Since leaving Muhlenberg, Rachel Drosdick-Sigafoos ’07 has split her time between collegiate-level coaching and mental health crisis intervention work. These fields may seem completely unrelated, but they aren’t, says Drosdick-Sigafoos, who holds a master’s in coaching and a Ph.D. in human and social services: disaster, crisis and intervention.
“The neurophysiology of competition, the anxiety of pre-race, of post-race, the chemicals and the neural functioning are very similar to what happens when somebody is experiencing a crisis,” she says. “The biological term is hyper-arousal: Someone is anxious. They’re really fidgety. They might be irritable or angry.”
She remembers experiencing these feelings as a student-athlete, though she still managed to thrive: A member of the 2005 track and field team that won the Centennial Conference outdoor championship, Drosdick-Sigafoos earned a gold medal in the long jump at the 2006 CC indoor meet and still holds school records in the pentathlon, heptathlon and indoor long jump. She was a French major on the education track who ultimately pursued coaching at Susquehanna University after graduation — first track, then swimming — and discovered she had a knack for that kind of mentorship.
She began working at the Children’s Service Center of Wyoming Valley in 2015, which inspired her to return to school to study crisis intervention. She ultimately moved into a role working with families in crisis there. From 2021 until recently, she was a crisis responder for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, fielding calls from veterans in distress. This year, Susquehanna appointed her to her current role as interim head coach for swimming and diving at a time when her own mental health was suffering from her VA work circumstances and environment. The timing was right for her to return to coaching.
“The most amazing thing that I got from being a student-athlete was the depths of the relationships with my teammates. I am now a godmother to one of my teammate’s children. We’ve been to each other’s weddings. We show up at family funerals. The bonds that we created at that time were forged in steel.”
—Rachel Drosdick-Sigafoos ’07
“Our youth are so much more fluid at talking about mental health and wellness and assertively discussing their needs and boundaries,” Drosdick-Sigafoos says. “I’m so excited to be able to meet them in that space.”
Though she’s coaching at a different Division III liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, she enjoys returning to Muhlenberg for track meets and football games: “I still come back on campus and feel like I belong, 20 years since I started,” she says. “To be able to say that now, for more than half of my life, I’ve had a place that I can come back to and feel at home, feels like an amazing blessing.”