Without kayaking, Bailey O’Sullivan isn’t sure how her life would have ended up.
It’s not hyperbole. The sport has shaped her whole life.
While in high school, she made the 2005 U.S. Junior National Team, which took her to Mezzana, Italy, to paddle the nearby Noce River. Experiences like that helped her later land a gig with the outdoor program at her college, Georgia Tech, instructing fellow students on outdoor skills. After that, she spent seven years with the Nantahala Outdoor Center as a wilderness medicine instructor, while using all of her free time to paddle the rapids there.
“Paddling just makes everything better,” O’Sullivan says. “It makes a good day better and makes a bad day good.”
The genesis of her lifetime on whitewater? The local Kids Whitewater Program, a precursor of Outdoor Chattanooga. A division of the city of Chattanooga’s Department of Economic and Community Development, Outdoor Chattanooga’s mission is “to make outdoor recreation an attractive, healthy and distinguishing lifestyle for Chattanooga’s residents and visitor population.”