W32; FIFO volunteer coach and mum becomes CEO of her swimming dreams

Will it be easy? Nope. Will it be worth it? Absolutely.

And so a third-generation artistic swimming and swimming coach from the United States found her lane at a remote Australian pool more than 1500km from her home in Perth and some 18,000km from her native Long Island, New York.

FIFO volunteer coach and fulltime mum shatters tyranny of distance to become CEO of her swimming dreams

FOR mother-of-two and head coach Briana Crisp (pictured), née Preiss, juggling – and accumulating frequent flyer points – has become a way of life in the remote desert climate and on pool deck at Karratha Swim Club.

The passionate Pilbara coach is helping put her swim club – and herself – on the map with her recent inclusion in Swimming Australia’s Women in Coaching Strategy, the W32 Project – a six-month national program designed to empower emerging female coaches with the leadership, confidence, networks and technical skills required to thrive in performance sport.

But the 34-year-old’s story starts far from the red dust of Western Australia but in East Hampton, New York where she received a swimming scholarship to attend university and competed as a nationally ranked swimmer and artistic swimmer for four years before moving in the strokes of her mother and grandmother to become a third-generation coach.

Briana grew up poolside watching her mother and grandmother lead artistic swimming and swimming teams, instilling in her not just a love for the water but also a model of strong, capable women.

As an early teen, Briana was making vision boards at school with a single goal in mind: to go to the Olympics as a coach.

“I don’t think I’ve ever really looked at it as a male versus female space,” Briana said.

“To me it was so natural to experience, and to eventually become, a strong female lead.”

Flash forward past her student-athlete scholarship and MBA from Lindenwood University in Missouri to Thailand where Briana’s coaching pathway with the Australian artistic team almost took her to Tokyo Olympics in 2020 before COVID-19 forced a reschedule and life change.

A job with Australia’s high performance artistic swimming team, based in Perth, then took her on a detour she never expected – to Karratha, a remote mining city in the Pilbara region of Western Australia.

During a fly-in fly-out week off with her husband Kai, Briana offered to volunteer on pool deck at the local swim club.

“I just wanted to be involved and get back on deck and three months later they offered me the head coach role. By that point (2021), we had moved permanently to Karratha, and I haven’t looked back,” she said.

Today, Briana spends six days a week at the Karratha pool, coaching the local club that’s grown to 100 members and in school holidays, she travels to Canberra to work with the nation’s most promising artistic swimmers as Youth National Head Coach.

“I’m a big believer in the untapped learnings you can get from sports that aren’t your own,” Briana said.

“There are a lot of things I learnt as an artistic swimmer that I used to my advantage as a swimmer and vice versa. Now is no different except I do so as a coach.”

Briana and Kai are also parents to Madison (3) and Brooklyn (18-months) and both girls spend majority of their time poolside with mum – just like Briana and her sisters did.

Briana said: “I watched my mum juggle coaching, work and raising three sporty daughters. Our homework and dinner were often on pool deck. So, for me, having kids and coaching at the same time wasn’t something I ever thought twice about.”

“Sure, I get ‘mum guilt’ dragging my girls to meets or waking them up at six am, but then I take a step back and think how lucky we are for the community we live in and the support we have. Plus, there’s a creche at the pool and a team of babysitters.”

Life in a remote town is not without its challenges – especially for a high-performance coach committed to ongoing learning and excellence.

“It’s a big fish, little pond scenario,” Briana admitted.

“You stand out in a good and a bad way, plus high-performance sport requires a lot of travel and Australia is far from small.”

Enter the W32 Project.

“For me, W32 is an amazing network opportunity and an open channel to hear like-minded stories and find other coaching mums,” she said.

“It’s nice to know I’m not alone – even as an American who comes from an artistic swimming background.”

From a small-town pool on Long Island to the far reaches of the Pilbara region, through passion, resilience and community head coach Briana has bridged the widest of oceans.

And while her vision board may have once had a single destination, Briana hopes she is showing women in all sport that coaching – and life – is made up of many highways.

Learn more about the W32 Project here

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