Samantha Arsenault Livingstone earned an Olympic Gold Medal in 2000. She later went on to teach science and coach swimming in Gwinnett County, Georgia. Photo credit: Samantha Livingstone

Oftentimes exceptional athletes become educators and/or coaches in our nation’s pubic schools. This is certainly true of Samantha Arsenault Livingstone, an Olympic Gold Medal winner who went on to teach and coach in Georgia.

Samantha was born on Oct. 11, 1981, in Peabody, Massachusetts. Her prowess as a student athlete became evident even when she was a young child. When she graduated from Gardner High School in 1999, her coaches recognized her potential as an Olympic athlete. By then, she had won several individual state championship titles, and she was instrumental in helping  her school garner two consecutive Massachusetts State team championships.

By the time she was 18, Samantha realized her potential when she qualified to compete in the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia. At these games she and her team members helped set a new Olympic record in the 4 x 200 meter freestyle, winning Gold Medals in the process.

After she returned home from the Olympics, Samantha enrolled at the University of Michigan, where she joined the swimming and diving team. In her sophomore year of college, she transferred to the University of Georgia, and she became a member of the swimming and diving team at that school, too.

Samantha earned both her Bachelor’s degree and her Master’s degree in Science Education from the University of Georgia. In addition, she is certified as a facilitator of Mindful Sports Performance Enhancement and is also trained in STARR (Stress + Trauma Activate, Release + Rewire) protocols.

After earning her degrees, Samantha accepted a position as a science teacher at Norcross High School in Gwinnett County, Georgia. She taught there for six years, from 2005 to 2011. She also coached swimming for two local organizations, Gwinnett County Summer programs and Swim Atlanta.

In 2016, Samantha founded Livingstone High Performance and the Whole athlete Initiative (WAI), an organization dedicated to building mental health support systems for individual athletes and athletic teams. Learn more about this by clicking on this link: WAI.

Over the course of her career as an athlete, Samantha has earned many accolades. She was named the NCAA Georgia Woman of the Year in 2005, and received the NCAA Top VIII Award the same year. She garnered the Joel Eves Award at the University of Georgia for obtaining the highest GPA for all the athletes in her graduating class, and was voted to the CoSIDA Academic All-America 1st Team. In 2018 she was inducted into the Greenfield, Massachussets’ Bay State Games Hall of Fame in recognition for her lifetime of sports achievements as a participant in their annual sporting event.