Hear Her Sports

Samantha Smith is a multi-sport athlete. She does freestyle, alpine, and nordic skiing, runs cross country, plays soccer, hikes, and mountain bikes. She lives seven months of the year in Boise, Idaho and five months in Sun Valley, splitting time between Boise High School and Community School. This set up allows her to pursue her two main sports -- soccer and skiing. And what makes Sammy unique is that she is top level in both these sports! She is a member of the U.S. cross-country skiing development team and a member of the U twenty U.S. National Team soccer pool. This past year she had World Cup experiences in both soccer and skiing. She played in the U17 soccer World Cup in India (where she scored two goals). Sammy also skied Period 4 of the Nordic World Cup in Norway, Sweden, Estonia, and Finland. In those 2023 World Cup races, which took place between March 11th and 26th, she earned two top thirty finishes. When she’s not competing, you can find her in the outdoors with her family and golden retriever.

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Sports nutritionist Nancy Clark is Certified Specialist in Sports Dietetics. She counsels both competitive athletes and casual exercisers in her successful private practice in the Boston-area. Her extensive experience has helped thousands of active clients win with good nutrition.

Her nutrition advice and photo have graced the back of the Wheaties’ box! She has been Team Nutritionist for the Boston Red Sox. And her best-selling Nancy Clark's Sports Nutrition Guidebook has sold over 800,000 copies and now is available in it’s 6th edition. Nancy also writes a monthly nutrition column called The Athlete's Kitchen, which appears regularly in over 100 sports and fitness publications and websites.

Nancy is a sought-after nutrition counselor for athletes who struggle with food-and weight issues, as well as a nutrition educator and speaker popular with dietitians, trainers, coaches, and other health professionals who want to learn how to effectively teach winning sports nutrition messages.

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Amanda Sobhy is currently the #1 ranked #1 US player (which is the highest ranked American player ever.) and she’s #5 in the world. She has a career-high world ranking of #3. She earned five US Women's National Champion titles and three Gold medals at the 2015 & 2019 Pan American Games, which makes her the first player ever to win three Gold medals (Individual, Doubles, and Team) in the Pan-American Games.

Amanda graduated from Harvard University in 2015 with an undefeated 62-0 record. She won the Intercollegiate Individual National Championship four times and the team National title three times. She also led the US Women's National team to a best finish (2nd) at the 2022 Women's World Team Championships.

Amanda currently lives and trains in Boca Raton, Florida.

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Since she was 18 years old, Kelsey Phendler has been working on water and in boats of all kinds. She’s been a professional Grand Canyon Boatman and River Guide for ten years, where she rows boats loaded with gear and passengers along 226-mile trips in every weather condition imaginable from spring through fall. Kelsey also currently pilots motorboats for the United States Geological Survey fish study group. She is now preparing to row from San Francisco to Hawaii with her Hericane Rowing teammates in the Great Pacific Race. This race will certainly be a huge challenge, but Kelsey is no stranger to the perseverance needed to smile in the face of physical and environmental adversity so she’s looking forward to this year of planning and preparation. Working with a strong group of women is exactly where Kelsey thrives. She believes training to break the Women's Ocean Rowing World Record alongside her strong teammates Sierra Myers and sisters Jennifer and Kristen Hofer will be a deeply transformational experience. They all share that same dream!

In this special collaboration with Women's Running Stories, we talk to Jae Gruenke, Feldenkrais practitioner, running form expert, and founder of The Balance Runner.  

Jae Gruenke is known as “the wise woman of running” and has helped runners from beginner to Olympian relieve pain and improve their performance; she specializes in helping runners whose problems have persisted despite medical treatment.

Jae’s interest in running technique was sparked when, as a professional dancer, she was asked to perform choreography that included sustained running in large, outdoor environments. Frustrated by how difficult and uncomfortable running felt, she began to study running technique and use the Feldenkrais Professional Training Program she was enrolled in as a laboratory to discover how to coordinate her movements so that running felt comfortable, easy, and enjoyable.

Eventually, realizing she’d come to prefer running to dancing, and also that the changes in movement that had made the difference to her running were not being taught, discussed, or researched elsewhere, she retired from dancing and launched The Balanced Runner. Jae has been a member of the Feldenkrais Guild of North America since 1999 and the United Kingdom since 2011 and was an ACE-certified personal trainer from 1999-2012. 

She graduated from Williams College in 1992 where she majored in literary studies and cross-enrolled at Bennington College to study modern dance. Working as a professional dancer from 1992-2003, she performed with a number of New York City-based companies, and at the time of her retirement from dance in 2003 she was a senior company member of Sarah Skaggs Dance.

