How motherhood impacts athletic career
Fear drove professional netballer Renae Ingles to explore a career change. But she found an unlikely coach to get her past the angst of overanalysing her performance: motherhood.
Renae Hallinan would have driven Renae Ingles nuts.
Renae Hallinan, the old Renae – before her marriage to NBA star Joe Ingles and the arrival in 2016 of their twins Jacob and Milla – would scrutinise every detail of her netball performances. She demanded perfection.
Every lift in the gym, every vertical leap and every pass would be trailed by a series of questions over how that action could be improved even further.
“Before kids I’d want to tick every box. Everything would have to line up,” she said. “I’d always be asking the coaches and high performance staff what more I could do. I realise now what a pain in the bum I was.
“Given the perspective of marriage, parenthood and study, I now appreciate the bigger picture. Not everything has to fall perfectly into place.”
Super mums
The comparison between pre and post family begs further investigation over whether elite female athletes can reproduce their best after childbirth. Or could they perhaps perform at a higher level?
Renae’s baseline was greater than most. She played almost 160 national league games for the Melbourne Phoenix, Melbourne Vixens and Adelaide Thunderbirds before taking a break from netball to begin a family. During this time, she won Commonwealth gold (2014), a world title (2015) and in 2013 was awarded the game’s highest individual honour, the Liz Ellis Diamond.
After taking maternity leave in 2016, the wing defence returned to elite sport in 2017 with the Thunderbirds before relocating to the US to support her husband Joe whose Utah Jazz charged into the NBA playoffs.
