The New York Times recently profiled a unique and successful coach at Brigham Young University. The headline trumpeted that she was surviving “haters,” and readers are immediately primed for the story they expect to find, even before they read the first paragraph.

The story says it is set in “Mormon country.” The coach being profiled is a woman, a minority, and a feminist. The implied conflict is obvious. A free spirit, an outsider, has succeeded at a restrictive religious institution despite the people around her trying to stop her. 

The trouble is that the story that is actually unfolding is entirely different. 

Diljeet Taylor is the head coach of BYU’s women’s cross country team. Her career is not a story of a woman surviving a hostile environment. It’s a story of a religious university recognizing excellence in someone who shares the university’s spiritual values. It is the story of entrusting real authority to a remarkable leader and allowing her to succeed. 

Taylor has not been hidden from the spotlight as an embarrassing exception to be tolerated. She has coached one of BYU’s most visible and successful teams, built a national powerhouse, and become one of the most admired figures in collegiate running, all with the university’s strong support behind her. 

Her story is not just another one to file into the category of “overcoming oppression,” it is a rebuke to those who have told scary stories about BYU’s religious distinctiveness and how it must produce exclusion and decline. 

Taylor’s success shouldn’t put BYU beyond critique—obviously. But it should serve as an example that BYU can remain distinctly and deeply religious without being brittle. It can have boundaries without oppression. It can be serious about its mission while still being open-hearted.

For those who have long supported BYU’s mission, Taylor’s success is precisely the kind of centered, religion-forward, and pluralistic outcome that we have always expected. That the New York Times sees it as an exception says much more about its biases than it does about BYU.

Taylor is perhaps an ideal candidate for Scott Cacciola, the reporter who wrote the story. His beat is covering people in the world of sports and entertainment who are doing “interesting things.” He’s written about the fashions of Olympic gear, highlighted a high school track runner who runs while holding chickens, and covered an annual race of retro hot rods. A college coach who shows up to meets in Louis Vuitton and Gucci certainly hits the sweet spot.

And Cacciola’s article avoids many of the pitfalls that come from covering Latter-day Saints. He doesn’t embellish with lots of superfluous details. He does not strain to turn minor personality differences into major conflicts. The story he tells is fascinating. He helps illustrate how Taylor’s Sikh faith aligns with the values of BYU and how it helps her connect with her athletes.

It’s really only in the framing that the piece fails—the kind of elements I would expect to be most influenced by the New York Times’ editors. 

BYU says openly that education is not morally neutral. It holds that students should not only become more knowledgeable and employable, but also more faithful, disciplined, and capable of serving those around them. Every university has its orthodoxies. BYU is just much more honest about them.

But this is exactly the kind of environment that many elite observers tell us should be impossible for someone like Taylor to flourish in. Yet she has flourished.

And this is why the Times can’t tell that story. She can’t be succeeding because of the culture at BYU; the story has to be that she is succeeding despite it. It is a common trope, and one that its sports and style writer was probably unaware of and was pushed into anyway.

This is not merely a problem of one writer in one profile. It is a larger failure of imagination. They are incapable of writing a story about Taylor’s success as it is, because they can’t imagine that being true. So they frame it and headline it one way, despite there being minimal evidence for it. 

As a journalist, I understand the instinct. Articles, no matter how good, have to find an audience. And the familiar story of overcoming adversity to succeed is a good hook, especially in sports writing. But there is a better, more effective way to generate eyeballs, and that is juxtaposition. When we read a headline that doesn’t fit our preconceived notions, we are motivated to learn more, which equals clicks. This is Piaget’s theory of disequilibrium.

A title such as “How a Sikh feminist succeeded at BYU” provides the kind of tension that will motivate people to read the real story, without needing to resort to the same well-worn tropes.

Diljeet Taylor’s success is impressive. It deserves to be celebrated. 

But she has not become successful because she has defeated BYU. She is a BYU success story. Her success reveals what BYU is. That’s a better story than “her versus the world.” It would have been nice if the New York Times could have seen that.

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