Why Did USATF Get Rid of Women’s Relay Coach Mechelle Freeman After Three Straight 4 x 100 Gold Medals?

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The women’s 4 x 100-meter relay at the 2022 World Championships in Eugene was supposed to be a blowout. On paper, the Jamaican team that lined up in lane 5 at Hayward Field on the night of July 23 was one of the strongest ever assembled. The trio of Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Shericka Jackson, and Elaine Thompson-Herah had swept the individual 100m podium, one year after doing the same at the Olympics. Fraser-Pryce, the greatest women’s sprinter ever, and Thompson-Herah, the second-fastest 100m woman in history, had split the last four Olympic 100m titles; Jackson had just run 21.45 to win the 200 in Eugene, the second-fastest women’s time ever. One year earlier in Tokyo, those three had teamed with Briana Williams to win Olympic 4 x 100 gold in a rout. They were expected to do the same in 2022.

The United States in lane 3 was the most likely squad to spring the upset, but this was hardly a vintage American team. Sha’Carri Richardson, who had burst onto the scene at the previous year’s Olympic Trials, had stunningly bombed out in the first round at the US championships and failed to make the team. Gabby Thomas, the Olympic bronze medalist in the 200m, had pulled her hamstring ahead of USAs. Thomas had been named as part of the relay pool but was far from her best and would not compete in Eugene.

Down their two biggest stars, this is who lined up for Team USA that night:

• Melissa Jefferson (first leg): The 21-year-old had finished just 8th in the 100 at the NCAA championships a month earlier for Coastal Carolina University before surprisingly winning the US title and finishing 8th at Worlds.
• Abby Steiner (second leg): In the midst of a career year, she broke the collegiate 200m record to win the NCAA title for the University of Kentucky before winning the US 200 title and finishing 5th at Worlds. Though she had run the 4 x 100 for Kentucky all year, the final represented her first-ever relay leg for Team USA.
• Jenna Prandini (third leg): Failed to make the 200m final in Eugene but had run legs on Team USA’s silver-medal-winning 4 x 100s at the 2015 Worlds and 2021 Olympics.
• TeeTee Terry (anchor leg): Finished 3rd at USAs in the 100 but failed to make the World Championship final. The 2022 Worlds was her first relay at a global championship, though she had anchored USC to NCAA titles in 2019 and 2021.

But as any track fan knows, the 4 x 100 relay is not run on paper. The Jamaicans did not run poorly — in fact, their time of 41.18 would have been the fifth-fastest in history before that night — but they did not run as well as the Americans, who stormed to gold in 41.14. Considering the stakes, the opposition, and the stage — the first World Championships ever on US soil — that golden evening at Hayward endures as one of Team USA’s greatest relay victories.

The victory also served as vindication for USATF women’s relay coach Mechelle Freeman. For the most part, American track & field is a meritocracy: for meets like the World Championships, the team picks itself based on the results of the US championships. If you’re not on the US team in an individual event, it is because three people beat you at USAs or because you failed to run the qualifying time. The exception is the relays, where the coach decides who gets to run in the final. And Freeman, who was in her first year as head relay coach, had made some big decisions at the 2022 Worlds.

The first was to use Prandini instead of Tamari Davis on the third leg. Davis was the faster 100m runner — she had finished 4th at USAs, while Prandini had not even made the final. But the 19-year-old Davis, who turned professional during her junior year of high school, had zero high-level relay experience, while Prandini had run the third leg on Team USA’s silver-medal squad at the 2021 Olympics.

The second, more controversial call, was to sub in Steiner for Aleia Hobbs for the final while keeping Terry on anchor. Hobbs, the 100m runner-up at the US championships, had been the best 100-meter runner for Team USA at the 2022 Worlds, finishing 6th in the individual final, and had run the second leg on the US team that clocked the fastest time in 4 x 100 qualifying (41.56, though the Jamaicans rested their big guns). Based on their individual race results in 2022, it made little sense that Prandini and Terry had places in the 4 x 100 team but Hobbs did not.

But when she took over the job as relay coach, Freeman was determined to do things differently, using video analysis and data collected from relay practices to incorporate an element of objectivity to the subjective process of selecting a relay team. And the data Freeman had from Team USA’s relay camp said two things: Prandini was the fastest at running the turn on leg 3; and Prandini and Steiner had the fastest baton exchange numbers of anybody. She wanted them on legs 2 and 3, and she wanted Terry on anchor, even if it meant benching Hobbs, who had missed relay camp after testing positive for COVID.

“[Jamaica] had the leg speed,” Freeman said on the Ready Set Go podcast in November 2024. “The only way we were going to sneak the win was the baton speed. So my plan was, every space and every zone, we were going to make it up.”

