Making Team USA: Meet Bree Schaaf

Two days before leaving for the 2006 Olympic Trials in skeleton, Bree Schaaf decided to sew herself a Wonder Woman suit. She and her teammates had been talking about different suits they could wear on the track, and Wonder Woman seemed like the perfect outfit for a 5-foot-10-inch brunette with a big smile.

So she stitched together the red, gold, and blue-and-white star material, with skin-colored Lycra for the legs and arms, and red shiny material for the boots. She even made a gold lasso.

Schaaf, the unofficial skeleton and bobsled team seamstress who's the go-to person for ripped speedsuits, then flew from her home in Bremerton, Washington - which sits across Puget Sound from Seattle - to the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid, New York, for Trials. Although she did not make the 2006 Olympic team for Torino, she has a very good chance of competing in the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games.

Except this time Schaaf is a bobsled driver, not a skeleton athlete.

In her second full season competing in women's bobsled, the 29-year-old wonder woman is currently ranked seventh overall in the World Cup standings.

Schaaf pilots USA3, the third-best women's bobsled on the U.S. team, behind reigning world champion Shauna Rohbock and the USA2 sled piloted by Erin Pac. For the first time, the FIBT, bobsledding's international governing body, is allowing the two highest-ranked nations to send three women's sleds, instead of two, to the Olympic Games. 

After four of eight World Cups, the U.S. women are in second place overall behind Germany. Both Germany and the U.S. have two sleds in the top four, followed by Canada with two sleds ranked fifth and sixth.

On January 17, 2010 - after seven of the World Cup races have been contested - the FIBT will announce the number of teams per nation that have qualified for the Olympics. With three World Cup races to go before that date - two on German tracks - Schaaf has to hold her position ahead of the third-best sleds from Germany or Canada.

"We're planning on [qualifying] three," stated Schaaf. "There's no doubt in my mind."

Like most American bobsledders, Schaaf did not start her athletic career with the idea that she would one day hurtle down an icy chute on a pair of steel runners at 80 miles per hour. Home videos show her ice skating, skiing, and playing basketball, soccer, and the piano.

To this day, the piano is such an important part of her life that she brings an 88-key digital piano with her when she travels to the Olympic Training Center in Lake Placid. "I've found that it gives me a much needed outlet to relax and regroup from the stress of training and sliding," she said.

She has played the piano since age five, and she picked up other musical instruments as well. In college at Portland State University in Oregon, Schaaf played the trombone in the school's jazz ensemble and wind symphony. She majored in anthropology (graduating with high honors) and also played volleyball for the Vikings' Division I team.

During her senior year, with her volleyball career about to end, she was watching the Salt Lake City 2002 Games on TV. Women's bobsledding debuted at those Olympics, and Schaaf thought it looked like fun.

"I'm a big girl, I'm a fast girl, I can do that!" she said.

She weighed about 145 pounds at the time - at least 20 pounds lighter than female bobsledders of similar height.

"Turns out I wasn't big enough at the time for bobsled, so I did skeleton instead," Schaaf added.

Her parents were worried about her crazy new career, which involved skimming face-down and head-first down an icy track at highway speeds.

"The first time I saw a skeleton go by, I think I started to cry," Terri Schaaf, Bree's mother, recently told Seattle King 5 TV. "But Bree told me, 'Don't worry because it's safer than bobsled.'"

Although Schaaf did not qualify for the 2006 Olympics, she stayed with skeleton and competed in all the World Cup races the following season. While skeleton teammates Katie Uhlaender and Noelle Pikus-Pace were frequently on the podium, Schaaf struggled, unable to match her teammates' podium finishes.

She started the 2006/07 season with a promising sixth at a World Cup in Calgary, Alberta. But she never finished higher than that again. At the end of that season, she finished 27^th at the 2007 World Championships.

"It was a really frustrating season where I felt like things weren't improving," she said. "I'd been at it for five or six years. It gets to the point where if you're not improving, it's not fun anymore."

Even more frustrating, Schaaf had trouble keeping her head up on her skeleton sled in some of the turns and would lose sight of her line.

"I have such a big head that anytime I would get to a pressure turn, I'd lose my head - as they call it," she said. "My face would get buried in the ice, and I couldn't see anymore, so I was feeling my way down the track."

Schaaf watched the bobsledders and thought that if she could see where she was going that she might have a chance of doing better.

During the 2006/07 season, she asked the coaches if she could drive a bobsled. They told her that she was too small, Schaaf recalled, laughing.

