My interest in swimming started when I was eight years old with the Wenatchee Swim Team, when my best friend encouraged me to try out.  She convinced me swimming was the “best sport ever”, and over the years I have had some level of commitment to the sport I love and enjoy.  After years of competitive swimming at the age group and high school level, I swam at Pacific Lutheran University, majoring in Physical Education with emphasis in Exercise Science. I started my coaching career while in high school, helping with the club team as well as the summer swim team. I have worked as an assistant coach with the Montclair YMCA age group and masters teams, as well as the WRAC swim team and now Velocity.

Outside of swimming I am a Nurse Case Manager at Confluence Health, and have three children, Kayli, Connor, and Austin. Through swimming at PLU I met my husband, James, who was the Wenatchee High School girls and boys swim coach before passing away in 2020. We encouraged all three of our children to swim because we realized the lifelong value of this skill, and recognized that swimming offers not only fitness benefits but teaches you about goal setting and perseverance, such invaluable skills to carry with you long after leaving the sport. I enjoy supplementing my nursing career with coaching, with the goal of helping novice swimmers get excited about the sport I so much enjoy. Two accomplishments of my swimming career were inductions into both the Wenatchee High School and PLU’s Hall of Fame, both secondary to the life long skills I have gained from this sport.

My mother was a competitive swimmer, and there was never any doubt that her children would be swimmers as well. I grew up spending all my free time during summers swimming. Being in water has always truly been my “happy place.”

I first became involved in Velocity when my oldest began swimming 10 years ago. My family quickly found a “home” on the team. At one time all three of my children have swam for the team.  My husband and I also quickly learned that not only can swimming be a great way for kids to get involved, it is great for the whole family to get involved. Both my husband and myself have had leadership opportunities on the team, including  both if us serving as Board Presidents. I never would have imagined 10 years ago the friends I would make because my son wanted to swim!

Coaching has always been a passion of mine, and I have spent many seasons coaching my kids’ various sports.  I am truly excited to have the opportunity to coach swimming, and I hope I can share my love of water with all youth that I work with. Off the pool deck I work as a 5th grade teacher, enjoy spending time with with my husband and kids, and love enjoying the great outdoors in the Wenatchee Valley.

Unlike all these other amazing coaches, I never swam for a club team. I kind of stumbled into swimming by accident.  My freshman year in high school, the basketball tryouts were being held at 5 am. Not an early riser, I decided to go out for the water polo team as their tryouts were being held at a much more reasonable hour.  Little did I know, I would soon be doing daily double workouts during the water polo season and then continuing those grueling workouts during the ensuing swimming season. I played water polo and swam throughout high school, going to state my senior year.

Following high school, I swam for three years at the University of Puget Sound. I graduated from UPS with a degree in Computer Science and worked for a small mortgage software company in Gig Harbor for several years. Our family relocated to Wenatchee in 2010 and my boys joined Velocity in October of 2011.  I feel honored to be able to help out our team and enjoy working with the kids and watching them grown and develop into amazing athletes and human beings. Outside of swimming, I work as a Control Systems Engineer for the Chelan County PUD. I enjoy boating, wake-surfing, paddle boarding, and wood working.

I started swimming as soon as my mom could get me into lessons and I never stopped. I did a lot of free swimming until my family moved to Quincy in 2010, where I joined a summer swim team when I was 10 in 2012. I did about two years of summer swimming before joining Velocity in 2014. Coach C and Coach Carolyn Magee were muy first coaches on the team. I swam with the team as an athlete for five years before deciding to help out with coaching. Over those five years, I became a certified LIfeguard, Lifeguard Instructor and Water Safety Instructor. I have been participating as both an athlete and coach up until recently when I decided to focus more of my energy on coaching instead of swimming.

I am the lead coach for the 13-14 group and enjoy helping and instructing all of the kids in this group along with any other group I help out with. Apart from being a Velocity coach, I also coach Masters, teach private swimming lessons for adults and children and teach adaptive swimming lessons as a part of the Swim Angelfish program. I also enjoy arts and crafts, camping and reading.

I grew up playing different sports for every season from basketball in the winter to my dad coaching tennis summer camps. One of the sports I participated in each summer with the City of Wenatchee was swimming. After the City, I swam with Darcy Bruggman and Carolyn McGee at the WRAC. My favorite memories from sports came from swimming-hanging out with friends during those long meets! I did not swim year round until my sophomore year of high school, again with the WRAC program. I did swim all 4 years in high school and joined Central’s rec team during my undergrad years.

I received my undergrad in Psychology from CWU in 2012 and continued on for my masters in Experimental Psy. After college, I returned to Wenatchee and worked as a para-educator at WHS in the aquatics department. There I was recommended by the head coach, John Pringle to become a coach with Velocity. I started the fall of 2014 and have loved it since. My first year I worked along side coaches Kathy Elwyn and Trent Grigsby with what was then the copper group. Since then I have worked with each age group and increased my on deck coaching knowledge and learned many behind the scenes administrate tasks. I am looking forward to this season and couldn’t have a more welcoming and energizing team to work with! Please feel free to email me with any questions about me or the team!