Brittni Trollinger
Caitlin Freeman, a junior at Berry College, leads a pretty chaotic life for a twenty year old. She is a passionate young woman who has a taste for unique things and helping others.
Her tastes run from hola hooping to working with the Special Olympics program and so much more. Caitlin is from Dalton, Georgia and studies exercise science at Berry College.
She plans on doing something after college in the fitness industry. She really enjoys teaching people and really like teaching people about their bodies. While she is involved in so many different things she is also a part of the honor program.
She has a small family but a very strong and unique family. Her small family of four includes her mom and dad and an older brother. Her brother has 23 high functioning autism ADHD and epilepsy.
She said that she had a very interesting childhood growing up because she had to deal with a family with mild disabilities. Her mom later became a special ed teacher at an elementary school in her home town.
She has always been very involved in advocacy for individuals with disabilities. And because of how she grew up, she is now involved with Special Olympics.
In 2006 Caitlin’s older brother was taking swim lessons to be on the Special Olympics swim team. His swim teacher was involved with the Special Olympics Equestrian team. Caitlin has always loved horses and loves to help people so she thought this would be the perfect opportunity.
So she asked the teacher if she could be a part of the team to help and the coach was very enthusiastic and told her ‘come on!’ She also volunteers at all kinds of Special Olympics events and has been in charge of running several state Special Olympics games. The motto for Special Olympics is: “Let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt” and Caitlin says that this is a motto that everybody can apply to their lives.
Caitlin is a Pilates instructor at Elizabeth Brown Pilates in Rome, Georgia. She has taken a class that certifies her to teach TRX suspension train to clients at the studio. She had never done any Pilates before in her life until she did some in her intro to kinesiology class. And through this class she met Elizabeth and asked if she could intern with her.
Through her internship Caitlin says she has gotten so much stronger. Something that she has learned through teaching Pilates is that people are lazy with their movements and you don’t realize it.
In the summer of 2011 Caitlin says that her love for hoop dancing came alive while she was at camp. She even makes her own hoops. Currently she does not compete with her hoops. She auditioned for hooping idol but did not make it, but she plans to audition again next year.
Right now she wants to continue to build her skills, routines and performance then hopefully compete seriously. Caitlin and her close friend Erin won second place at the Mountain Day talent show this past year. She makes and uses several different types of hoops like hand hoops, ¾ thick, 3 ½ thick & even an LED hoop the lights up as she hoops.
Even though she would have liked to have started a club here on campus, she never went through all the proper paper work to do so. But Last semester she met a group of hoopers just for an hour or two a week and just had fun. She explains that it is a great stress relief.
Another interesting aspect of Caitlin’s life is her dancing. She has always loved to watch people dance but didn’t actually start dancing till she came to college when she wanted to do something fun and different than she had ever done. So after a mass email was sent out to the student body at Berry College, she decided to go for it.
Beneficially, she applied to use some of the moves from her hooping in her Middle Eastern dancing. When she is dancing it’s peaceful and she really has a lot of fun, even though her face is very serious and deep in thought of what is coming next in the dance. There is a broad range of people from Berry that participate in this dance troupe and they come from all different walks of life.
As if all this isn’t enough for one person to handle, she also has a boyfriend named Zac. She is in a long distance relationship with her high school sweetheart who attends Armstrong Atlantic State University.
They have been dating for about five and half years and even though they are apart for the majority of the days in a year, she believes that their relationship has really grown. She says it’s not easy to maintain a long distance relationship because her days can sometimes run from 10-12 hours.