She insisted that she could get bigger, and she did. Over the next two years, she put on 20 pounds of muscle - although she joked, "let's be honest, it's not all muscle."

"My training definitely got more weightlifting intensive, with focus on dead lifts, squats, and glute-ham raises to build needed gluteus and hamstring strength," she said. "More important was how strict I got with my diet. I went on an intense muscle building program of eating specified amounts of protein and carbs every three hours to aid in recovery, build muscle, and maintain lean body mass."

When USA Bobsled ran her through its standard five-item test for explosive power and speed, she proved that at 167 pounds, she deserved to be given a chance in bobsled.

The five-item test included sprints, shot toss, standing broad jump, and two power-lifting exercises.

"My 30-meter sprint was right up there with the best brakeman that year," she said. "Then it just became a matter of getting stronger while maintaining that speed."

"It's much easier to make a fast person strong than a strong person fast," she added. 

Bobsled and skeleton are held on the same tracks, and this helped Schaaf's quick transition from skeleton to bobsled.

"All the lines are the same [as skeleton], and it's the same principle in finding the right line in a turn and squeezing as much speed as you can out of it," she explained.

To find the right line, she found that she could still rely on the sense of feel that she honed in her five years on the skeleton circuit, where she felt the lines on the track more than saw them. "I'm so used to feeling pressures," she said.

"So in my runs I'm feeling everything from my hands to the D rings to the bungees to the runners, as opposed to going on sight clues," she added, referring to a bobsled's steering mechanism.

"When I'm talking to the coaches and we're talking about lines, it's more about what it sounds and feels like as opposed to look for this, steer here, go there," she added.

Her coaches agree that skeleton has helped Schaaf to quickly master bobsledding. "She knows the tracks," said Francoise Plozza, assistant U.S. bobsled coach and 2001 women's bobsled world champion from Switzerland. "She knows the pressure points, all the curves, the length from the curves."

"But still bobsledding is different with the steering," Plozza added. "It's way more sensitive to drive. So for [Bree], it was a huge switch. But she did it very, very well."

In the fall of 2008, Schaaf began competing on the domestic America's Cup bobsled circuit, earned podiums in nine of 12 races, and was the overall America's Cup women's champion. She also won the 2009 U.S. national championship in Lake Placid in early January and earned a World Cup start.

"Now I can actually [see] and put the sled where I want to go," she said with a big smile.

On February 6, 2009, she made her World Cup debut on the 2010 Olympic track at the Whistler Sliding Centre, where she and brakeman Emily Azevedo finished sixth sandwiched between Germany's top two sleds. It was an astonishing result for her first World Cup race. A week later at the next World Cup in Park City, Schaaf and Azevedo were fifth.

Schaaf's World Cup success continued this season. At the first World Cup in Park City, Utah, in mid-November, Schaaf and Ingrid Marcum took fourth.

"Bree knows the North American tracks," said Rohbock. "She's never been in a bobsled on the European tracks [only a skeleton]. We'll all try to work together and help her as much as we can so she can hopefully get some top podiums there."

Her fellow drivers' help has already paid off. At the World Cup in Cesana, Italy, in early December, Schaaf and Azevedo finished sixth.

But Schaaf is still struggling with consistency. At a recent World Cup in Winterberg, Germany, she finished tenth.

"We're trying to work together to get all three teams to the Olympics," said Rohbock. "So if I'm ahead in the end, and I need to take a few bad results to get Bree up and give some brakemen to her, then that's what we'll do."

If three U.S. women's sleds do qualify for the 2010 Olympics, Schaaf will be thrilled, especially since she won't be running the track - known as one of the fastest in the world - on her skeleton sled.

"There are certain parts of the track that are very tricky in a bobsled," she said. "On a skeleton sled, it means you're taking that beating with your body. The first time I saw the skeleton lines on there, I was like no chance. I put my sled up for sale."

But she does love running the Whistler track in a bobsled. In the World Cup last February, she clocked 89.2 miles per hour on her fastest run - about 16 mph faster than average speeds on her home track in Lake Placid.

"People are really scared of [the Whistler] track because it's so fast," she said. "But it's so much fun! There's so much skill and speed involved that I missed it when we left this year [after our training camp].

"Now none of the tracks are as fun as Whistler," she added. "I can't wait to get back there."

Peggy Shinn is a freelance contributor for teamusa.org. This story was not subject to the approval of the United States Olympic Committee or any National Governing Bodies.

Tags: 2006 Olympic Trials, Bree Schaaf, Katie Uhlaender, Noelle Pikus-Pace, USA Bobsled, Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games, Wonder Woman