Taylor Mar

“I was actually kinda forced into the sport by my friends in my 2nd year during my undergrad days at UC-Irvine when UCI-Dragon Boat was still a constituent of CAU Irvine.

‘Join the dragonboat team,’ they said, ‘it would be fun,’ they said. 😂

It took me a while to catch on, but I learned to love the sport and the people on the team. I fell in love with the passion, excitement, atmosphere, and the challenges that the sport and the paddling community gave me.

It’s funny, because I don’t really have a specific memory of a moment during my paddling career (I also have a really bad memory too 😑). It’s really a culmination of the experiences and feelings that lead up to a race and the bonding that happens within the team outside the race lanes. There were plenty of pre- and post- race parties that happened when I was paddling with my college team, and all of them were memorable in their own way. It’s the small moments, the feelings, that I collected along the way during post-race debriefs where the excitement of winning a race or the disappointment of losing a race by 0.001 of a second made the biggest impact in my paddling career. The people I paddle with, no matter which team I end up paddling for, are the most memorable part of my experience. I’m always striving to create new experiences amongst my home team to make sure they create that passion for dragonboating for themselves.”

[Taylor Mar (Long Beach, California, USA), coach of Los Angeles Racing Dragons (LARD), coach of Southbreeze Dragonboat, paddler on Newport Aquatic Center, team manager for U16/U18 US national team, ex-paddler on US national team.]

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