Heavy Lifting

We get to know Stephanie Ciarelli, Newport Harbor High strength coach and the junior national coach for USA Weightlifting.

Photo By Ralph Palumbo Stephanie Ciarelli is at home in Newport Harbor High’s weight room.

he diminutive Stephanie Ciarelli emerges from the back of a dark room, her short red hair the only thing visible as she comes closer. She seems very small – she is very small – amongst the towering 15 lifting platforms inside Newport Harbor High School’s football weight room. There’s no one there at the moment; it’s very quiet. But during the off-season, the banging of 45-pound plates and the grunts of heavy lifters are what Ciarelli lives for. These are her “kids.”

(The observant set will rapidly notice Ciarelli’s obvious attributes. Let us address them accordingly: She is the only female strength coach around and a recent grandmother. She was also, at one point, a cheerleader. There, it’s out.)

But really, none of this is relevant to Ciarelli’s career. Besides her position as Newport Harbor High’s strength coach, she is also the junior national coach for USA Weightlifting, which is a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee.



Chosen by her peers for her dedication to the sport, Ciarelli travels the country to attend various weightlifting meets, taking her top athletes with her for competition and meeting others with the potential to “move up the athletic ladder,” a role she’s happy to nurture.

But Ciarelli is modest. We must, quite literally, read between the lines. She mentions (casually) that she has trained a couple of junior champions and a collegiate weightlifting champion along the way, as well as countless others who have gone on to become Olympic-caliber athletes.

With further prodding, she also reveals that she broke state records in all of her lifts in 1976, when she lived in Hawaii and began powerlifting as a hobby. “I’m not very good at talking about myself,” she says curtly, clearly uninterested in self-promotion. “But I was fairly good at [powerlifting]. I held some records in my day.”

These days, her focus is on her “kids,” who are motivated and good-natured. When asked about problems with notorious teenage angst and rebelliousness, Ciarelli bursts out with an emphatic “No, just… no. They’re here because they want to be here. They don’t want to go home and sit on the couch.”

So they stay after school, where, for two and a half hours, they work through a series of Olympic-level training that includes overall circuit conditioning as well as lifts like the snatch and the clean and jerk, both of which are useful in athletics. “This type of lifting is very specific to sports and is used as a training tool,” says Ciarelli. “You’re really training in the way that your body would move in just about any sport. This isn’t bulking up for bulk’s sake.”

There is, in fact, a void of mirrors in the football weight room – this is no vanity contest. On Ciarelli’s watch, explosiveness, balance and flexibility are the end results – not massive biceps. Her dedication to strength and overall conditioning led last season’s football team to the second round of CIF Division in the Sunset League, which is among Orange County’s toughest.

And the future? What does it hold? As far as Ciarelli is concerned, hopefully more of the same. “It just keeps going along and getting better and better,” she says.

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