For Valorie Kondos Field, the biggest battle of her coaching career didn’t happen inside a gym. It began with a strange feeling in her breast and a diagnosis that made her wonder how much time she had left.

In 2014, the legendary UCLA gymnastics coach discovered she had HER2-positive breast cancer. The aggressive form of the disease arrived just as she was preparing to begin another season with the team she had spent decades building.

“I had a potential fatal tumor in my breast,” Kondos Field recalled in a recent conversation with former UCLA gymnast Gracie Kramer. “My head exploded in fear.”

Suddenly, gymnastics wasn’t the first thing on her mind. She began thinking about everything that could come next. How much time did she have? Would treatment be painful? Could she continue coaching? And perhaps most frighteningly, how would she tell the athletes who looked to her for guidance?

But how was it diagnosed initially? Kondos Field had felt something unusual on the side of her breast. Rather than a traditional lump, it felt more like a pulled muscle. She didn’t ignore it. A mammogram, ultrasound, and biopsy eventually revealed the cancer.

The diagnosis left her terrified, but another thought soon began to take hold.
She remembered hearing the words, “Be anxious for nothing and grateful for all things.” At first, she wasn’t exactly convinced.

“I got snarky with God,’ she admitted. “I went, ‘Excuse me, I don’t know if you heard or not, but I have a potential fatal tumor in my breast.'”

Later, she told her husband, Bobby, what had happened. His response gave the words a different meaning. He pointed her toward Philippians 4, where she found the message she had already heard.

“I heard this twice before I ever read it,” Kondos Field said. “This was a commandment.”

The fear didn’t disappear overnight. But slowly, her perspective began to change. She stopped seeing every day of treatment simply as something she had to endure and began viewing it as another day she had been given.

Valorie Kondos Field found something to be grateful for amid cancer

The diagnosis also gave Kondos Field a strange sense of perspective. Her doctor told her that if the same cancer had been discovered a decade earlier, the options would have been drastically different.

“If you got diagnosed 10 years ago in 2004, they had nothing for you,” her doctor told her. But in 2014, targeted treatment offered a much more hopeful path.

And she refused to let cancer push her away from the gym.

As UCLA’s head coach, Kondos Field had already built a remarkable legacy. She led the Bruins from 1991 to 2019 and guided them to seven NCAA championships, becoming one of the most successful coaches in collegiate gymnastics.

But during her treatment, she saw another role waiting for her. “Immediately I thought, ‘What an amazing teaching moment for my student-athletes,'” she said.

In an unconventional move, she allowed members of her team to feel the tumor. She wanted them to understand that cancer was real, but she also wanted them to see that it didn’t have to consume every part of someone’s life.

“I showed my students that cancer was a small part of my life and a small part of my day,” she explained. “It wasn’t my whole life and day – and it certainly didn’t define me.” That philosophy became bigger than the diagnosis itself.

Kondos Field has since credited medical research and targeted therapy for giving her a future she might not otherwise have had. “Research is the reason I’m alive,” she added in that interview in 2019.

The now-retired coach’s career eventually brought seven national titles, coaching awards, a place in the UCLA Athletics Hall of Fame, and recognition as the Pac-12 Coach of the Century. But the lessons she carried beyond the competition floor became just as important.