Strength personified, Sara Wiley powered many athletes, teams on way to honor

Sara Wiley played softball at the University of Evansville. "I wasn't very good,'' she said. "I was better at training than playing.''

One day she walked into the weight room and the athletic department's first-ever strength trainer made her an offer she could have refused. "He said, how about you intern for me, and I won't pay you a thing, but I'll give you a T-shirt?' " Wiley said. "I said, 'Sure, that sounds great.' "

She never got the T-shirt, but that was the start of a career that led, this week, to her receiving the Breaking Barriers Award at the National Girls & Women in Sports Day at the Minnesota Awards annual celebration.

Despite her modesty, she was a four-year letter winner in softball at Evansville. She earned a master of science degree in human performance at Wisconsin-La Crosse and joined the University of Minnesota staff in 1994 as an assistant strength and conditioning coach working in the women's athletic department. Now she's the assistant athletic director for Olympic Athletic Performance and the athletic performance coach for the volleyball and softball teams.

Considering her credentials — including an internship at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Center in Colorado Springs — getting a job out of college should have been easy.

"I had my master's and all of these internship and volunteer hours and I'm thinking, 'I'm golden, man,' " she said. "So then I moved back to Indiana and lived with my parents. This is the early '90s. I'm helping out around the house and painting houses to make money, and I would drive downtown after I worked and go to the library and see if there were any strength and conditioning jobs open.

"I'd look at newspapers from around the country, and see if the Strength & Conditioning Association had posted any jobs.''

Known as "Coach Y" on campus, Wiley has become a beloved figure in the athletic department.

She worked with the women's basketball team when Lindsay Whalen led them to the Final Four. Wiley played in a rugby match first, then flew on her own to New Orleans in 2004. When she got to the team hotel, the elevator doors opened and Kadidja Andersson popped out and gave her a big hug. "We can't lose with you here,'' Andersson said.

Wiley would play for the Minnesota Valkyrie, a women's football team, and work closely with the likes of Whalen, Amanda Zahui B. and a slew of excellent volleyball players.

Wiley might be the rare athlete who likes workouts more than games. She learned early that she appreciated the "brutal honesty'' of the weight room, where there are no lucky bounces.

"There is no instant gratification,'' she said. "You don't get anything without working for it. There are so many different ways to teach people with that platform, so many ways to teach them that they can accomplish more than they ever thought they could. It's very confidence-building.

Her career has defined upward mobility. She entered the field at a time when strength training and women's sports were undervalued but on the rise.

Like so many successful women in sports, she is appreciative of those who came before her while recognizing that there is much more progress to be made.

"It's the old saying, 'The first one through the walls gets bloody,' " Wiley said. "I stepped through the door that a lot of people opened for me. It's not always easy to be in a space that is not traditionally occupied by women. But now everything is so different.''