Jackie Bachteler's Remarkable Return to Coaching at Turf Moor
On Sunday at Turf Moor, Jackie Bachteler will finally take her place in the home dugout. It should have been a simple coaching milestone. For her, it feels closer to a miracle.
Nine months ago, Burnley’s new women’s team manager was flat on her back in intensive care, convinced she was about to die.
From dream move to emergency dash
The American coach arrived from San Diego in December 2025, buzzing at the chance to work with Burnley’s women’s first team and the men’s academy. New club, new country, new challenge. The usual aches and fatigue made sense: long-haul flight, winter in England, a heavy workload. She assumed it was jet lag and a cold.
Then one morning at the training ground, the floor went from under her.
“The whole room spun,” she recalled to BBC Sport. She stepped outside for air but couldn’t draw enough into her lungs. Breathing, something she’d never had to think about, suddenly became a fight.
She called for the club doctor. The men’s team medic was on site and checked her over. Her blood pressure crashed. Her oxygen levels were dangerously low. The situation turned serious in seconds. She was rushed to A&E.
“To be honest, I thought I was going to die. I just had this feeling in my body like ‘this is it’,” she said. “I knew something was wrong.”
Doctors treated her lungs and tried to discharge her. Bachteler refused to accept it. She pushed for more tests, insisted they look again. That insistence almost certainly saved her life.
Her blood pressure nosedived. She could no longer walk. Dizziness blurred into confusion. Blotches appeared on her skin. A blood test finally lit the alarm.
“All of a sudden four or five doctors were sprinting towards me,” she said. “I had two IVs with fluids and antibiotics, as well as an oxygen mask.”
The diagnosis: sepsis. A life-threatening reaction to infection that can shut down organs within hours.
Alone in ICU, staring down mortality
Bachteler was moved into intensive care. For a couple of days, staff checked her blood every 20 minutes, constantly monitoring her organs. Machines hummed and beeped around her. Her world shrank to numbers on screens and the next bag of fluids.
Her support network, usually spread across continents, suddenly felt very far away. Her family in the United States couldn’t get over. Her wife, in Finland, was trapped by a snowstorm. Calls and messages helped, but the reality was stark: she was alone in a foreign hospital, fighting an illness she barely understood.
“On my third day in hospital, I tried to stand up and I couldn’t,” she said. “The nurses told me not to walk and when you hear that it’s a bit of an alarm bell.”
Everything became a struggle. Lung treatment after lung treatment. Fluids, antibiotics, more tests. She needed help just to get to the bathroom.
“It was close to when you face your mortality,” she said. “It just gives you another perspective on life.”
She had to relearn how to walk. Coaching, tactics, training schedules – all of it vanished from view. Survival came first.
A slow road back to the touchline
Burnley brought her back in July, this time as manager of the women’s team. The title was new. The body underneath it was still rebuilding.
She lives with post-sepsis syndrome. Dizzy spells. Crushing fatigue. Mental fog. Memory lapses. Tremors when she pushes too far.
During a pre-season friendly a few weeks ago, the warning signs flared again.
“It was so hot with the sun facing the bench,” she said. “I got up in the second half and it was like when you have too much wine, you get up and you’re like, ‘woah!’”
She delivered instructions, spoke to her players, then quietly removed herself.
“I went to the cafe on site and said to them: ‘Can I sit in your freezer?’ I just needed to calm down. Then I started crying because my nervous system is still recovering and it’s just been really, really hard.”
The club have wrapped support around her. She credits Burnley’s doctors with saving her life and linking her up with a respiratory specialist. Her staff have taken on extra tasks. The players have sent messages and given her space when she needs it.
Her family, when they’ve managed to visit, have seen both the progress and the scars.
She remembers a Sunday in May. Her parents had flown over from the US. They went out for dinner. The noise in the restaurant overwhelmed her.
“I just got so dizzy and they could see it,” she said. “As we were walking back, I was shaking and I didn’t know where I was.
“They started crying, both of them. I think it was even harder for them. I get emotional any time I talk about my family with this.”
When her wife finally reached her in hospital, the shock was immediate.
“She just started crying because of the amount of weight I lost,” Bachteler said. “I’m really athletic and I’m really fit, but then I wasn’t able to walk. She had to hold me up going down the stairs.”
Life redefined – and football reframed
Bachteler continues respiratory therapy to rebuild her lung function. The symptoms still come: fatigue, fog, memory loss, tremors, dizziness. But there is progress.
“I’m definitely in a good way though,” she said. “I’m about 70 to 80% Jackie again and that’s thanks to the club, the doctors here and the NHS – but it was close.
“If I had gone home that day when the emergency room tried to send me back, I wouldn’t be sitting here today.”
Every day she leaves the training ground with the same quiet thought: she has been given a second chance. Football, once an all-consuming profession, now sits in a different place.
“A loss is a loss,” she said. “I really believe in what I’m doing and in the people that I’m doing it with. Now the worst thing that will happen is that we lose a game.”
World Sepsis Day, Turf Moor – and a message
On Sunday, Burnley host Sunderland in the Women’s Super League 2 at Turf Moor (14:00 BST). It will be Bachteler’s first time in the home dugout. It also falls on World Sepsis Day.
The timing is not lost on her.
She has thrown herself into learning about the illness that nearly killed her. The numbers stunned her.
“I realised it’s a leading cause of death. I didn’t even know what sepsis was before. I thought it was something you heard on Grey’s Anatomy,” she said.
“I didn’t understand the severity of it and how much it’s missed by doctors. The amount of people that have been affected really shocked me. It’s a silent killer.”
She wants Sunday’s game to be more than a fixture list entry. A platform, too.
“Hopefully I can use the game as a tool to help others recognise the signs and let them know they are not alone,” she said. “Over 50% of survivors have post-sepsis syndrome.”
So when she walks out at Turf Moor, tracksuit on, technical area ahead, it will carry a weight beyond tactics and touchline instructions.
“To be standing on the pitch, doing something that I love, that I’ve dreamed of doing every single day and knowing that wouldn’t have been the case almost a year ago,” she said, “it’s a bit poetic it’s on World Sepsis Day.”
The whistle will go, the match will start, and for Jackie Bachteler, simply being there will already feel like a victory.
