Submitted Paige Juliano, first row on right, signs her letter of intent to continue her academic and athletic career with the Michigan State rowing team.

Whenever Paige Juliano had a swim meet, needed help with homework or studying for a test, her father, Rafael, was there.

But then he got sick.

“When we got the phone call, I was actually at a sleepover at one of my friends’ houses,” Juliano said. “I found out the next morning because my mom didn’t want to tell me while I was there. We just took that whole next day, my family and I, to just cry and be sad. But then we had to kind of go into planning mode. We weren’t going to just give up with this diagnosis. We were finding different trials, finding different ways to just try to get him better, see what we could do.”

The doctors initially believed Rafael had Acute Disseminated Encephalomyelitis (ADEM), a rare neurological disease. Following more scans, however, he was officially diagnosed with central nervous system (CNS) lymphoma.

“[It’s] basically just a fancy word for brain cancer,” she said.

The family, which had lived in Poland for about 10 years, moved to Pittsburgh for better job opportunities for Paige’s parents, as well as to be closer to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) so Rafael could continue to fight.

His family fought right alongside him.

“It was definitely very hard,” Juliano said. “There were times that were harder than others, like [when] my dad was transferred to a bunch of different hospitals. He went from UPMC to Cleveland Clinic. He went to a hospital in Boston. He was all over.”

Meanwhile, Juliano, who attended middle school in Poland and then attended Holy Family, transferred to Quaker Valley in Leetsdale, Pa. There, she maintained a hectic schedule trying to balance schoolwork, sports and family time.

“I would wake up at like 4:30; we had practice in the morning at five that morning. Practice was usually about an hour and a half, give or take,” Juliano said. “So I would get ready in the locker rooms, obviously, go to school, then I would go back to practice. Afternoon practice started at four, and it was two hours. So we would go four to six, and then we would lift for an hour after, and then I would go home, do what I needed to do, study, homework, projects, papers, and then I would kind of take the rest of the time that I had that evening to just be with my family.

“It was difficult, but I feel like once I kind of found a good rhythm, a good routine, it just felt like my new version of life, like it was my new normal.”

Rafael died on Oct. 19, 2023, at the age of 44.

But just as she had done while he fought, Juliano never broke stride – not in school or athletics.

“It was almost like a way of keeping some kind of normalcy in my life, and trying to honor him as well,” said Juliano, who had an above-4.0 GPA at Quaker Valley.

She did notice, though, that swimming, the sport she competed and excelled in for most of her life, was no longer what she really wanted to do.

So in the spring of 2024, she, along with her coaches and mother, Melinda, an Ursuline alum, agreed that she should take the summer off from swimming. That opened the door to her new love: rowing.

“My friends had done rowing. … I could cross-train with rowing, because it basically works all the same muscles,” Juliano said. “I ended up doing a learn-to-row camp at this club called Three Rivers, and I fell in love with it. The sport was amazing. The support I had from coaches and rowers was just unmatched. And it’s so different from swim. It’s very much a team sport. You have to be very unified with the people in your boat. You have to be in sync. So it was just a completely different vibe. And I really loved it, and I decided to switch over.”

After 12 years of competitively swimming, Juliano made the decision to completely drop the sport, which she said did not really register as a tough decision.

“It was hard at first, I’d say, but after I kind of got into the grind of another sport, you almost don’t really have time to think about what once was. You have to be in the present moment, focusing on getting better. And especially since this was all completely new to me, I really had to put all of my effort and attention into rowing just to kind of learn the basics, get down the technique, all that stuff,” she said.

Leaning on her distance swim background, Juliano picked up rowing quickly, earning a spot as an alternate for the Head of the Charles Regatta, the largest three-day regatta in the world, which takes place annually in Boston.

Additionally, within nine months of her venture into the sport, she signed with Michigan State’s women’s rowing program in favor of Minnesota, Delaware and Alabama.

“I had no problems with exerting myself for long periods of time in a pretty intense manner,” Juliano said. “So to go from swimming to rowing, it really, physically, was not that big of a change, because I was already used to the endurance aspect, and I was already used to the aspect of using my full body to be able to excel at the sport.”

Juliano intends to double major in political science and journalism at MSU before attending law school in hopes of becoming a civil rights attorney.