Personal Life
Swoopes was married from June 1995 to 1999 to her high school sweetheart, with whom she had a son, Jordan Eric Jackson in 1997. In October 2005, with her announcement that she is gay, Swoopes became one of the most high profile athletes in a team sport to do so publicly. She and her partner, former basketball player and Houston Comets assistant coach, Alisa Scott, whom Swoopes at the time said she would like to someday marry, together raised Swoopes's son, Jordan.
Swoopes said "it doesn't change who I am. I can't help who I fall in love with. No one can. ... Discovering I'm gay just sort of happened much later in life. Being intimate with or any other woman never entered my mind. At the same time, I'm a firm believer that when you fall in love with somebody, you can't control that."
In 2008, Sheryl Swoopes made an appearance on Shirts & Skins, a reality series from the television channel LOGO. Swoopes flew out to mentor the San Francisco Rockdogs, a gay basketball team, and shared her experiences on basketball, family, faith, and coming out, helping to bring the team closer together.
As of 2009, Swoopes has been coaching the girls basketball team at Mercer Island High School, while head coach Jamie Prescott has been on maternity leave.
As of 2011, Swoopes had broken up with Alisa Scott and was reportedly engaged to a man.
Read more about this topic: Sheryl Swoopes
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, personal and/or life:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters “woman’s peculiar sphere,” her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“Fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“All men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground. Better are the physically dead, for they more lively rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. A man’s life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)