Meet Your Mentors
Bio:
Coral is a World Champion coxswain for Team USA in Beach Sprints, she recently earned her PhD in gene therapy for a childhood muscle-wasting disease. She was previously a coxswain coach for the University of Virginia women’s rowing team, Penn Athletic Club Junior Gold team, and UC Santa Barbara rowing team. She currently lives in Philadelphia and mentors local high school students in her lab at the University of Pennsylvania.
Coral’s rowing career has led her to 3 Senior National Teams, including the US Beach Sprint Team and the US Pan American Team. Along the way, she has had opportunities to participate in Senior Team Selection Camps for the World Championship US Women’s 8+, and pre-Olympic Coxswain Selection for the Paris 2024 Olympic Selection Camp (just missing the cut in both).
Coral started her rowing career at the club level in college, having found the sport freshman year. After graduating college, she continued to pursue her competitive dreams at the New York Athletic Club (Pelham, NY) and Penn Athletic Club (Philadelphia, PA).
Fun facts: Coral holds an American Concept2 erg record for the marathon (42,195 m), and she is an avid weightlifter.
Specialties:
Coral specializes in mentoring student-athletes who struggle with vision, remaining encouraged through rejection or failure, and finding the path forward when they cannot see the way. Coral can teach student-athletes how to see the purpose in who they genuinely are and how they are wired. She can help student-athletes define their strengths, build areas they want to work on, and generate a “training plan” to transform themselves into the person, athlete, student, and teammate they want to be.
Superpower:
Vision
Seeing how someone’s strengths, struggles, victories, and failures can work together to be harnessed as their own unique superpower.
Impactful Moment:
Failure is not the opposite of success – failing to show up again is.
I was in selection camp for the US National Team, vying to cox the women’s eight at Senior World Championships after predominantly coxing men for a decade. I wasn’t the right fit and was ultimately cut.
Immediately after, the US coastal rowing coach let me race a coastal quad at the biggest international coastal rowing regatta. It was a women’s quad, and the boat had no cox box. We were in the open ocean for a 4-6km race with 30 mph winds and 3-foot swells. I had never coxed a coastal boat before but for some reason the coach believed in me – he believed in us – and that carried more weight than I realized at the time. My coach’s confidence transcended to me and to my boat. We crushed it, placing 4th in a field of 20.
The following year, I tried out for the US Coastal Rowing Beach Sprint Team. I made it, earning a seat coxing the mixed quad. We trained and raced our hearts out and won GOLD! World Champions.
The rejection I felt getting cut from the women’s eight hurt. I was frustrated and discouraged that this was the end of pursuing an elite rowing career. The experience revealed many of my weaknesses and struggles – some that I didn’t even know I had until I was in selection pressure at the top of the top. But the rejection gave me the opportunity to face these struggles – work them, train them, and turn them into strengths. As long as I showed up again.
By continuing to train and race in elite coastal rowing, I transformed into the person, athlete, and teammate that was in me all along, but that I had yet to fully learn how to access.
For me, what’s most inspiring from this story is how my coastal rowing coach believed in me enough to take me in after being rejected and before I transformed. He gave me a chance to show up again. And in that, he helped bring my best self out of me. Keep showing up.
As Michael Jordan said: “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life, and that is why I succeed.”
