A youth sports coaching program developed by Nike and the University of Minnesota’s Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport is facing criticism over how it defines “girls” and how it frames the reasons girls quit sports.
CoachingHER launched in 2023 as a joint project of Nike and the Tucker Center, offering free digital training modules meant to help coaches recognize unconscious gender biases and stereotypes that Nike said negatively affect girls’ experiences in sports. Since then, the program has grown well beyond youth coaching staffs. The Tucker Center’s Educational Champions initiative now encourages college professors to work CoachingHER modules into courses on coaching education, sports psychology, gender studies, athlete development and physical education. In May, USA Weightlifting announced a partnership giving eligible members access to CoachingHER courses through its learning platform, describing the training as a way to help coaches “recognize and reduce unconscious gender bias.”
Sarah Barker, a former coach and creator of The Female Category, spent months reviewing the program’s training modules and underlying research after first encountering CoachingHER through the Minnesota State High School League. She told OutKick in an interview that the program does not match how it is being presented to coaches.
“Everything about it tells me that it is not, in fact, what it is being sold as,” Barker said.
Barker took the training herself and interviewed the CoachingHER program’s director, Alicia Pelton, in 2024. She said CoachingHER’s current FAQ defines a “girl” as anyone under 18 “who was assigned female at birth or who identifies as a girl,” and describes the program as “inclusive of gender-expansive identities.” Barker said that language was displayed more prominently when she first looked into the program in 2024.
Barker said one training module tells coaches to accept, in her words, “all bodies and identities,” language she said takes on a different meaning once paired with the program’s definition of “girls.”
Her central criticism is that CoachingHER’s focus on coaches’ unconscious gender bias does not line up with the research on why girls actually leave sports. She pointed to a CoachingHER article citing 2024 research from Dove and Nike that names low body confidence as the “No. 1 reason girls quit sports” — even as the program describes its mission as addressing “the unconscious gender biases and stereotypes held by coaches.”
“They knew that the number one reason girls drop out of sports was concerns with body image,” Barker said, adding that in her review of dropout research, including the Tucker Center’s own, coaches’ gender bias “was never listed, not even in the top 15 reasons.”
Barker said Pelton acknowledged body image as the leading factor when the two spoke in 2024. That, Barker said, raised the question of why the program was built so heavily around changing coaches’ attitudes toward gender.
“Why would they build an entire program around blaming coaches when they know that that is not true?” she said.
The Tucker Center and Nike have previously said coaches were chosen as a focus because earlier research identified them as a significant influence on girls’ sports experiences. In a 2023 article about the program’s creation, Tucker Center director Nicole LaVoi and former Nike social-impact executive Caitlin Morris said workshops with girls and coaches helped shape CoachingHER’s emphasis on gender stereotypes.
Nike’s website still promotes CoachingHER as of 2026 and continues to display the Nike logo under the words “Brought to you by.” Barker said Pelton told her in 2024 that Nike funded the program, though she said she was not told the amount. In January 2026, the University of Minnesota described CoachingHER as “powered by Nike.” It is unclear whether Nike currently provides funding.
OutKick asked Nike whether it still funds CoachingHER, what role it plays in developing or reviewing the curriculum, and whether it endorses the program’s definition of girls. OutKick also asked the Tucker Center and CoachingHER to respond to Barker’s criticisms. Neither Nike nor the Tucker Center had responded as of publication.
Barker said she agrees with CoachingHER’s stated goal of keeping girls in sports but objects to how the program defines who counts as a girl and what she says follows from that definition.
“This is a group of people that’s going to need a lot of re-education, a lot of heavy-duty indoctrination,” Barker said of coaches who maintain sex-based distinctions in girls’ sports. “That is what Coaching Her is. It is an indoctrination program for coaches … to normalize boys in girls sports.”
She called the program an example of what she termed “girl washing.”
“Girl washing is calling something beneficial to girls, when in fact it’s actually harmful to girls,” Barker said. “It is not about girls, it is not about keeping girls in sports at all. What’s really galling is that they’re lying about it and getting away with it by calling this beneficial. It is the opposite of beneficial.”
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