Hi, I'm Tara!  I work with former and retired athletes, helping them transition to a healthy and balanced life after sports.  I love this work because I lived it.

I was a competitive gymnast for my entire childhood.  After graduating high school, I retired from gymnastics and took up cheerleading in college.  By the end of college, I had spent most of my life intensely involved in sports that entailed other people observing, judging and telling me how to move my body.  I had a busy practice schedule and had always been given specific training and conditioning routines.  After ending my sports career, there was this huge, gaping hole in my life that had once been filled by sports that I loved and dedicated so much time to. I also had lingering injuries from years of intense training and wear and tear on my body. There was also the realization that I didn't know how to exercise on my own, without a coach directing it.  I tried to establish an exercise routine and figure out how to incorporate the life skills my sports had taught me into my new adult life, but not very successfully.

After finishing my Bachelor's degree in biology and psychology, I worked in a clinical setting with children with a variety of significant behavioral issues.  Here I learned about applied behavior analysis, or ABA, which is a scientific approach to understanding behavior. I went on to graduate school and received my Master's degree in Applied Behavior Analysis.  It was during that time that I discovered yoga.  I started to learn to move my body in a more intuitive way. I learned how to start being present with my breathing, listen to what my body was telling me and be more gentle with myself when I needed to.  It also helped tremendously with those old, nagging injuries I had over the years.

After finishing graduate school, I became a Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA for short) and spent a lot of my career working with children with autism and developmental disabilities, developing ways to teach them the skills they need, help them generalize and maintain these skills and reduce challenging behaviors that get in the way of them living to their fullest potential.  While I loved this work, I started to focus on applied behavior analysis (ABA) as a science that can be applied to all behaviors of all people, despite being best-known in the world of autism treatment.  I started to study and research more about how ABA can be applied to adults and their different types of needs, specifically using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).  All this time, I continued to practice yoga and started to realize that there is a lot of overlap between ABA and ACT for adults and yoga and how they both help people learn to lead meaningful and satisfying lives.  After adding certifications as a yoga and meditation teacher and Precision Nutrition Coach, Level 1 to my toolbox, I decided to put all the pieces together and develop The Vintage Athlete.

So now here I am....ready to help hard-working and dedicated athletes continue to evolve into their true selves in their lives after sports.