ITHACA, N.Y. — There’s a moment at the end of every afternoon practice when the deck at Teagle goes quiet. Lanes settle. The last droplets slide off the edge of a starting block. And in that soft in-between — the place after the work but before the rush back to campus — you can find senior captain Jungmin Yoon smiling like someone who finally understands what the sport is supposed to feel like.

“I think I’m the opposite of most people,” she said. “A lot of girls lose their love for the sport in college. For me, I found it.”

Born in Seoul and raised in Los Angeles, Yoon moved to the United States when she was three after her father fell in love with the freedom he felt on a work trip to California. He left engineering in Korea, started a small athleisure clothing business in the U.S., and, with Jungmin’s mother – a former track and field standout and PE teacher – rebuilt a life from scratch. 

It wasn’t always this way. For most of her childhood in Los Angeles, swimming was something she did well, not necessarily something she always loved. She began as a perpetually sick five-year-old whose mom saw a Facebook post claiming swim lessons would build a stronger immune system. The lessons came with tears and bribes of candy.

The sport got serious quickly. Growing up in Koreatown, she swam for a small club with a coach from Korea and a training style to match – long, demanding practices for an eight-year-old. When her family moved to La Crescenta for better schools, she joined Rose Bowl Aquatics, one of the top clubs in Southern California.

The work grew tougher. The clubs got bigger. By 13, she was training in the highest competitive group at Rose Bowl — 5 a.m. doubles, seven days a week, surrounded by older athletes whose schedules swallowed their lives.

“It was very intense,” she said. “I basically burnt out. I didn’t see the point anymore.”

By the spring of her senior year, she walked away for three months — a full stop that no young swimmer ever expects to take. She needed space and time. A chance to answer the question that burnout always asks: Do I actually want this?

That break saved her. However, the idea of swimming in college still felt more like obligation than dream.

But the comeback? That came when she arrived at Cornell.

The recruiting call she remembers most is the one where the Big Red’s Philip H. Bartels ’71 Head Coach of Women’s Swimming, Patrick Gallagher, only touched on the sport. “He talked about chocolate cake,” she said, laughing. “He was the only coach who didn’t make it about times. I wanted that family type of environment.”

Cornell gave her that and more. She found teammates who competed hard but celebrated even harder when someone else broke through. A lane that felt joyful as often as it felt demanding. A program where “healthy and happy” weren’t clichés but expectations. A team that rebuilt her love for the sport simply by reminding her what it feels like to belong.

A steady contributor in mid-distance freestyle and backstroke from the moment she arrived, Yoon has competed at every Ivy League Championship of her career and scored in multiple events while helping power several Big Red relays. College, she said, is where her perspective shifted.

“I realized swimming is part of who I am,” she said. “But it doesn’t define my worth. Training here … it’s two hours of my day where I don’t think about school or stress. I just get in, swim with my friends, laugh a little and come back to the rest of life after.”

The final nudge came from her younger sister, Hojung. After a difficult freshman year, Jungmin was still unsure whether she’d return. Then her sister committed to Cornell.

“She told me, ‘Just give me one more season with you,'” Jungmin said. “That ended up being my favorite one.”

The following spring, the two sisters also became U.S. citizens — driving to Syracuse between practices and exams to complete their interviews, waving little flags after the ceremony and finally formalizing what Jungmin says she’d felt for most of her life. “I grew up here. I’ve always identified as American,” she said. “But to do it together, in the middle of a season … it felt really special.”

This fall, the quiet kid who once cried before lessons — the swimmer who didn’t want to race, didn’t want to lead, didn’t know if she’d keep going — is now the team’s elected captain. Not because she shouts the loudest, but because she makes spaces lighter. “The lane Jungmin is in is always the happiest,” former Big Red assistant coach Eileen Bringman once told her. That’s the whole job description.

With a few months left in her career, she’s trying to savor it: the long bus rides, the late-night sitcom binges in the slightly-chaotic house on Linden Avenue, the teammates she calls family.

Yoon leans into the business world she grew up around — watching her dad reinvent himself in America, discovering her own passion for beauty and fashion marketing, and finding a favorite course in retail strategy. She sees her future clearly now, just as she sees her sport more clearly too.

As she looks toward the end of her senior season, she doesn’t talk about times, medals or podiums.

“I want to leave with no regrets,” she said. “I want them to remember me as a good friend first — someone who gave her all, who brought good energy, who loved being part of this.”

Most days, she finds that perspective in the same quiet moment that opens her story — the end of practice, when the deck settles and the Teagle water grows still. 

This is where she found her love for swimming again.

This is where she learned the sport doesn’t define her — it reflects her.

This is where Cornell swimming saved the thing she almost walked away from.