Let’s Get Started
Here’s why I started Let’s Go
I was out hiking with my husband Jim in January 2025, a few weeks after our annual coaches’ convention, when I told him I was finally going to do it. I was going to build Let’s Go.
I was 35 years into coaching collegiate track and field by then. Most of those years I spent running programs, and none of them prepared me for how hard it would be to say that sentence out loud.
My husband is always there holding me up and pushing me at the same time. He’s got a finger in the middle of my back, nudging me forward. He always has. So he didn’t need convincing.
I gave myself six months to get Let’s Go off the ground. We held the inaugural Let’s Go Mid-Summer Summit in July of 2025. It was a start.
The idea wasn’t new
I’d been carrying the idea of Let’s Go for years. What I didn’t have during those years was a complete vision of all it could be. But in early 2025, I finally found the right moment to say out loud that I wanted to make it real.
Part of it already existed in another form. Through our coaches’ association, I started a women’s seminar at our national convention years ago. What began as a luncheon and a panel for about 20 people grew over the years. By the time I stepped away it was on its way to 300 women. I gave up the responsibility of running it each year when I went to Tennessee because I had too much on my plate. It’s since passed to a third woman and it’s thriving.
But somewhere in the middle of that run, things got a bit redundant. Every year: work-life balance, how to coach the opposite gender, how to navigate motherhood. I know all those things matter and I don’t want to knock them. They were also the entire conversation, every single year. It was a discussion. It was never a progression.
So my best friend Kathleen Raske and I went to the woman running it at the time and said we had to do something different. She handed it straight back to us:
“Okay, what do you want to do?”
We brought in Katie Taylor for a sit-down conversation. The Olympic gold medalist, world champion and about as far from a track coach as you can get. The room lit up. The next year we brought in Celeste Blackman, who teaches collaboration within companies, and that landed too. I came off the second one knowing something bigger could happen.
Being first
In 2006 I became the first woman to direct a men’s Power 5 track and field program at Penn State University (member of the Big Ten Conference). In 2014, at Tennessee, I became the first woman to lead a men’s program in Southeastern Conference history.
When you’re offered the chance to be a first, you don’t really get to turn it down. I remember thinking it was already past the question of whether I wanted to do it. I had to do it.
What I didn’t see coming was everything else. When I was coaching only women, none of this was an issue. The moment I took on the men, I felt I became a target, and many wanted to see me fail. I couldn’t get a proposal through my own conference. The silent message back was that they weren’t letting me into the boys’ club that fast. I’d been sitting in an SEC room for eight years. It took me a couple of years to understand that a lot of what I was running into wasn’t fair, wasn’t right and had very little to do with the job I was actually doing.
I grew a thick skin fast. I grew it because I needed one.
What got me through was the relationships I built. At Penn State I didn’t even have to interview for the men’s job; my boss believed I should be the one and made it a transition. At Tennessee, the senior woman administrator, Donna Thomas, promised me she’d be there for my first five years, and she was. When you’re the first, you can’t be the only person in the building who believes it’ll work.
The rest was mine to carry. I walked through the door, took a deep breath, straightened my crown, walked into the first team meeting and said we were going to turn this thing around.
I went in as the only one. By the time I left, there were three more women at the table in the SEC.
The call I kept getting
For years my phone rang with the same conversation. Young coaches. Coaches in the middle of their careers. Women I met once between events at a meet who’d ask me to call them the following week, when we could really talk.
They weren’t calling to ask me how to coach.
“I don’t feel heard. I don’t feel understood. And I’m intimidated to move forward.”
That was it, over and over, until it turned into something harder:
“I can’t get anything done. It’s not the coaching part. It’s all the other stuff.”
I’d also seen what was being offered. Years ago I went to a large women-in-sport summit at a five-star resort. Yoga in the morning. A woman who owned an NFL team. An ESPN anchor. It was genuinely cool and I was thankful to attend. I walked away relaxed, but with nothing a college coach could use on Monday.
There’s more energy around women in sport right now than I could have imagined 15 years ago. But very little of it reaches the coach in the trenches.
What I built instead
Let’s Go is a summit, a consulting practice, and camps and clinics.
The Summit is priced so a working coach can actually attend. It’s not a lecture hall. You move, you work, you talk. I call it a workshop and I mean that literally. I coach teams, and I like a room full of people working toward the same thing. Inspiration is part of the end product. But teaching women strategies is the critical component of the Let’s Go Mid-Summer Summit.
The access piece isn’t finished. Right now the Summit is one day in one place. I want it to move to a different region every year so that attending doesn’t mean a cross-country flight and a hotel bill on a coach’s own card. Further out, I’d like it to be a weekend. Two or three days gives you room to work all the way through a topic instead of opening it up and running out of time.
The topics are the ones that don’t usually make an agenda. What to do when you’re not being heard in a staff meeting: before it, during it and after it. How to bring vulnerability into your coaching on purpose, as a style, without putting yourself somewhere you’ll regret. The things women are actually running into, and specific strategic ways through them.
Coaching is an energy-out job. You chose it because you wanted to serve other people, and that takes something out of you. What I want women to hear from us is: see it through. You’re going to be good at this. And do it your way, with your own touches. It’s been done before, but it hasn’t been done by you.
I could have kept mentoring one call at a time. I couldn’t keep up. There were more women asking than there were hours in my week, and I got to the point where I felt like I wasn’t doing anything for anyone. Bringing it together was simply more effective.
Where we go
Let’s Go isn’t a phrase I workshopped. It’s what we say on a track. It’s not a jumper’s line or a sprinter’s line or a distance line. It’s the track and field expression. It’s also the whole philosophy in two words. Here’s where you are. So where are you going? We’ll meet you there.
People ask me what success looks like. I don’t have an attendance number or a revenue target. I want a woman to walk away from a day with us and say that it really helped her. That she got something she could use on Monday.
Throughout my career I have had good coaches around me, mostly men, who took care of me and listened when I asked what on earth I should do. But there was nowhere to actually learn any of it. It was keep your head down, work hard, you’ll be fine.
I want her to leave with an avenue I never had.
The next Let’s Go Mid-Summer Summit is Friday, July 16, 2027, in Storrs, Connecticut.
Save your seat
One day, one room, and no translating required.
About Beth Alford-Sullivan
Beth Alford-Sullivan is the Founder of Let’s Go. Beth serves as the Director of Track & Field and Cross Country at UConn, where four seasons have produced 16 consecutive BIG EAST team championships and a 2026 senior class that graduated undefeated in conference competition. In 2026 she was named USTFCCCA Northeast Region Coach of the Year for both women (indoor) and men (outdoor), and guided UConn to its best NCAA Championship team finish in more than a decade.
She served as head coach of the U.S. women’s team at the 2013 World Outdoor Championships and was on the U.S. Olympic coaching staff for the 2004 Athens Games. In 2006 she became the first woman to lead a men’s Power 5 track and field program, and in 2014 the first woman to lead a men’s program in any sport in SEC history. Across her career she has coached more than 300 All-America honorees and 16 individual NCAA champions.