Content Warning: This article discusses mental health issues and pregnancy loss, which may be triggering for some readers.
Just days before a preliminary football final in 2022, Olympian Erin Phillips and her wife, Tracy, suffered a “devastating” loss: Tracy’s miscarriage.
The dual-sport champion, commentator, and now Hall of Famer, shared the horrible news in an interview with Channel 7’s Unfiltered.
Who is Erin Phillips?
Erin Phillips OAM is one of Australia’s most celebrated dual-sport athletes. A basketball star for the Adelaide Lightning in the WNBL before being drafted to the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun in 2005, she went on to win two championships — with Indiana Fever in 2012 and Phoenix Mercury in 2014 — and a silver medal with the Opals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Switching codes in 2017, she joined the Adelaide Crows for the inaugural AFLW season, quickly becoming one of the competition’s biggest names. She has three AFLW premierships to her name (2017, 2019, 2022), two league best-and-fairest awards, and two grand final best-on-ground medals.
Who is Erin’s wife, Tracy Gahan?
Erin met Tracy Gahan, a former American basketballer, in 2006 when they were Adelaide Lightning teammates.
The couple married in the US in 2014, before same-sex marriage was legal in Australia, and have since welcomed four children: twins Brooklyn and Blake in 2016, son Drew in 2019, and daughter Londyn Skye in 2023.
Erin and Tracy’s IVF journey
“It took us two years before we had Blake and Brooklyn, and we had multiple unsuccessful pregnancies where we couldn’t even get pregnant. We tried. We moved on to the IVF route, which is more expensive, obviously,” Erin recalled on Unfiltered.
IVF can be a difficult journey for hopeful parents. And Erin didn’t diminish that in her recollections with Unfiltered.
“[We were] maybe a bit more hopeful in the chances of becoming parents, and we ended up getting five embryos,” she shared.
And thankfully, the couple were really lucky: “We tried for two, and we were just hopeful to just get one, and we won the lottery. We got two, we got Blake in Brooklyn.
“I thought, after all the sleepless nights and … just how crazy life was, I thought maybe we’d be done at two, because looking after kids is a full-time job.
“And so we decided to have another one. So we go for three and then we had Drew straight away, no problem. And then we tried for number four, thinking that this is easy, like the hard part’s done.
“We’ve had one, two and three. All the three embryos took. Why wouldn’t number four take? And initially it did.”
Their devastating loss
“And then three days before the prelim in 2022, three days before we played Fremantle in the prelim at Adelaide Oval, Tracy miscarriages… And it was one of the most just … devastating, hardest, awful moments to see your wife, your partner, go through that.
“As her wife, there was nothing I could do to make it better. You just feel so helpless to see her go through that.
“We got to the obstetrician thinking it was a regular scan, [but the scan is] saying there’s no heartbeat anymore. And it was like, it was a shock. It was like, we can’t possibly be hearing that, surely not.”
Playing through the pain
“We didn’t talk about it with anybody. We didn’t want to tell people what we were going through, because we didn’t really want people to worry.
“I didn’t want anyone to feel like that something was wrong, and I had a prelim, and I know that seems so irrelevant, a game, and it is in many respects, but it was also a big game that I wanted to find the energy and the willpower to go and perform and bring some joy into back into our lives.
“And there was also this element of, you know, we were so lucky. We’ve already got three kids, you know. You know, we miscarried our fourth. Should we even be feeling like we were unlucky, or should we even be grieving?
“There were so many emotions going on at the time when we won the grand final, it was like the final siren was the moment that I could actually just grieve. You know, I just, I just wanted to bring some joy back in that moment for Trace and what we just been through.
“And football seemed like such a small part of what we were going through, but we were able to celebrate and find some joy in that moment.”
The following year, the couple tried again for their fourth child. In 2023, they welcomed daughter Londyn Skye, completing their family.
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Watch the full episode on 7Plus.
