Hampton's Hoolahan raises bar at USA Weightlifting youth national finals

Standing 5-foot-2 with pony-tailed blonde hair and a cherubic smile, Kendall Hoolahan has a difficult time convincing anyone she’s a competitive weightlifter.

Sometimes she just has to flex her muscles.

Hoolahan, 14, of Hampton placed seventh in the clean and jerk in her division at the 2021 USA Weightlifting National Youth Championships on June 26 in Detroit.

Less than two years since she took up the sport, Hoolahan rebounded from a discouraging start to post a personal-best lift of 66 kilograms (145.5 pounds) at an event that attacts some of the top weightlifters from around the U.S. She was competing against other 14- and 15-year-old girls in the 130-pound division.

Hoolahan is ranked ninth in the nation in her age-weight division.

“That girl is probably one of the strongest 13-14 year-olds that I’ve ever seen,” said Brian Pirone, a former back-to-back Masters national champion weightlifter who trains Hoolahan out of Steel City Barbell Club in Swissvale. “One thing I will tell you about her. She is just scratching the surface in this sport.”

A lifelong soccer player, Hoolahan three years ago began training for CrossFit competitions, a multi-discipline exercise program that combines different exercises into fitness routines. Last summer she finished second in the 13-15-year-old division at the Garage Games Junior Champions Tour CrossFit competition in Fredericksburg, Va.

She began competitive weightlifting after Pirone saw her potential at CMX Athletics, a CrossFit training facility in Richland owned by her uncle, Craig, in early 2020.

“He told me that I have something that he’s never seen in a 13-year-old before,” Hoolahan said.

Time to lift

With that, Hoolahan began serious weightlifting. Of the 23 people on the Steel City Barbell weightlifting team, 18 are women and Hoolahan is by far the youngest, Pirone said. She has been embraced by her older teammates, who have taken her under their wing.

Hoolahan said weightlifting was a welcomed complement to soccer, a sport she started at age 4. She plays for Arsenal FC travel club and last month helped her Olympic Development Program team go 3-0 at a US Youth Soccer East Regional Tournament outside Boston. A forward, she attended the USYS ODP Identification Camp in mid-July in Delaware for some of the top players on the East Coast and is eyeing a spot on Hampton’s varsity roster this fall as a ninth-grader.

“I like weightlifting because I’ve always played soccer, and it’s always been a team sport,” she said. “It’s really rewarding at the same time for me to do weightlifting because whenever I hit a weight, it’s like, ‘I did that. No one else helped me do that.’ … But at the same time, it’s really hard on you whenever you don’t hit a weight. There is no one else to blame but me.”

Weightlifting didn’t come easy. Hoolahan struggled at first in what she called a “very frustrating” and “mentally abusive” sport.

But she kept improving and won the Steel City Open in April with a combined lift good enough to qualify for nationals. She was also named Best Youth Female at the event. Along the way, she has increased her maximum backsquat by about 150 pounds, Pirone said.

“From when I started with her to now, she’s like night-and-day better,” Pirone said. “It’s just been a dream coaching her. She has great technique. She has a great mindset. She picks up things extremely quickly.”

Hoolahan said she trained seven days a week, three to four hours a day, leading up to nationals. But all the work didn’t pay off early on. She failed to complete any of her three lift attempts in the first competition, the snatch, in Detroit. It was a tiny misstep — of fewer than 2 inches — that cost her.

“The weights I missed were weights that I hit every day in training,” she said. “Backstage, I watched a replay of it. I know exactly what I did. Whenever I pulled, I’m supposed to jump back around 2 inches. I jumped back about 3 1/2 inches. I did everything else. But it’s so technical, an inch and a half can mess you up.”

With no chance to reach the podium for all-around score, Hoolahan turned her focus to the other discipline, the clean and jerk. She hit her first lift and then completed a 66-kilo lift, her best ever, good for seventh place in the 17-girl division.

“She bombed out on snatch,” Pirone said. “At that point, she was only going for clean jerk. The mental fortitude that she had is amazing. We opened her (with a higher weight) than we’ve ever opened her for any clean jerk, and she smashed the first one.

“That takes an amazing individual to do something like that. To come back from bombing to hitting two clean jerks back-to-back was something to see.”

Dealing with pressure

Looking back, Hoolahan said a disrespectful fellow competitor helped to motivate her. She said the girls in her age group at nationals were “either super-friendly or they are not very nice at all.”

“The girl I was next to, she was not very nice,” she said with a laugh. “We said, ‘Good job, nice job,’ to her, and she sort of just stared at me. I don’t know why, but that made me really mad. It made me want to go out there and completely crush her, which I ended up doing.”

Hoolahan said she was a little nervous at nationals, but she has a rare ability, Pirone said, to tune out the pressure while standing alone on a brightly lit stage with just the weights and hundreds or even thousands of eyes on her.

“A lot of kids, like Kendall, can take to it,” Pirone said. “A lot of kids can’t. It’s the pressure that makes people either thrive in the sport or go down in the sport.

“I’ve had kids say, ‘I don’t want to compete because I don’t like being in front of people. I don’t like when people look at me.’ I say, ‘That’s OK. But then weightlifting is not your sport.’ Kendall just thrives on it.”

Hoolahan said she is so focused during her lifts that she can’t see the crowd or hear anyone cheering. She said she feels like “you are out of your body.”

“My parents definitely don’t realize it, especially my mom,” she said, “but I don’t hear people yelling until I watch the videos. After I watch the videos, then I hear how loud my parents really are. And, I’m like, ‘I didn’t hear them at all.’ “

The next major national weightlifting event is the American Open Finals in December in Colorado. Hoolahan admits she will be a long shot to qualify with the upcoming demands of high school soccer.

But with her performance at USA Weightlifting nationals, maybe she will have an easier time convincing her classmates and gym teachers that she knows what she’s doing around weights.

“In gym class in middle school, they have barbell,” Hoolahan said. “The boys in my gym class would ask me if I wanted to try it, and my gym teachers would never let me. They didn’t want me to pick it up but they let the guys, because maybe with football they would know. It made me so mad.

“I would tell them, ‘I do this for a sport.’ I think they always just thought, ‘She plays around in her basement.’ I don’t think they ever understood that that’s not the case.”