Jim Harbaugh and his wife, Sarah Feuerborn Harbaugh, weren’t always fond of each other.

After meeting at PF Chang’s restaurant in 2006, Jim had to work hard to impress Sarah, which ultimately paid off. The two married in 2008 and now have four children together: daughters Addison and Katherine and sons Jack and John.

The couple began their life together in California, where Jim coached at the University of San Diego, Stanford University and the San Francisco 49ers throughout his career. In 2015, they moved to Jim’s hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, when he became the head coach of his alma mater, the University of Michigan. After eight seasons with the Wolverines, the Harbaugh clan returned to California when Jim signed on as the head coach of the Los Angeles Chargers in January 2024.

Sarah is a huge supporter of her husband, attending major games like the 2024 NCAA National Championship and the Super Bowl. Jim is also supportive of his wife.

“Happy birthday, to myself, thank you Sarah for marrying me,” he said posted on X (formerly Twitter) in 2016, with the addition in Spanish: “My warm welcome in all the world!”

Sarah is so supportive of her husband’s career that she told him Ann Arbor Family in 2015 that she “can’t go online.”

“I just can’t do that because when I see something negative, I just know him for who he is, as a great person and a great father, and then you see someone say whatever he says and I just want to punch them. I just can’t do that anymore. It’s going to give me sleepless nights,” she said, adding that she still wants to be “involved” and “supportive.”

Here’s everything you need to know about Jim Harbaugh’s wife, Sarah Feuerborn Harbaugh.

She grew up near Kansas City

Sarah grew up in Belton, Mo., a southern suburb of Kansas City, and dreamed of becoming a big-rig truck driver. She had six sisters and four brothers. She said Ann Arbor Family in 2021 that she lost two of her brothers to colon cancer.

When Jim and Sarah met in 2006, she was living in Las Vegas and working in real estate, KCTV Kansas City reported, per Bleacher ReportJim visited the city for a coaching conference.

In the nearly two decades they’ve been together, Jim’s head coaching stints have taken them from California to Michigan, and his most recent job with the Chargers has brought them back to the Golden State. But Ann Arbor will always hold a special place in the hearts of both Jim and Sarah because long before he became a head coach, Jim grew up in the college town and played quarterback for Michigan.

“There’s just something about Midwesterners, they’re so down to earth. So I’m grateful for that,” Sarah told mgoblue.com in 2015 upon returning to the Midwest. “In the NFL, you’re kind of away from everybody. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing (yet), but in Ann Arbor, you’re totally involved in everything. It’s a community.”

She met Jim in a restaurant

Jim and Sarah met in a restaurant in 2006, when Jim was newly divorced and coaching at the University of San Diego.

In an interview on HBO’s Real sportsJim said Sarah was going to get takeout (according to Players’ wivesthey were at a PF Chang’s), and he walked up to her and asked if he could “meet” her, to which she replied, “Sure, you can meet me.”

“I didn’t believe her at first. I thought it was one of those fake numbers she gave me. But I called her, multiple times. About nine times before she called back,” Jim recalled, adding, “I could tell she was a total winner.”

Sarah’s brother, Marty Feuerborn, confirmed that their romance wasn’t love at first sight. He told KCTV Kansas City that Sarah didn’t want to talk to Jim at first, so the coach “pursued her and pursued her and pursued her.”

This bond worked: the couple married in January 2008.

She has four children with Jim

Jim and Sarah have four children together, daughters Addison and Katherine and sons Jack and John. The boys are named after their grandfather, former college football coach Jack Harbaugh, and uncle, Baltimore Ravens head coach John Harbaugh, respectively.

When news broke in 2016 that Jim and Sarah were expecting their fourth child together, the former NFL star told the Detroit Free Press that he “tackled this pregnancy with an enthusiasm unknown to humanity.”

John arrived a month early and spent 19 days in the NICU. Two and a half months later, the newborn was healthy enough to travel out of the country and was baptized in Vatican City (it was a dream of Jim’s to meet Pope Francis, which happened earlier on the same trip.)

“That was something I could never have imagined in a million years,” Sarah told ESPN. “The whole thing, you felt like you were in another world. You were just there in the moment and it was beautiful.”

When Jim lived in San Francisco, he wasn’t able to spend as much time with his family as he would have liked, but that changed when the Harbaugh family moved to Michigan in 2015.

“The kids are so much happier when he’s around,” Sarah said Ann Arbor Family shortly after the move. “And I can take the kids to the office. They love it, running around on the field… They’re already much more involved in his life, and that’s going to be really good.”