The numbers backed up Freeman’s decision: Steiner split 9.86 in the final, easily the fastest second leg*, closed out with a seamless handoff to Prandini.

*4 x 100 splits, typically taken from the middle of each exchange zone, are tricky, given teams hand off in different spots. But Steiner’s split shows that the US team did the best job of getting the baton from 100m to 200m as quickly as possible.

The 4 x 100 is a tough event to master, yet over the next two years, the American women continued to rack up victories: gold at the 2023 Worlds, gold at the 2024 World Relays, gold at the 2024 Olympics. The far less technical 4 x 400 was almost as successful, with golds at the 2022 Worlds, 2024 World Relays, and 2024 Olympics (the only blemish: a DQ at the 2023 Worlds when Alexis Holmes left the exchange zone early).

So how did USATF reward Freeman for her tenure as US women’s relay coach, during which the team won seven golds in eight outdoor championship races?

It didn’t.

USATF chose not to renew Freeman’s contract at the end of 2024. She and men’s relay coach Mike Marsh were replaced by Darryl “D2” Woodson, an assistant on the 2024 Olympic staff who took over as coach for both sexes.

Which prompts an obvious question: why?

The decision to move on from Marsh was not a huge surprise. Expectations are always high for US relays, especially during Marsh’s tenure, during which American men dominated the 100m at Worlds and the Olympics by winning six of the nine individual medals on offer. Marsh’s men’s 4 x 100 team won World Championship gold in 2023 but could only manage silver in 2022 and were DQ’d at the 2024 Olympics.

Team USA men’s relays at outdoor global championships, 2014-24

Freeman’s departure, however, raised eyebrows. Marsh said he enjoyed working with Freeman and acknowledged that her teams had a better record than his (the two worked together to coach the mixed relay).

“I felt like she was an incredible teammate and even a little more personal, just a really good friend,” Marsh said. “And I respected her professionally. I have nothing but good things to say about her capabilities as a coach.”

Team USA women’s relays at outdoor global championships, 2014-24

In its press release announcing Woodson’s hiring, USATF stated that he will report directly to Wallace Spearmon, General Manager of International Teams and Coach & Athlete Services, and Michael Nussa, General Manager of High Performance, though the relays will fall largely within Spearmon’s purview.

Spearmon declined to be interviewed for this story. USATF Chief of High Performance Operations Robert Chapman offered the following statement about why Freeman’s contract was not renewed.

“Like any professional sport, we evaluate coaches at the end of each season,” Chapman said. “After careful consideration, we decided to not renew the contracts of both relay coaches. We are going in a new direction for the LA28 quad, with a goal of six gold medals in the six relay events. This is what the USOPC has challenged us with in this quad, and we will deliver.

“With any team, with any outcome at the end of the year, it’s not just the outcome of wins and losses that is the sole metric by which you are going to evaluate personnel and programming. There are many, many other factors that go into it, both visible and behind the scenes, that are going to influence it. And certainly in this case, those things were all taken into account and were part of the calculus to determine the change in staffing and programming.”

The decision to replace Freeman and Marsh came shortly after USATF restructured its High Performance division, which Chapman said stemmed from a message from USOPC. USATF relies on USOPC grants for a healthy chunk of its funding (in 2023, USOPC provided USATF with $5.8 million in grants — or 16% of USATF’s $36.7 million revenue). In 2024, USOPC bumped USATF’s grant to $6.2 million, but it came with a message: continue to innovate, move to a more “centralized” model where accountability is clear and rests with USATF’s national office rather than volunteers and contractors, and win six relay gold medals at LA 2028.

No country has swept the relays at the Olympics since the US did so at the last LA Olympics in 1984, before the introduction of the mixed relays.

USATF relay coaches are contractors whose contracts are reviewed and renewed on an annual basis. A “centralized” model means that the national office and its permanent employees — in this case, Spearmon, who reports to Chapman — are more involved, and thus more accountable for the team’s successes and failures.

In previous years, the relay coaches would choose the discretionary spots for the 4 x 100 and 4 x 400 relays. If an issue arose, there was a committee in place to address it, which included athlete representatives, the USATF High Performance Chair, and the USATF head coach for the championship in question. Moving forward, the High Performance division will have more input on discretionary selections as well as the organization and execution of pre-championship relay camps. Woodson will report to Spearmon, who served as USATF assistant relay coach from 2017-19 and stepped in to coach the men’s relays at the 2021 Olympics when head relay coach Orin Richburg could not attend.