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Kristen Bourne has coached cross country skiing at the collegiate and professional level for the past three years. She was the assistant coach at The College of Saint Scholastica for two years where she was a 2021 Women’s Sports Foundation Tara VanDerveer Fellow. During the summer, she was an assistant coach with the Craftsbury Green Racing Project professional team in Vermont. Prior to coaching, she skied for Northern Michigan University for five years, qualifying for the NCAA Championships three-times and representing the United States at the World Junior Championships and U23 World Championships in 2015 and 2016. After college, she moved to Oslo, Norway where she skied full-time and was an intern at the Norwegian School of Sports Science. Currently, Kristen is the US Ski Cross Country D-Team coach at US Ski and Snowboard, overseeing the top junior and U23 athletes in the US as well as traveling full-time on the World Cup supporting all national team athletes. She is also a graduate student at the College of Saint Scholastica studying Exercise Physiology. When Kristen is not working or studying, she can be found hanging out with her dogs and spending time outdoors with her friends and family.

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Erika Hood was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio and has over fifteen years of experience in community organizing and advocacy. She believes that authentic engagement matters most when working with the community. In 2009 Erika, her sister Ebony and their mother Marcia founded Syatt, formerly known as See You at the Top. Syatt's MISSION is to support its community through culturally relevant programming in the natural and built environment. As a co-founder of SYATT, Erika is able to transform the lives of youth and adults in Cleveland, by curating culturally tailored opportunities for community members to engage in nature and outdoor recreation. In spaces that are historically white, she understands how important Black and Brown representation in nature is and has committed to maintaining a level of expertise in all activities that she encourages her community members to try. Most recently that meant that she and her sister became certified SCUBA divers. As a member of a community that suffers from toxic stress and chronic diseases, green space is an integral component of the physical and mental healing of her community. Erika recalls having supportive parents in her youth who gave her the opportunity to try new things. They exposed her to parks, informative landmarks, and the legacy of cultural contributions found across America. She has passed on this love of travel to her incredibly talented sons, Greg and Duke. 

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Jenny Nguyen picked up a basketball right around the same time she put down her milk bottle. From an early age, people called her a tomboy. Instead of playing with dolls and wearing dresses, she climbed trees and rode bikes. But most of all, she loved to play basketball. That love shaped her whole identity and helped her to fit in all the way through high school.

When she was 19 years old in her first year playing college ball at Clark College, Nguyen ruptured her ACL. She was devastated by the career-ending injury, but stumbled upon a newfound passion: cooking. She cooked all through college, first for her roommate, then for the whole floor and then for the entire dorm. She landed her first kitchen job at age 22 and fell in love with the craft all over again.

After graduating from college, Nguyen enrolled at the Western Culinary Institute in downtown Portland. There she graduated from the expedited program while working full time at a couple of fine dining restaurants. When she was in the kitchen, Nguyen was in her element. The zone. The basketball court and the kitchen have been the only two places she has ever felt like she belonged. Later, she realized that both those places are very male-dominated and that she had struggled, endured and found success in her own way. She went on to work her way up in kitchens for another 15 years, with the last four years as an executive chef at Reed College for Bon Appétit Management Company.

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Anouk Patty has a long and distinguished career at several blue-chip corporations. She was Head of Strategic Partnerships at HP, Inc. focused on 3D scanning and 3D printing partnerships, particularly in the footwear and sports categories. Prior to that, she led HP’s partnerships in the gaming space. Anouk spent time at Intuit where she was the GM of Quicken and Quickbooks for the Mac business. Her foundational professional experience was developed at both Bain & Company in San Francisco and J.P. Morgan in New York City and Melbourne, Australia. Anouk is on the board of Park City-based POWDR, the parent company of Woodward, Copper Mountain, and Killington Resort and previously sat on the board of Green Mountain Valley School. Anouk is a long-time athlete. She competed on the U.S. Alpine Ski Team in the 1980s and raced for Dartmouth College, where she was a three-time All-American and won the NCAA Skiing Championship in 1988. She earned an MBA from Harvard Business School, an executive education certificate in leadership in innovation from Stanford Business School, and a B.A in Economics from Dartmouth College. Anouk continues to love the outdoors, aims to get out every day to ski, play golf, mountain bike or trail run.

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Find Anouk at http://usskiandsnowboard.org/about/executive-leadership-team

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Sasha DiGiulian began climbing in 1998 at six years old. She won the World Championships for Female Overall, a Silver in the Bouldering World Championships, as well as Bronze in the Duel. Sasha was also the undefeated pan-American Champion for over a decade. Outdoors, Sasha is the first North American woman to climb the grade nine-a, five-fourteen-d. Additionally, she has on-sighted multiple eight-b-pluses, five fourteen-a’s, ascended groundbreaking, multi-pitch routes of over fifteen hundred feet of eight-c climbing, AND accomplished multiple First Ascents and over thirty First Female Ascents around the World. Sasha is a graduate of Columbia University in New York City where she studied Non-fiction Writing and Business. She is on the Board of the Women’s Sports Foundation, and is an Athlete Ambassador for Right to Play, Up2Us Sports, Access Fund, and American Alpine Club. She is the founder of SEND Bars and Female Focused Adventures, plus is a co-founder of RoamTV.

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