Clark College Athletics

After two years of stretching like silly putty between Vancouver and Austin, Texas, Ciera is finally cemented at Clark College. She began working with the softball team in the summer of 2020, inspiring the team to lift pieces of heavy metal (cue Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin), as the strength and conditioning coach.  She continues to help the Penguins get swole at the Thompson Fitness Center and is entrusted with sharing their amazingness to folks outside the huddle via social media (@penguinsoftball). When she’s not at the gorgeous softball complex cheering on the failures that provide the building blocks to master a skill, she supports the academic growth of the team as a strategy tutor.  After all, she is a sports nerd. 

Ciera draws from her diverse range of experiences to view athletic development through a variety of lenses. She was a full-ride Division I athlete who experienced burn out.  Originally recruited as a catcher to an SEC school, the decision she made as a 17-year-old did not account for the need of her support system and she transferred closer to home to attend Northern Virginia Community College.  She continued her softball career at George Mason University, where she saw starting time at every position except 1^st base and pitcher.  She forewent her last two years of eligibility to study abroad in Australia, gaining a new perspective of athletic development systems by playing field hockey for the University of Canberra Hockey Club.  Her last semester of her undergraduate (BS Biology) she lived at the Smithsonian Conservation Biological Institute where she assisted with the Clouded leopard breeding program. 

She found her way back to softball after she moved from an east-coast metropolis to a western desert town without a traffic light.  Sports played the role of her wingman and she integrated into a new community by playing pick-up basketball and coaching softball (along with three other sports) at the high school. She finally received time on the mound as the only female in a men’s fastpitch league.  As a coach, she had season outcomes of two total wins along with seasons ending with two state championship rings. She has created free community skills clinics at the grassroot level and helped manage collegiate conference championships.  She has taught mindfulness to kindergartners, engaged in theoretical discussions revolving around physical culture and sport with university students and published research on what makes playing sports fun.  

Ciera returned to the city of no skyscrapers and earned her MS in Exercise Science and Nutrition at George Washington University where she managed the body composition lab and continued her collegiate athletic career playing for club field hockey team.  She continued playing field hockey at the University of Texas where she is pursuing her doctorate in Kinesiology.  She decided to take on the challenge of learning a new sport and made the travel squad of the nationally ranked UT women’s lacrosse club.  She is currently teaching at UT remotely and managing the Thompson Fitness Center at Clark as she finishes her dissertation examining physical and cultural geographic factors that influence opportunity or the lack of to play youth sports. She is privileged for the chance to learn from the strong women of Clark Softball.