But if the national office is now more accountable, by definition the relay coach must be less accountable. Who will pay the price if/when something goes wrong? Woodson? Spearmon? Someone else? And will this new model make any difference when it comes to winning gold medals on the track?

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“Her record speaks for itself”

In her more than 50 years in track & field, Sue Humphrey has always tried to find room in the sport for women. Humphrey was named USATF’s first High Performance Chair in 2000 and served as head coach for the 2004 US women’s Olympic team. But she said she often felt overlooked during her career despite coaching an individual Olympic gold medalist in the high jump (Charles Austin, 1996).

“I’d lose out on different positions that I’d apply for because I had not coached men and was not given that opportunity,” Humphrey said “…This is part of the concern that I’ve had with our sport is that until recently, women were not always given the opportunities or they were put in there to fill a quota.”

So when Humphrey served as chair of the women’s track & field committee at USATF from 2008-16, she was always on the lookout for qualified women who might be able to contribute. In 2015, she turned her attention to the relay program.

“There had been various individuals involved, but they had all been men,” Humphrey said.

Humphrey suggested that Freeman, who had represented Team USA in the 4 x 100 at the 2007 Worlds and 2008 Olympics, would be a good candidate. In 2015, Freeman joined then-relay coach Dennis Mitchell‘s staff as an assistant and remained in that role when Richburg succeeded Mitchell in 2017. When Richburg stayed home from the 2021 Olympics to care for his wife, who had just been diagnosed with cancer, Freeman handled day-to-day coaching duties for the women in Tokyo, where they earned silver in the 4 x 100 (behind a Jamaican team that ran the #3 time in history) and gold in the 4 x 400. In 2022, USATF hired Freeman (below, second from left) as head women’s relay coach.

Humphrey said she was “shocked” when she found out Freeman was not being retained.

“Her record speaks for itself,” Humphrey said. “I would hope that what she has done with the women’s teams over these last few years has definitely led to more medals and gold medals, which is what they have asked for…The women were being successful. They had a coach that looked like them. Why are you changing if it’s working? Why are the men running all these programs now? We’re reverting back to the 1960s, and I thought we had moved out of that.”

Alexis Holmes, who ran the anchor leg for Team USA’s gold-medal winning 4 x 400 at the 2024 Olympics, said she was sad to hear Freeman had not been retained.

“I loved Coach Mechelle but I’m sure it’s a little more complicated than what a lot of people probably know,” Holmes said. “I don’t really know too much about it, personally, but I was definitely disappointed to see Mechelle go.”

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A top coach pushes back: “We need to stop with this rhetoric that she was treated unfairly”

During his 23 years as the head coach at the University of Florida, Mike Holloway‘s men’s 4 x 100 relay squad has won six NCAA titles. He knows what a well-oiled relay machine looks like. And that is not what he saw when he watched the US women win Olympic 4 x 100 gold in Paris, where the final exchange between Thomas and Richardson took multiple attempts to complete.

“Sha’Carri got the stick five meters down,” Holloway said on the May 29 episode of the Ready Set Go podcast. “You can’t go 10.8 (Jefferson’s pb), 10.8 (Terry’s pb), 21 (Thomas’s 200m pb) and be 5-6 meters down in the relay. The exchanges were bad.

“No diss to Mechelle. I think she did a competent job. But we need to stop with this rhetoric that she was treated unfairly. We need to stop with this rhetoric that she was the best relay coach ever.”

Holloway, who served as head coach on two Team USA staffs (2013 World Championships and 2021 Olympics) and was Team USA sprint coach at the 2012 Olympics, has coached two women who have run for the US relay team under Freeman: Taylor Manson (mixed 4 x 400 relay, 2021 Olympics) and Talitha Diggs (4 x 400 relay, 2022 Worlds). He also sits on the men’s track & field committee of USATF’s High Performance Division — though he only assumed that position this year and said he had nothing to do with the decision not to retain Freeman.

Speaking to LetsRun.com, Holloway noted that it is not uncommon for sports organizations move on from coaches with a record of success if they believe there is a better way of doing things, using the New York Knicks’ decision to fire Tom Thibodeau after coaching the team to its first Eastern Conference Finals appearance in 25 years as a recent example. He said he was not surprised when he heard Freeman had not been retained.

“There were communication issues, there were some organizational issues,” Holloway said, noting that he had spoken to a number of other elite coaches who felt the same way.

Holloway also pushed back on Humphrey’s suggestion that Freeman’s sex had anything to do with her dismissal.

“Nobody gets let go because they’re a Black female,” Holloway said. “I just don’t believe that. It’s just laughable to me.”

