Jim Harbaugh and his wife, Sarah Feuerborn Harbaugh, weren’t always head over heels for each other. After meeting at a P.F. Chang’s restaurant in 2006, Jim had to work to impress Sarah, which eventually paid off. The two wed in 2008 and now share four kids together: daughters Addison and Katherine and sons Jack and John. The couple began their lives together in California, where Jim coached 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, Mich., when he became head coach of his alma mater, the University of Michigan. After eight seasons with the Wolverines, the Harbaugh clan headed back to California when Jim signed on as head coach of the Los Angeles Chargers in January 2024. Sarah has been a major supporter of her husband, turning up for major games like the 2024 NCAA National Championship and the Super Bowl. Jim is supportive of his wife as well. “Happy Anniversary, to myself, thanks Sarah for marrying me,” he posted on X (formerly Twitter) in 2016, adding in Spanish, “Mi Esposa hermosa en todo el mundo!” Sarah is so supportive of her husband’s career that she told Ann Arbor Family in 2015 that she “cannot go online.” “I just can’t because, if I see something negative, I just know him as who he is, as a great person and a great dad, and then you see someone say whatever they might say and I just want to punch that person. I just can’t do that anymore. I will lose sleep,” she said, adding that she still wants “to be involved” and “supportive.” Here’s everything 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 being a big rig driver. She had six sisters and four brothers. She told 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, according to KCTV Kansas City, per Bleacher Report. Jim was visiting the city for a coaching convention. In the almost two decades they’ve been together, Jim’s head coaching gigs took them from California to Michigan, and his newest job with the Chargers took them back to the Golden State. But Ann Arbor will always hold a special place in both Jim and Sarah’s hearts, as long before he became head coach, Jim grew up in the college town and played quarterback for Michigan. “There’s just something about the Midwestern people, so down to earth. So, I’m thankful for that,” Sarah told mgoblue.com in 2015 of returning to the Midwest. “In the NFL, you are kind of away from everybody. I don’t know if it’s good or bad [yet], but you’re engrossed in everything in Ann Arbor. It’s community.” She met Jim at a restaurant Jim and Sarah met at a restaurant in 2006. At the time, Jim was recently divorced and coaching at the University of San Diego. In an interview on HBO’s Real Sports, Jim shared that Sarah was getting takeout (according to Player Wives, they were at a PF Chang’s), and he went 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 was giving me. But I called her, multiple times. Like, nine times before she returned my call,” Jim recalled, adding, “I could tell she was a winner all the way.” Sarah’s brother, Marty Feuerborn, confirmed that their romance wasn’t love at first sight. He told KCTV Kansas City that Sarah wouldn’t talk to Jim at first, so the coach “chased her and chased her and chased her.” This commitment worked — the pair wed in January 2008. She shares 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 was “attacking this pregnancy with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind.” John arrived a month early and spent 19 days in 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 in a million years have imagined would happen,” Sarah told ESPN. “The whole thing, you felt like you were in a different world. You were just there in the moment and it was beautiful.” During Jim’s time in San Francisco, he couldn’t have as much family time as he would’ve liked, but that changed when the Harbaugh clan moved to Michigan in 2015. “The kids are so much happier when he is around,” Sarah told 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 are already way more involved with his life, and that is 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 ad mocking Jim’s “dad pants” Jim is well-known for rocking pleated khakis, a look Sarah has disavowed, going as far as saying she “will not take blame for his outfits.” “I’ve thrown [his pants] away many of times,” Sarah told 99.7 NOW in 2014. “I threw them out, and when he went to the [NFL scouting] combine, he found a Walmart. They were $8!” Though Sarah wouldn’t force him to change his pants preference while his 49ers were on a roll (superstition matters to Jim), she did poke fun at him in a 2014 PSA-style ad for Dockers. “Dad pants can affect almost any man, and the suffering it can bring upon a family and loved ones can be significant,” Sarah joked at the beginning of the ad, which ends with a grinning Jim gamely manning a grill in his new pleat-free pants. The Dockers commercial is a little meta because Sarah told Ann Arbor Family she was a huge fan of Seinfeld, which mocked a Dockers ad during its second season. Some of Sarah’s other favorite TV shows are Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Office. They publicly support each other Sarah is an avid supporter of her husband and gets (almost) as worked up about the football season as Jim. “I get really stressed, I mean really stressed. When Jim got the [Michigan] job, [I] felt nauseous and I still feel unsettled about the pressure he is under,” Sarah told Ann Arbor Family. “He is so calm about things that it helps me, but I am still worried about him because there is a lot of expectation here. The thing about Jim is, he is confident and he is good at what he does, and I realize that, but you just don’t know.” Jim has lavished praise on his wife as well — often in football terms. “I was thinking just the other night that two people in my life, my wife and our [then-Stanford] quarterback, Andrew Luck, have a lot in common in that they’re just both perfect,” Jim told reporters in 2010, per ESPN.com. “With most people you say, ‘If they only didn’t do that. Or they didn’t do this.’ Or you 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 are just absolutely perfect the way they are. For a football coach that’s pretty great — to have a great wife and a great quarterback.” She is a proponent of local non-profits Sarah has admitted that it isn’t always easy being a coach’s wife, and it took the naturally reserved mom of four time to feel comfortable at public events. “It’s hard, extremely hard to be married to a coach; people warned me about that. It’s hard because even the times when they’re home, they’re not home completely,” she told the Detroit Free Press. An avid supporter of nonprofits, Sarah has worked through her fears because she has said that helping her community makes the hard times worth it. Sarah is on the Board of Directors of ChadTough, which funds research and helps families battling two kinds 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 together have donated to causes they care about, including matching donations for a 2017 event supporting the mental illness nonprofit Fresh Start Clubhouse and sending $100,000 to the 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 released the book Enthusiasm Unknown to Mankind. The tome features 300 black-and-white photos taken by Turnley during Jim’s first year coaching Michigan, as well as a 9,000-word essay on leadership by Jim. During a book signing in Ann Arbor, Sarah told the Detroit Free Press that she helped Jim fine-tune the essay. “He worked for a long time and really, probably every night before bed, ‘Can you read this,’ or ‘Listen to this, is this okay?,’ so he took it really seriously,” she explained. “Every single word he put in there, he was really serious about. It was neat to finally see it in print.” She doesn’t love technology While her four kids know their way around a screen, Sarah knows she’s “behind the times,” though she tries to keep up with email and texts — just not around her kids. “It makes me nervous. I am always worried about it. I don’t know what is going on. My phone is never updated and it is always screwing up. I wish I was more savvy with it,” she told Ann Arbor Family, adding, “I just found an Xbox while unpacking (I think EA Sports gave it to Jim), and it made me consider, do I want them to start playing with those games?” Eschewing technology has given Sarah more time to play the piano Jim gifted her 15 years ago. “It’s funny because he got me a baby grand in 2009 and he said, ‘This is Valentine’s, Mother’s Day, Christmas, your birthday.’ I think it was supposed to be for two years but it’s dragged into 10 years,” she told the Detroit Free Press in 2017. “I’m okay with that. He’s busy.”
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