April 19, 2016
ORLANDO, Fla. (UCFKnights.com) -- Waking up early for workouts and practice is nothing for UCF rower Olivia Staples. She has practiced hard work and dedication throughout her life thanks to her childhood experience in the small town of Smithville, Ontario, Canada.
Staples grew up on a pig farm with her four older brothers and sister. They completed daily chores such as watching over their four barn houses filled with pigs, horses and sheep and taking care of the maintenance for their extra property.
"Not the average person's childhood, but honestly I loved it," Staples said. "I think it got me to where I am today. I'm so thankful because I think I learned a lot from it. I had my own horses that I had to look after and my own sheep, and I always had a lot of odd summer jobs."
Her first summer job took place in a factory that produced school agendas when she was 16 with her older sister. Staples said that she sat at a desk and strung the coil bindings through the agendas.
"I think that's when I realized that I wanted to go to college and leave Smithville," Staples stated. "All my family is there and I'll always have a heart for Smithville, but I knew that I wanted to do something more."
When she turned 17, she traveled out of Smithville for the first time. She moved a few hours up north at a camp with 22 other girls. She was completely off the grid with as little as no internet or electricity all to be a park ranger.
"It was a program that all of my brothers and my sister had done and we were like park maintenance," she said. "So we travelled to all the different prevention parks and cleaned up the camp sites and groomed the trails."
Her close-knit family and small-town upbringing made her a self-proclaimed homebody, so it was her first real time away from home on her own. But moving away for that summer helped her with her transition from Canada to Florida.
in Costa Rica
She traveled to the United States for the first time for three official visits to Kansas, Texas and UCF, and she decided she was going to become a Knight.
"The atmosphere was completely different from the rest of them. The team, you could tell that they were a family. They weren't just a team, they were more than that and that's what I needed," she said. "Being such a homebody, I needed to feel like I was at home and I felt that here."
Over the past four years at UCF, Staples has maintained a 4.0 GPA and has been in the Varsity 8 boat every semester. She has helped the team win an American Athletic Conference Championship in 2015 and was a member of the Varsity 8 boat that earned the American Boat of the Week honors three times.
"When I came here as a freshman I think we finished eighth in our conference. Last year we won conference and finished 19th in NCAA's and has just been really inspiring to be a part of that," Staples said.
Staples is getting a degree in sports and exercise science and plans to take a Gap Year to travel and find her passions before returning to UCF for graduate school.
She hopes to travel to Vancouver for a few months to visit her brother and sister, who live there, and to follow wherever the wind takes her to next.
"Growing up we didn't travel. We would go up north a few hours and camp because we had the farm and everything," Staples said. "My first time anywhere else was to Costa Rica with Knights Without Borders and that was incredible. It's crazy how many opportunities lead to more opportunities. Just the connections I made in Costa Rica led to so much more."
Story by Christina Aguis