For as long as the USATF relay program has existed, a tension has existed between the relay coach and the personal coaches of athletes, who often have strong opinions about which athletes should run on each leg. Legendary coach Bobby Kersee, for example, has always preferred his stars Allyson Felix and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone to run the second legs in relays, believing it to be the strongest leg. He told LetsRun.com he even pulled Felix from the relay at the 2005 Worlds because he was told she was going to lead off; at the time, Kersee felt the 19-year-old Felix was a poor starter and asking her to lead off would have put Felix and the team in a bad position.

Mike Conley, who served as chair of USATF’s High Performance Committee from 2016-24, said he heard complaints about Freeman from some personal coaches — though that is typical of pretty much any USATF relay coach. With only four spots on each team for the final, there is never going to be a way to satisfy everyone.

“Almost all the coaches you talk to would think that she favored another coach – which can’t be the case, right?” Conley said.

Potential favoritism was one source of criticism during Mitchell’s tenure as relay coach from 2014-16, since he also served as the personal coach of several top US athletes. Moving forward, USATF changed its hiring policy to ensure the relay coach did not coach any athletes who could potentially be included in the relay pool. Freeman is a speed performance coach in the Dallas area, where she works with youth, college, and elite athletes on multiple sports and consults with fitness companies on sprint training programs. Marsh, the 1992 Olympic champion in the 200m and member of gold-winning US 4 x 100 relay teams at the 1991 Worlds and 1992 Olympics, did not have any coaching experience before being hired by USATF.

Yet the fact that Freeman and Marsh did not coach a college team or professional group created another source of tension with the personal coaches. Holloway said that because Freeman and Marsh only spend a few days a year working with the relay athletes, it is not even accurate to call them relay “coaches.” He believes “relay coordinator” would be a better name for the position.

“All they’re doing is deciding who runs what leg and asking them to coordinate how they run those legs,” Holloway said. “But the actual coaching, the actual day-to-day grind of getting the athletes in shape and making sure they’re rested and ready to run at the big competition, that’s the coaching part of it.

“…Whoever is in this position, they need to start giving the credit where it belongs, and that is to the personal coaches. Because if Dennis [Mitchell, coach of Melissa Jefferson, TeeTee Terry, and Sha’Carri Richardson] and Tonja [Buford-Bailey, coach of Gabby Thomas] don’t do their job, we don’t have a medal of any kind.”

Freeman declined to comment to LetsRun.com for this story, citing contractual agreements. But in a post on her Instagram account on June 4, Freeman responded to Holloway’s comments on Ready Set Go, which she viewed as unfair.

“The DISRESPECT I had to deal with behind closed doors is finally being spoken out loud,” Freeman wrote.

“Imagine leading your teams to GOLD MEDALS BACK to BACK to BACK, being the best in the world and having people still claim you ‘aren’t a coach.’ Imagine leading teams to World Records, American Records, World Championship Records, and being called ‘stupid’ to your face. Imagine leading teams to some of the biggest upsets witnessed in the history of your sport, but yet being verbally mocked in front of a room full of high-performance coaches and professionals. Imagine COACHING the USA Relays for 9 years and you ‘aren’t a coach.'”

Though Woodson is well-respected in elite coaching circles, the tension between USATF’s relay coach and personal coaches is unlikely to dissipate entirely — there are always going to be hard decisions to make. But because relay coaches hold immense sway over their individual athletes, keeping the peace will be important.

“If you don’t have the [backing of the] personal coaches, and you don’t have the athletes, then you don’t have a relay,” Holloway said.

Conley said it is important for personal coaches to have their voices heard, but he also believes the relay coach must have a certain amount of autonomy.

“What I think is that [the personal coaches] should be 100% involved on the policy of what we do,” Conley said. “At the end of the year, the personal coaches should all get together and meet with the relay coaches and the office and talk about what went good, what went bad, and be involved in writing the policy of what we should do moving forward.

“And once it’s written, they need to step out of the way and let it work. And the relay coaches need to be accountable for their actions and their decisions and their results.”

***

Communication issues in Paris

After last summer’s Olympics, 400-meter runner Kendall Ellis expressed frustration with the way Freeman treated her in Paris. On the morning of the 4 x 400 final, Freeman had told Ellis she would not be running that night. Ellis then requested an in-person meeting, in which Freeman reversed course and said Ellis would run the final that night, only for Freeman to change her mind again and tell Ellis she would not be running just minutes before the race began.