Jim also has three children from his first marriage to Miah Harbaugh: sons Jay and James and daughter Grace.

She starred in a Dockers advert mocking Jim’s ‘dad pants’

Jim is known for his pleated khaki pants, a look Sarah has distanced herself from, even saying she “won’t take the blame for his outfits.”

“I’ve thrown (his pants) away a lot of times,” Sarah told 99.7 NOW in 2014. “I threw them away and when he went to the (NFL scouting) combine, he found a Walmart. They were $8!”

While Sarah wouldn’t force him to change his pants while his 49ers were on a roll (Jim is big on superstition), she did ridicule him in a 2014 PSA-style Dockers ad.

“Dad pants can affect almost any man, and the pain they can cause a family and loved ones can be significant,” Sarah jokes at the beginning of the ad, which ends with a grinning Jim standing bravely behind the grill in his new wrinkle-free pants.

The Dockers commercial is a bit meta because Sarah said Ann Arbor Family she was a big fan of Seinfeldwho made fun of a Dockers ad during season two. Some of Sarah’s other favorite TV shows include Curb your enthusiasm And The office.

They openly support each other

Sarah is a huge supporter of her husband and gets (almost) as irritated about the football season as Jim.

“I get really stressed, I mean really stressed. When Jim got the job (in Michigan) I felt sick and I still feel anxious about the pressure he’s under,” Sarah said Ann Arbor Family. “He’s so calm about things that it helps me, but I still worry about him because there’s a lot of expectations here. The thing about Jim is, he’s confident and he’s good at what he does, and I realize that, but you just don’t know.”

Jim has also praised his wife to the skies, often in football terms.

“I was thinking the other day that two people in my life, my wife and our (then-Stanford) quarterback, Andrew Luck, have a lot in common in that they’re both perfect,” Jim told reporters in 2010, according to ESPN.com. “With most people, you say, ‘If only they didn’t do that. Or if only they didn’t do that.’ You either wish they could do this, or you wish they could do that. But I don’t do that with my wife, Sarah, or Andrew Luck. They’re just absolutely perfect the way they are. For a football coach, that’s pretty awesome — to have a great wife and a great quarterback.”

She is a supporter of local non-profit organizations

Sarah admits that being a coach’s wife isn’t always easy. It took a while for the naturally reserved mother of four to feel comfortable at public events.

“It’s hard, extremely hard being married to a coach; people warned me about that. It’s hard because even when they’re home, they’re not fully home,” she told the Detroit Free Press.

Sarah is a passionate supporter of non-profits and has overcome her fears, saying she can make the hard times worth it by helping her community.

Sarah serves on the board of directors of ChadTough, which funds research and helps families battling two types of aggressive and rare brain tumors that most often affect children and are generally fatal. Both she and Jim have also publicly supported The Hope Clinic, which provides free medical care to residents of Ypsilanti, Michigan.

Sarah and Jim have donated together to causes they care about, including matching donations for a 2017 event to support the mental health nonprofit Fresh Start Clubhouse and donating $100,000 to United Way for Southeastern Michigan in 2020 to support their COVID-19 Community Response Fund.

She helped Jim work on his first book

In 2016, Jim and Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer David Turnley published the book Enthusiasm unknown to humanityThe book includes 300 black-and-white photographs Turnley took during Jim’s first year as Michigan’s coach, and a 9,000-word essay on leadership by Jim.

At a book launch in Ann Arbor, Sarah told the Detroit Free Press that she helped Jim perfect the essay.

“He worked on it for a long time and actually, probably every night before he went to bed, ‘Can you read this?’ or ‘Listen to this, is this okay?’ so he really took it seriously,” she explained. “Every word he put in there, he really took it seriously. It was cool to finally see it on paper.”

She doesn’t like technology

While her four children are fine with screen time, Sarah knows she’s ‘behind the times’, even though she tries to keep up with her emails and texts – just away from her kids.

“It makes me nervous. I’m always worried about it. I don’t know what’s going on. My phone never gets updated and it always messes up. I wish I was better with it,” she said. Ann Arbor Familyand added: “I just found an Xbox when I unboxed it (I think EA Sports gave it to Jim), and it got me thinking: do I want them to play those games?”

By no longer using technology, Sarah has more time to play the piano, which Jim gave her 15 years ago.

“It’s funny because he bought me a grand piano in 2009 and he said, ‘This is Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Christmas, your birthday.’ I think it was supposed to be two years, but it’s been 10 years now,” she told the Detroit Free Press in 2017. “I’m fine with that. He’s busy.”