About Me

I’ve always loved the water and spent many happy hours at the pool as a child in West Africa. At age 11, I joined a synchronized swimming club, started competing, and instantly fell in love with the sport!

Various swimming instructors and coaches encouraged me to pursue training in swim instruction, coaching, and lifeguarding. As a teenager, I got my first job as a lifeguard and swim instructor and continued working as a lifeguard, swim instructor, synchronized swimming coach, and water aerobics instructor throughout my undergraduate degrees.

At age 18, I moved to Edmonton and achieved my goal of competing at a national level in synchronized swimming. But what really changed my life was joining a masters swim team, Penguin Swimming, where I learned to do proper flip turns and butterfly, met people who are still my good friends to this day, and gained a mentor in the form of the head coach who pushed me as an athlete and also had a huge influence on my coaching career.

After finishing my Bachelor of Physical Education and Bachelor of Education, I went to the Philippines and spent two years teaching at an international school. I developed a new K-12 swimming curriculum and also coached the high school swim team.

When I returned to Edmonton to pursue graduate studies in sport psychology, I had a job waiting for me with Penguin Swimming, coaching young competitive swimmers. This gave me the perfect opportunity to start applying concepts from my studies to the pool. I enjoyed attending swim coaching conferences in New Orleans and San Diego, as well as academic sport psychology conferences.

For my master’s thesis, I explored factors leading to sport commitment on a local high school swim team. But it wasn’t until my PhD that I fell in love with self-determination theory—a powerful theory of motivation—and began applying it to research in exercise and sport contexts. I want every child who tries competitive swimming to continue enjoying swimming for the rest of their life. I dedicated my studies to preventing burnout and dropout from youth swimming and encouraging continued participation as adults.

Another thing that happened during my PhD is that I stepped away from coaching and got my first “grown-up” job in an office, working as an instructional designer. I’d already been teaching undergraduate courses in sport and exercise psychology, personal health and wellbeing, and coaching, and it was a smooth transition to a role that involved designing effective online learning experiences for adults. I joined the Learning & Development Accelerator and gained a ton of knowledge in learning science.

All this time, I was still training and competing as a masters athlete with Penguin Swimming, except for a break during the height of COVID-19. In 2023, the head coach and cofounder of Penguin Swimming retired, and the club dissolved. I worked with other former Penguin Masters swimmers to create Fast Eddie’s Swim Club and found myself back on the pool deck, this time as head coach.

Seeing adult swimmers delight in mastering new skills and pushing themselves to achieve their goals got me thinking about the many people outside of our swim team who could also benefit from my coaching—especially women.

Before I knew it, I was buying a domain and registering a trade name for The Big Mermaid. I took on my first client in November 2025, and the rest is history!