Though Ellis was the US champion, benching her was a defensible decision. She had run poorly at the Games. In the first round of the 400, Ellis ran 51.16 to place 5th, nearly two seconds slower than the 49.46 she had run to win the Olympic Trials. Ellis then ran 50.40 in the semifinals and missed out on the final. In the 4 x 400 final, the US team of Shamier Little, McLaughlin-Levrone, Thomas, and Holmes would run 3:15.27 to win the gold, the second-fastest time in the history of the event.

Ellis, who did not respond to an interview request for this story, told ESPN in August that while she was disappointed by not getting to run in the final, she was angry about the way it was handled.

“I don’t feel supported or valued as a member of the team or as a 400-meter runner, and I don’t feel respected,” Ellis told ESPN. “I feel like so many athletes on the U.S. team have had this concern of there being a lack of transparency and communication regarding U.S. relays. This is not new. This is not shocking. There is a history of this on USA relays, and I am fed up and would like to bring awareness to it.”

Holloway said miscommunication has been a problem within the US relay program since 2021 and that other athletes in the relay program, including his own, have been put in similar situations.

“Kendall was just the only one that went public with it,” Holloway said.

Kersee said he felt that Freeman did some aspects of the job well. But, like Holloway, he felt she could have done a better job communicating decisions in a timely fashion.

“I thought everything that she did as a relay coach to try to put people together, run the camps and all that stuff, I think she did pretty well,” Kersee said. “What I felt she lacked was really getting a clear message and communicating with the athletes and the coaches in terms of who was going to do what and when and getting some type of consistency…I think making those decisions and sticking by it and letting the coaches know is important for whoever is the relay coach.”

Managing the egos of athletes (and their coaches) has always been one of the most challenging parts of the job for a relay coach, especially in a country as talent-rich as the United States. At the end of 2023, Freeman and Marsh recognized that a lack of transparency and clear communication between athletes and coaches had plagued the relay program since before their tenures and worked to create a manual to lay out a consistent communication protocol. Despite the manual, Conley said that area still needed improvement after 2024.

“My feeling on Mechelle is she won the medals,” Conley said. “She got the job done. That’s on the positive side. On the side that we had to address of improvements – which we were going to address this year – was better communication with how we presented who was going to run and when we presented that to coaches. And we identified that and she agreed that we needed to have an improved process on how we do that.”

Logistically, there were also issues in the leadup to the Paris Olympics which may have been out of Freeman’s control. The Wall Street Journal reported that USATF prevented its relay teams from competing in the London Diamond League two weeks before the Games due to “cost concerns.” Chapman denied that, telling the WSJ that the decision not to compete in London was not financial, but notably, he admitted that the decision not to compete there came from USATF — not the relay coaches.

Conley said he felt that USATF could have done a better job supporting Freeman and Marsh.

“I know that in some cases they felt not supported because they wanted to do certain events or meets or felt they needed something and that went through a scrutiny process that made doing those things sometimes difficult,” Conley said. “I think we needed better advance planning and support from the [national] office in that respect.”

USATF posted a $5.6 million loss on its 2023 tax return, the most recent year for which numbers were available, and the return listed overall assets of negative $4.5 million. In addition, multiple highly-paid USATF staffers were let go in January 2025. But Chapman told LetsRun.com that financial concerns played no role in USATF’s decision to replace two coaches (Freeman and Marsh) with one (Woodson).

“Not one bit,” Chapman said. “This is about finding the best way to win six gold medals in LA, period.”

USOPC has delivered a message to USATF to continue to innovate, but Humphrey is concerned that parting ways with Freeman, who found consistent success on the big stages in the most challenging relay event, just looks like change for change’s sake.

“You can’t get rid of institutional knowledge and just throw it out under the auspices of change,” Humphrey said. “That to me is a very poor method.”

Conley termed out as High Performance chair at the end of 2024, so he did not have a say in why Freeman was let go. But he said that even if there were issues with communication, he felt they could have been overcome.

“The ultimate goal is to win medals, and that’s what she did,” Conley said. “So if I was making the decision, I would have retained her and improved on the communication aspect.”

The USATF relay coach can be a thankless position. Because of the talent advantage the US so often enjoys, winning gold is not just the goal, but the expectation. Yet it has not been the reality recently. From 2014-24, US relay teams not coached by Freeman won gold just 59.1% of the time across the World Relays, World Championships, and Olympics. In the 4 x 100, specifically, the win rate is 40.9%.

During that same span, Freeman’s women’s teams earned gold 87.5% of the time — and 100% of the time in the 4 x 100.

The biggest track meet to be held on US soil in a generation is looming in 2028. In voluntarily moving on from Freeman, USATF is sending the message that, despite her results, it believes there is a better way to do things. Over the next four years, we will find out if it was the right call.