RPI goalie doubles as olympic weight lifter
TROY, N.Y. » The first time the RPI field hockey freshman class started weight training, some had never done it before. It was a mandatory part of being on the team, but it was also, in many cases, a beginner course.
Then it was Rachel Kaufman’s turn to show what she could do. And the freshman last year showed she was in a class of her own.
“It was crazy. Some of us had never lifted before,” teammate Casey Collette said. “And then there’s one of the freshmen coming in and just putting up numbers. It was really impressive. Most of us were like, ‘Oh, Ok. I’m not going to do that.’ Most of us were just with the bar and she’s got 45s on each side.”
Kaufman is the starting goalkeeper for RPI’s field hockey team. She’s been the starter since coming to the school in 2015. But long before that, Kaufman was a competitive weightlifter, part of an interesting intersection of competitive athletics, but one that she believes has helped her.
She’s been playing field hockey since sixth grade, but started weightlifting as part of a rehabilitation process in ninth grade after breaking her hip. An assistant football coach at her high school in Morristown, New Jersey asked if she had a deeper interest in weight training. And it became a part of her routine.
“It started out where I didn’t actually think that I could compete, because I didn’t think that I was good enough to lift up the kind of weight that a lot of the other girls did,” Kaufman said. “But the coach ... he trained me, and eventually I started to hit the kind of numbers that you’d see in a competition.”
Kaufman specializes in the clean & jerk and snatch. These are very specialized Olympic Weightlifting exercises which are as much about strength as they are about finesse and technique.
When it came to high school, Kaufman was usually a better weightlifter than the guys on the football team. It’s not necessarily the same as the college athletes she’s around now. But even at RPI, where she has put the competitive aspect of her weightlifting on hold, she every now and then will do a friendly competition.
“It’s also kind of funny. People are like, ‘You don’t look like you’re a weightlifter,’ Kaufman said. “But you go to some of the competitions and you see women who don’t look like some insane, crazy bodybuilder who can lift up like 500 pounds. It’s
a weird type of weightlifting.”
Kaufman says this type of training helps her explosiveness in field hockey. In Olympic Weightlifting there’s a focus on exploding from the hips to move the bar up your body. On her steps in the cage, she feels like she can be more explosive.
She no longer trains competitively, but works on lifting more in the offseason, and has seen tangible improvements in the numbers she can lift.
“During the recruiting process I learned about Rachel’s interest in lifting,” said RPI head coach Bridget LaNoir. “Through her senior year, she was joining in competitions. It was exciting to think about, it’s a knowledge that many incoming freshmen don’t have. ... It’s been really great to see where she came to the sport, and how much she enjoyed it.”
Kaufman wrote an article on The Odyssey Online titled “5 Reasons Olympic Weightlifting Is The Best Sport”. It’s a fairly funny article, making fun of the name of her exercises (clean & jerk and snatch).
There are a couple good lines that she writes, including, “There’s nothing better than a toned butt!” Or “There’s nothing like a pair of nice arms to top off an awesome dude.”
Kaufman might be allin on another field hockey season at RPI, but there’s still a love for weightlifting that will likely lead her back to it after her field hockey career is over. And clearly she’s aware of the benefits it provides.
“I’d say it’s a benefit for me,” Kaufman said. “And I’d imagine it’d be a benefit for everyone in athletics.”