One morning last week, with the Wasatch Range flecked in golden sunlight to the east, eight of the finest college distance runners in the country made their way across the Brigham Young University campus toward the athletic facilities. One by one, they stepped into a locker room that their coach, Diljeet Dosanjh Taylor, had commandeered for a meeting.
There were blue buckets on a long table, one for each team member who had qualified for the N.C.A.A. track and field championships in Eugene, Ore. Taylor and her student managers had filled each bucket with an unlikely assortment of goodies — oranges, broccoli, blueberries, hand sanitizer, face masks and coloring books.
Taylor, who speaks in all capital letters, was still raspy from the team’s recent meet in Arkansas. “When I’m 80,” she said before the meeting, “I’ll probably sound like someone who smoked for 70 years.”
As she addressed the athletes, Taylor, 48, curiously avoided any reference to running. Instead, she spoke about gratitude, acts of service and exposure to sunlight. “Get that vitamin D!” she said. “Take your coloring books outside with you!”
“We are blessed,” she continued. “We are blessed for wanting this. I’m blessed for wanting good things to happen to my women, for my women and with my women. You are blessed for wanting good things to happen to you and your teammates!”
It was a faith-based message that seemed on brand for a coach at Brigham Young University, a Mormon school steeped in conservative values. The twist was the messenger.
Taylor, who arrived on campus in 2016, not long before B.Y.U. ended its decades-long ban on caffeinated beverages, has emerged, to the astonishment of many, as one of the school’s most visible figures.
“I’m the trifecta here,” she said. “I’m a woman in a position of power, I’m a minority and I’m not a member of the church.”
She knows she stands out. She favors designer clothes and Air Jordans. She speaks her mind. She parks her Range Rover at odd angles. “Some people on campus don’t like me, if you want to believe that,” she said.
But at a time when strong, assertive women are still frequently labeled shrill, bossy or worse, Taylor believes her confident approach empowers her runners.
“I want to help these women become the architects of their own blueprints,” she said. “I want them to dream.”
They certainly know how to win. Taylor has coached more than 100 All-Americans while leading B.Y.U. to two national championships in cross country. The current roster includes Jane Hedengren, a freshman who already holds three N.C.A.A. records and is a favorite for national titles in the 5,000- and 10,000-meter races. Taylor also coaches a professional track team sponsored by Nike.
At the meeting last week, she concluded her pep talk by gathering her runners in a circle so that they could partake in a team tradition: swigging shots of turmeric. Taylor also mentioned that she was treating them to manicures and pedicures.
“Some of your feet — I’m not judging, but they need help,” she said. “OK, love you all!”
‘I Can’t Leave These Women’
It took time for Taylor to find her voice. Her parents, Indian immigrants who had settled in California’s Central Valley, spoke Punjabi at home, which meant that when Diljeet started kindergarten, she had no idea what anyone was saying. So she kept quiet. Once she learned English, everything changed.
“I wanted to be everyone’s friend,” she said.
Yet she had the sense that, in some ways, her life was not her own. Her parents raised their four children to adhere to the orthodoxies of their Sikh faith, which left Diljeet baffled by an assignment from her fifth-grade teacher: Tell me your dreams. Dreams? All Diljeet knew was that her parents wanted her to go to college and study medicine. So that was what she wrote.
“No,” the teacher said. “I want to know about your dreams.”
Around that time, Diljeet discovered that she was faster than the boys at recess. As she got older, running became an expression of personal freedom, though it came at a cost. When she joined the track team at California State University, Stanislaus, she was estranged from her parents. She was not following their plan for her future. It wasn’t until she began to run professionally that they repaired their relationship.
Looking back, Taylor can appreciate the challenges her parents faced as they straddled two cultures. They wanted what they thought was best for their daughter, she said. But she was determined to plot her own path, which eventually led her to coaching her alma mater into a regional force.
When B.Y.U. called in 2016, Taylor figured the job interview would give her a chance to visit her in-laws in Utah — nothing more. As an athlete, she had once been kicked off the indoor track on the B.Y.U. campus for wearing a sports bra as her top during a training session. And now the school wanted to hire her?
But once she was back in Provo, she experienced what she has described as a spiritual pull. She called her husband, Ira Taylor, an inactive member of the Mormon Church whom she had met in college, and told him she wanted to take the job. He supported her decision.
“They need a little bit of variety over there,” he said.
Diljeet Taylor, a practicing Sikh who has two teenage sons with her husband, says that being at B.Y.U. has only strengthened her relationship with God, and that her upbringing has helped her relate to her runners, who are predominantly Mormon.
