#bernalsgator

[bernalsgator]

PAM KUONG

 Pamela Kuong is a Boston native, and the city has served her well. While attending Wellesley High School she swam under Coach Bernal, and after graduating from Ohio Wesleyan University she returned to Boston and became a coach at Bernal’s Gator Swim Club, Wellesley High School Girls Swim Team, and the Wellesley Swimming Association.

As an aspiring banker, Kuong was directed to golf as a good way to help level the playing field in a male dominated profession. The mix of discipline and mental training skills she had learned at Gator along with weekends and vacations spent golfing helped her become one of the greatest golfers in New England. As she started to compete in charity business tournaments, she would have to diplomatically select the team she would play for while a plethora of successful businessmen made a push to get Kuong on their team.

In 2008 and 2010 she won the Massachusetts Women’s Amateur and in 2011 she won the New England Women’s amateur. She has previously plated in five US Senior Mid-Ams and Two US Senior Ams. In 2012 she was the Women’s Golf Association of Massachusetts Player of the Year. She is currently a Senior Vice President and Senior Client Manager of Commercial Banking at Bank of America, and another incredibly successful alumni of Bernal’s Gator Swim Club.

[bernalsgator]

SUNITA WILLIAMS

In the last century, traveling the globe has become easier and easier. Technological improvements are reducing costs, and as we globalize communications, Europe and Asia and South America and Africa seem to be closer and closer and closer.

Yet, for all those technological advancements, it still takes a really special person to be able to break the stratosphere and travel into the dark abyss of space. Sunita “Suni” Williams then, is an incredibly special person.

Suni Williams Is an American astronaut, a United Sates naval officer, and a Bernal’s Gator Swim Club Alumni. She holds the records for the longest single space flight by a woman (195 days), Total Spacewalks by a woman (seven), and most spacewalk time for a woman (50 hours, 40 minutes).

She was born in Euclid, Ohio as the youngest of three children, but moved to Needham, Massachusetts we she was young. This is when she swam under Coach Bernal. One year after the season ended, and they had two weeks off she decided to run the Boston Marathon in a brand new pair of shoes she had bought. Half way through the race, her feet had been bloody and covered in blisters so she finished the race barefoot. After high school she went to the United States Naval academy in 1987.

She joined NASA in 1998, and become the first person to run the Boston Marathon from space in 2007, running it again on land in 2008. She remains an Avid Red Sox fan to this day.