[At nine years old] I didn't really know what that meant at the time. I thought it might be in a warm summer sport like softball, but I played a variety of sports growing up - basketball, soccer and track. I really didn't care. I just wanted to be an Olympian.

It's one of the greatest honors I could ever imagine - to be able to represent my country and to be able to wear "USA" on my back. It's an incredible honor. It's an accomplishment of the past four year but of a life of dreaming and working hard and doing everything I can in pursuit of this goal.

There is the potential for dreams to come true, for records to be broken, and medals to be won, and at this time everyone believes that they individually have the potential to make their dream a reality.

I played softball at George Washington University and then I played professionally for the Mid-Michigan Ice. I had a couple of tryouts with the US Olympic Team but I don't know if I have a word to describe how bad one of the tryouts was. It was the worst tryout in the history of tryouts. It was that bad. So I totally bombed it and thought my chances of being an Olympian were over.

The Lord calls us to love everybody. Every day it's a challenge. Within this sport, I'm called to love everybody. That means that every single German or Canadian that I want to beat, I still have to love. That means competing the way God wants me to compete. That means doing things that might not necessarily be seen as giving me a competitive advantage but instead doing what God would want me to do.

I have been to non-denominational churches like National Community Church in Washington D.C., but I've also gone to Lake Placid Baptist and a slew of other churches. I got baptized with my fiancé (Nic Taylor) this last year at Saranac Lake Baptist Church (in New York), so maybe that makes us Baptist. But for me, it's really been about my relationship with Christ and not so much about a denomination or a label.

I was baptized Episcopalian when I was maybe two years old and we went to an Episcopalian church. When we moved to Georgia, we started going to a Lutheran church and I fell in love with the church there - Lutheran Church of the Good Shepherd in Douglasville, Georgia. I really have a home there.