Sue-Moy’s path to Pitt a family matter

As an assistant coach for the Notre Dame women’s soccer team in 1998, Sue-Moy Chin finally… As an assistant coach for the Notre Dame women’s soccer team in 1998, Sue-Moy Chin finally considered coaching as her profession.

And there, among the class of upper-tier collegiate athletics that is the Fighting Irish program, she found another rare-but-welcome opportunity – to work alongside her older sister, Carla.

It proved to be a beneficial chance on Chin’s part, as the experience managed to be “rewarding” in several ways, both “professionally and personally.”

“We’re six years apart in age,” Chin said. “When she was in college, I was in high school, so in our adult lives we never really connected much.”

But this connection not only provided the two sisters with a chance to get to know each other “as adults and as peers,” it also completed an ironic and fate-paved circle that began many years before Notre Dame.

As a child growing up in Ontario, Canada, Chin idolized her older sister.

“My sister was my role model,” Chin said. “I wanted to be like her, and I wanted to do what she was doing.”

At the time, her sister played both soccer and ice hockey. And so, Chin said, she also wanted to play soccer and ice hockey.

Chin’s mother, however, attempted to persuade her in another direction.

“My mom wanted me to do piano and ballet and everything like that, so I did that for a few years,” she said.

But in a family Chin describes as “very athletic,” and as the little sister of four older brothers, her mother eventually had to give in and let a 10-year-old Sue-Moy make the decision of what to pursue – a choice Chin found easy to make.

So from then through high school, Chin played soccer in the summer and ice hockey in the winter.

She took up goaltending as a position because of her “fearless” persona from growing up as the youngest of seven children.

A few years later, at the age of 18, when faced with the task of picking which sport to pursue, she had a difficult decision to make.

Despite an opportunity to play ice hockey at Yale, she chose to instead stick with soccer.

“At the time they didn’t have a national ice hockey team in Canada for women, but they did have one for soccer,” Chin said. “And I knew the avenues were greater in soccer to go further at the time.”

Chin then went on to play at Florida International University, winning the program’s only Trans America Athletic Conference Championship in 1993. She also went on to secure several school records, be a three-year captain and be chosen for the university’s Hall of Fame.

In her 5th year at FIU, as she worked to obtain her degree, her coach asked her to be a student assistant to the team. It was there that she gained her first coaching experience.

“That’s what really triggered it,” she said. “But I didn’t know that was what I’d do for the rest of my life.”

That realization came when she arrived at Notre Dame.

It was there that Chin and her sister connected paths again. And from that proximity, Chin once again found herself watching her sister for inspiration.

“I picked up a lot from my sister,” Chin said, looking back on her time at Notre Dame. “A lot of what I learned from her was on the recruiting side of it, which is huge in college sports. She was one of the best recruiting coordinators that I’ve ever worked with.”

Chin was the assistant coach for two years at Notre Dame before accepting a job as assistant coach at Duke in 2000, where she spent only a season.

In 2003, after a two-season run as an assistant coach for the University of Colorado, Chin finally arrived at Pitt as the head coach of the women’s soccer team.

It has been five years since then, and Sue-Moy has developed the women’s soccer program into her own entity.

She defines her coaching style as “intense” and “competitive,” which she attributes to her years of playing soccer and her experience coaching in high-level competition at Notre Dame and Duke.

“[It has helped] being at universities with big-time athletics, getting the feel for that, and just seeing how things should be done,” Chin said.

And here at Pitt, Chin said that she’s optimistic about the women’s soccer program.

“A lot of the other Olympic sports are developing and growing as we start expanding and putting more resources into our Olympic sports,” she said.

Chin has certainly had a lot to do with the development of the program.

As a first year coach, Chin recorded the most wins ever by a first-year coach in Pitt women’s soccer history. And in the past five years, she’s led the team to two playoff berths, the first two in seven years.

And through all of this, Chin still calls her sister for advice.

“It’s not usually about tactical things,” she said. “But if I’m frustrated about something I talk to her and she always calms me down and puts a lot of things into perspective.”

They talk usually two to three times a week, Chin said. And often Chin looks back on what started all of this.

“I got an education because of [soccer] and now I’m making a living with it and it all started with me looking up to my sister and wanting to be like her,” she said.

And now, as the head coach of an ever-developing women’s soccer program, she expresses only content and gratitude to be in the position in which she finds herself.

“I love my job,” Chin said simply. “I don’t think a lot of people can say that. It’s definitely my profession and it’s a job, but it’s not work. I love coming in every day.”

But as for her long-term plans, Chin was unable to provide any solid hopes or goals beyond coaching at Pitt.

“Right now I’m just trying to focus on the game against West Virginia on Friday,” Chin laughed.

A game that surely Sue-Moy and Carla talked a good bit about.