When it all fell apart, Kara Kohler moved back in with her parents.
Up until that point, every major decision in her 25 years of life had a singular purpose, to help her be the most effective and efficient athlete she could be and get her to the Olympics, her dream since she was a child in her Clayton home.
In 2012, Kohler stunned the rowing world — and herself — when she won a bronze medal at the London Olympics just three years after taking up the sport. But in 2016, she was left off the Olympic roster for Rio. U.S. Rowing cut her funding. She had no income. No bank account. No direction.
“When you rise that high, you can fall pretty far,” she said. “I was too heartbroken to continue.”
Broke and confused, that’s when she met Jack Woll, a high school junior at The College Prep School in Oakland who became her mentee, eventually inspiring her return to competition which has led her back to the Olympics in Paris this summer.
“That gave me inspiration,” Kohler said. “It doesn’t take much to inspire people.”
Olympic rower Kara Kohler practices along the Oakland Estuary on June 7, 2024. (Ray Chavez/Bay Area News Group)
When Woll first met Kohler in 2016, he didn’t know how alone she was feeling.
He knew her as a superstar in the rowing world.
He knew her as a walk-on at Cal who never held a paddle until her freshman year, two years later won an Olympic bronze medal and then returned to Cal to lead the varsity eight to the NCAA championship.
“At the time I was feeling low about myself but he didn’t see that,” Kohler said. “He’s like, ‘Wow you’re so accomplished.’”
She was “a remarkable athlete,” Woll said, the perfect example of someone who can achieve anything they set their mind to.
Woll wanted to be coached by her.
Kohler needed a job.
“Coaching turned out to be more multi-dimensional than I thought,” she said. “It was a symbiotic inspirational loop.”
She invited Woll to the Cal Rowing Club, where, for an entire summer, they’d sit side-by-side in the erg rooms and practice on rowing machines, simulating the stroke over and over, studying video and fine-tuning the technical details.
“I think she did a really wonderful job of showing me how to love the process in a different way than I had been taught,” Woll said. “She taught me how to be internally focused, understand how days fit into weeks, into months, and understand where the important days were, what day-to-day variation meant in performance, and what it was like to be trending toward the goal.
“It served me well. We ended up winning a national championship with the Oakland Strokes at the end of my senior year.”
Kohler gained something, too.
“He was so diligent and had so much enthusiasm for getting better that it definitely rubbed off on me,” she said. “I was like, ‘OK, this is what it’s like to have joy for a sport.’”
She helped guide Woll to a spot on the Princeton rowing …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
