re present and connect with each other.

It’s possible to go through a whole day, or an entire season, without really connecting. But that’s not good, because you think about how you want to be the best for your team and that requires taking care of yourself as a whole person, so you need those moments to recover.

And as I said, sometimes it can be hard to get away from the sport because we’re both coaches. We’ll say “No soccer talk tonight. We’re not going to talk about work,” and within 5 minutes we’re saying “Oh, today this happened at work!” But that’s also because it’s our joy. We like doing it. We do have to put time limits on when we’re not allowed to talk about soccer, otherwise it would dominate every conversation, but we try hard to find those balances.

You’ve talked before about how your mom and dad supported your career as a player. What role does family play in your position at University of Chicago?

It’s important to have those connections to the families and get them involved. We have a double header weekend for our conference and that’s when we hold a family barbecue. It gives families an opportunity to connect and to make friends who they can chat with in the stands while they’re cheering for their son. And it’s great to have those moments because then when I see them I can reach out and say hello. If we’re talking about having this brotherhood and this culture within our team then we should have that same culture within our entire program.

Do you talk to parents directly about the standards you set and the culture you create?

I don’t talk to parents specifically about our team culture. I think the guys share that message with their families, and the previous staff and alumni have created and sustained that dynamic over time. When we went to the finals we had unbelievable support from past players who were in the stands and that will continue to be passed down to future teams.

I coach youth soccer so my largest roster will be around 18 players. College soccer can have huge rosters though. How do you manage so many players to ensure everyone is bought in and trying hard?

Yeah, we have 30 players on our roster: 4 goalkeepers and 26 field players. And unfortunately you do have injuries sometimes, so you do want a big roster where you can train and play 11v11 at training and go through different tactics. But when I was playing there were times when I didn’t like that I didn’t make a travel roster or that I wasn’t playing as many minutes or that I got put into a different position. I never acted out on that — and it’s okay be upset about the situation — but you still have to show up the next day and work hard and buy into the team.

But I’m thankful that I had all of those experiences because it’s helped me to be able to work with my athletes. It’s just part of playing sports. The ups and downs of it and the wins and the losses and all the life lessons. If my road was straight up or linear or plateaued I wouldn’t be able to have these conversations or give light to some of the players. It’s also helped me on how to guide some of those conversations, because as a player there where times when I didn’t know that I wasn’t on a travel roster and I found out through an email or something else. So as a coach, I always do my best to talk to the athletes first before putting anything out.

What does it look like when you’re communicating something like that to your athletes?

Oh that’s the worst part of my job. Because no coach wants to leave any of their players behind. If you could travel everyone all of the time you would. Unfortunately that’s not how it works. And it is such a hard part of your job to tell an athlete who comes every single day, who works hard, who is a part of the group, that they didn’t make the travel roster this time around. It sucks. I hate it. It’s a part of my job that if I could eliminate, I would.

Are those face-to-face conversations?

Yeah, that’s my first priority. If I can talk to them face-to-face after training, I will. Before we release the travel rosters I’ll meet with the players and have that conversation before we send everything out. If I can’t get to them in person, I’ll always call them.

Reading and listening to what other female coaches have said about coaching men, they believe that they can’t just be as good as a male coach but they actually need to be better. The season before you took over, the University of Chicago men’s team lost in the second half of overtime in the NCAA semi-finals so the margin to improve on that was incredibly slim. Did you feel a sense of pressure that you had to deliver?

I just tried hard to not think about those things. I think that would exist whether I was taking over a men’s program or a woman’s program. You can always have that pressure on yourself. But I think it definitely helps knowing the University of Chicago after having spent some time there on the women’s side, knowing what the program is about, and I had known the previous coach. That stuff definitely helped but you feel that pressure whether you take the men’s job or women’s job. I tried hard to stay true to myself and to go in with the things that I knew I could add or the things I believe in. I didn’t want to change for the job.

For me, I’m coaching athletes, so these are the exact same things I would be talking about even if I was coaching a women’s team. It doesn’t matter whether I’m coaching a men’s program or women’s program, my standards don’t change. My expectations don’t change. My culture doesn’t change. I was just taking the job to coach, and that’s how I really tried to look at it.

Once again a huge thanks to Coach Sitch for taking the time to chat. If you want to read more of my interview with her, keep an eye out for the next publication of the United Soccer Coaches’ Soccer Journal.