Before Gemma Wollenschlaeger was two years old, she had already undergone multiple surgeries to correct her clubfoot. Surgeons sliced into her tendons and reformed her foot to give her as much mobility as possible, but the operations didn’t fully mend her birth defect and left her ankle immobilized.
“I worked really hard to make sure it’s not something that’s gonna hold me back,” said Wollenschlaeger, a member of Temple’s women’s rowing team.
As the only physically disabled person on the rowing team, Wollenschlaeger initially refrained from telling her coaches about her disability because she feared her clubfoot would negatively impact her chances of making the team.
“During the recruiting process, you have so many girls all these times and you’re picking them apart,” Wollenschlaeger said. “And I’m like, ‘Wow, they know I’m going to have some disability. That’s something that could set me apart, right? Maybe they won’t like that.’ So I hid it, and I didn’t tell any coaches about it.”
To accommodate her disability, Wollenschlaeger was measured for orthotic inserts which were slid into the boat to level out the size differences in her legs. The negative feelings she associated with her clubfoot were quickly transformed into dignity and passion for her sport, which was put on even further display when she brought home a silver medal at the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games this summer.
But it wasn’t until after Wollenschlaeger realized she had a stable position on the team that she felt comfortable telling her coaches about her clubfoot.
“I was like, ‘Hey, I came up with a plan,” Wollenschlaeger said. “I was like, ‘This is my disability. I can’t run, I can’t jump, but this is what I can do instead. I can bike, I can do this,’ and it doesn’t take away from anything.”
Wollenschlaeger qualified for the 2024 Paris Paralympic Games after earning a silver medal at the World Rowing Championship regatta in 2023. There, she was greeted by a community of other athletes who understood her struggles on a personal level — something she never experienced at Temple.
“Seeing how disabilities got us here and how we can embrace them has made me really highlight and appreciate and love my foot,” Wollenschlaeger said. “And I would never wish it away when every day I used to be like, ‘I don’t want it. I wish I didn’t have it. Can’t I just be normal?’”
Wollenschlaeger’s athletic success hasn’t always come easy. Growing up, the mental and physical pain of her clubfoot impeded her ability to succeed in other sports she tried to play. But joining the women’s rowing team at Temple allowed her to feel less restricted by her disability and to thrive in an athletic environment that supported her to the fullest extent.
Wollenschlaeger’s close friends and teammates can attest to her success and are motivated by her presence on the team. Niamh Kiely, a fellow member of the rowing team, said the entire team gravitates toward Wollenschlaeger’s constant positivity and hard-working attitude.
“[Her success] made us work, even if we didn’t realize it, a little bit harder,” Kiely said. “Because we’ll be sitting there complaining, ‘Oh, today’s so difficult. And then we think about our teammate who’s going to be on our boats next semester and is literally at the Paralympics right now.”
As their award-winning race came to a close, Team USA’s coxswain had to turn up her microphone to be heard over the thousands of roaring supporters cheering on Wollenschlaeger and her team. Her butterflies seemed to fly away after realizing she achieved a feat that seemed impossible earlier in her life — a Paralympic medal.
Team USA secured second place in the PR3 mixed coxed four finals, trailing gold-medalist Great Britain by just three seconds. A team of three women and two men, the athletes completed the two-thousand-meter race in under seven minutes.
Wollenschlaeger’s teammates at Temple were in her corner each step of the way, even when she was competing halfway across the globe.
“We had watch parties for all her races this summer and her trials last winter,” said Eve Keesecker, coxswain of Temple’s women’s rowing team. “We would get to the boathouse a couple of minutes early and put it on the big screen and cheer her on, which is really exciting.”
Wollenschlaeger plans to train for the 2028 Los Angeles Paralympic Games and continue to row as long as she can. While the sport isn’t easy and she’ll have to push her body even harder for the next games, Wollenschlaeger knows she’s up for the challenge.
“I think that’s something that rowers are deemed as kind of insane because we kind of enjoy [the pain],” Wollenschlaeger said. “That’s part of it is, ‘How far can I push my body?’ And then on top of that, having a disability it’s like, ‘how far can I push my disability? How many more years do I have in me?’ It’s just another factor in it, but it makes it even more of a challenge.”
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