Brian Santiago, B.Y.U.’s athletic director, said that her guidance may mean more to her athletes than it would coming from someone else. “Because it’s not just, ‘Oh, she’s always been a part of this, and now she’s leading us,’” he said. “They look at her in a unique way, so it almost gives her more credibility.”
In 2019, Taylor was interviewing for an opening at Stanford when Meghan Hunter, one of her freshman recruits, broke her neck in a car crash. On a visit to the hospital, Taylor scolded the doctor when he said that Hunter might not walk again.
“You’re not God!” Taylor told him. “How can you say that?”
She stayed on at B.Y.U. — “I can’t leave these women,” she said — and coached Hunter through her comeback, which included a Big 12 Conference championship in the 800 meters.
Butterflies
Back in her office, Taylor had workouts to schedule, flights to book and team parties to plan. (She loves parties.) She outsourced a few text messages to an assistant, who asked for guidance.
“Respond however I would respond,” Taylor said. “With a little bit of an edge.”
There are times when Taylor sounds like a Dale Carnegie course in human form. She peppers her speech with off-the-cuff aphorisms: “I’m married to the dreams of my athletes, and I make them my own.” And: “I used to want to fit the stereotype, and now I want to create the stereotype.” The other day, the office layout provided inspiration for a new one: “The trophies behind me the tell story of where I’ve been. The people in front of me are the reason I keep going.”
It seems that no one is exempt from her pep talks. Cassie Bigler, her hairstylist, recalled complaining to Taylor about her lackluster diet and workout routine. Suddenly, Bigler said, she found herself in a “come-to-Jesus with Diljeet” at the salon. “She was hyping me up,” Bigler said. “And I’m like, ‘You’re right! You’re right!’”
In the wake of B.Y.U.’s disappointing 14th place finish at the 2023 N.C.A.A. championships, Taylor told her team that, just when a caterpillar thinks the world is ending, “she becomes a butterfly.” It became a theme for the 2024 squad. Taylor even gave her runners butterfly necklaces.
Sure enough, B.Y.U. was back in the championship mix that fall. The problem was that Lexy Halladay-Lowry, one of the team’s stars, was struggling with an injury. “You can compete with anyone,” Taylor told her, “even if you’re not 100 percent.”
Halladay-Lowry went on to run a terrific race, helping B.Y.U. win the team title. “Knowing that she believed in me was enough for me to give it everything I had,” Halladay-Lowry said.
‘Kind of Obnoxious’
Last week, Halladay-Lowry, who graduated in 2025, was in Provo for some workouts with several of her teammates on Nike Swoosh TC, the professional team coached by Taylor. On a campus where it was once forbidden, she and her fellow runners all wore sports bras as their tops.
Taylor blared encouragement from the opposite side of the track: “Perfect! Perfect!”
Back when she was starting out as a coach, Taylor sought to fit in by wearing school-branded polo shirts. “You won’t catch me dead in a polo now,” she said. “Unless I’m on the golf course. And even then it better be a cute one.”
In the early days of their marriage, her husband, an accountant, carefully tracked their monthly expenses. His wife soon put the kibosh on that. “I slid the paper right back across the table and said, ‘It’s me or the budget,’” she recalled.
Taylor’s standing now allows her to command what she described as “ridiculous prices” when area companies approach her to deliver speeches. The money has allowed her to dabble in Louis Vuitton and Gucci, brands with prominent logos. “I’m not going to spend $2,000 on a jacket and nobody has any idea what it is, right?” she said.
Her race-day fits have been the talk of Provo and beyond, as when she wore custom pants with images of her runners on them and a black vest with the words “Watch Women’s Sports” writ large on the back. Her family tends to go with it. “Sometimes we all agree it’s really cool,” Ira Taylor said, “and other times we’re kind of like, ‘You wore what to the track?’”
Her style matches her coaching persona: bold, even “kind of obnoxious,” she said. Her clothes “exude confidence,” and she often tells her athletes to “look good, feel good, run good.”
“She’s helped us feel so comfortable and confident in our bodies,” Hunter said. “That means a lot, especially here in Utah.”
The B.Y.U. runners know that their coach’s rah-rah positivity may seem a little corny to outsiders, and Taylor is self-aware enough to realize that she is not for everyone. But she won’t compromise her style just to please those she refers to as her “haters.”
She keeps a stack of notecards on her desk. Before every race, she writes personal messages to her athletes. She signs each one the same way: I believe in you.
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