Fifth grade math and science teacher Caroline Hallisey-Kepka is also a three-time Winter Olympic speed skating competitor.

There are many examples of talented classroom teachers who have also experienced successful careers as athletes. One of these is Caroline Hallisey-Kepka, a three-time Olympic speed skater who now teaches elementary school in Massachusetts.

Caroline Hallisey was born on September 24, 1980. She was raised in Natick, Massachusetts. “I was an average kid, though I did a lot of sports growing up — basketball, soccer, swimming, horseback riding,” Caroline remembers. “I grew up doing everything active kids do, but around the seventh grade I wanted to see how I could do.” She left home in eighth grade to move into an Olympic training center. There she dedicated herself to her Olympic speed skating dream.

And she did very well. Caroline competed on the United States team in the Winter Olympics three times. She participated in the short track speed skating event 1998 in Nagano, Japan; in 2002 in Salt Lake City, Utah; and in 2006 at Turino, Italy.

Once she retired from speed skating in 2006, Caroline enrolled at the University of Colorado. Later she married J.P. Kepka, a US bronze medalist in 2006. The couple lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, with their 15-month-old daughter.

Caroline now teaches fifth grade math and science at the Glen Urquhart School, an independent school for grades K-8 located in Beverley, Massachusetts. As a teacher, Caroline says she strives to provide her students with the motivation to succeed and achieve their goals.”I chose teaching this grade because my middle school years were really challenging for me,” Caroline confides. “So I wanted to teach that middle school age to try and give these kids the tools I learned when I was training as an athlete — how to overcome challenges they will face,” she continued.

To read more about Caroline’s post-Olympic career, see this article published by the Boston Globe.