None of the trailers she lived in ever had a dishwasher. For some time during her sophomore year of high school, Jen Fremd didn’t have a washing machine either.

Without one, she didn’t have consistently clean clothing.

There was a bedroom for her mother and her mother’s boyfriend. A small kitchen, a living room.

And there was a bedroom for her and her older sister, Darcy. It was so small that a bed couldn’t fit inside of it. So Darcy slept on the couch and most times,Fremd slept on the floor next to her.

“I grew up in poverty,” Fremd, a Quinnipiac senior rugby player, said. “I came from trailer trash.”

Fremd grew up in Oak Harbor, Washington, living in multiple trailer parks. She moved before kindergarten, after first grade, after second grade, and in between eighth grade and freshman year of high school.

Kids like that are bullied. Fremd was no exception.

“I got everything from a thrift store that was usually 10 sizes too big for me because it was hand-me-down stuff,” she said.

Her fondest memories of her childhood?

“That’s a hard question,” Fremd said. “You’ll have to get back to me on that one.”

In these trailer parks, she lived with Darcy, who is one year older, her mother and her mother’s boyfriends, whom changed over the years. Her mom kicked her older brother out of the house during Fremd’s freshman year of high school.

“He’s kind of a scumbag, I guess,” Fremd said.

She also described him as “belligerent” and a bum. His drugs of choice were “mostly stuff he could just steal from the store.”

“Robitussin was a really big one,” she said. “I don’t know what it’s called, I think it’s Benadryl? Little pink pills everywhere – a lot of those, too. And then of course, alcohol.”

He served as a model of everything she didn’t want to become.

Trailer parks, bullies and an addict brother motivated Fremd to find a way out of her situation.

So, she decided to start wrestling, and it wasn’t in the most conventional way.

“In seventh grade, some kid dared me to do wrestling and so I joined and I’m too stubborn to quit things,” Fremd said.

Lawrence Falcon was her coach through middle school and into high school.

“Whatever she puts her mind to, whatever she’s doing, she’ll always do it at 100 percent,” Falcon said. “That girl never quits.”

Fremd referred to Falcon as her “second dad” as he offered support to her in any way he could.

“This is a girl that had a lot of challenges growing up, from the home standpoint,” Falcon said. “And she made something of it. She made something of herself. She’s been that kid that wouldn’t let anything knock her down.”

Fremd played football and tennis. She competed in judo, and wrestled against boys during the regular season and girls in the postseason. At one point during her high school wrestling career, she placed third in the state’s girls’ division.

“If I could go back now, I would change a lot because I feel like our society doesn’t push girls who compete at that level. They more so push us to maintain at a level,” Fremd said. “So, I think I would’ve done a lot better and gone a lot further if I had the right mindset for it.”

Throughout her time participating in this sport, Fremd underwent a great deal of change. Before getting involved, her life was overshadowed with pessimism.

“I had a very negative outlook on the world and a very negative outlook on life,” Fremd said. “I was fat. I was asthmatic. I was probably going to become a delinquent.”

Wrestling helped begin her journey down a brighter path, but issues with confidence were long-lasting.

“I used to have zero self-confidence. That didn’t stop until recently, actually,” Fremd said. “And then of course self-image and self-worth were very low for a long time.”

Today, her mindset is a little bit different.

“I guess just one day I was like, ‘No, you can’t just tell other people to be confident. You have to just listen to your own advice,’” Fremd said.

Fremd’s eclectic set of athletic abilities gave her the opportunity to play rugby at Quinnipiac University.

Quinnipiac women’s rugby head coach Becky Carlson spent time researching double and triple-sport athletes to find potential future players for the team.

“I found them to be positive additions, effective additions to rugby because rugby requires athletic diversity,” Carlson said.

Then, Carlson found something that piqued her interest.

“I just happened to be looking and I saw there were some barriers broken in Washington, and that they had wrestling,” Carlson said. “Jen Fremd came up and it said that she also played football.”

Carlson got in touch with Fremd’s coach, arranged a visit, and “that was that,” Carlson said.

Fremd appeared in five games during her freshman season and redshirted the following year.

During her junior year, Fremd recorded 27 solo tackles and 12 assisted tackles in 12 games for Quinnipiac.

And in her senior season, Fremd recorded 39 solo tackles, 11 assisted tackles, one assist and one try.

Outside of sports, Fremd is heavily involved in the arts and has been for most of her life.

At Quinnipiac, she’s involved in the pep band where she plays the tuba. But she can play a variety of other instruments as well.

From the trumpet to the ukulele to the accordion, Fremd can do it all. She learns to play whatever she finds interesting. She enjoys cross-stitching, dabbles in painting and also has a love for poetry.

Drawing also serves as an outlet of expression for Fremd.

“I do a lot of self portraits to try and make tangible the things words cannot grasp,” Fremd said.

One of her best friends at Quinnipiac and fellow pep band member, Jackie Dembro, said Fremd plays down the praise she receives and her hard-working personality is unmatched.

“I’ve never seen someone so dedicated to their work and what they’re passionate about,” Dembro said.

Fremd is majoring in mechanical engineering. She hopes to one day design prosthetics and other medical devices, a profession that speaks to her selfless personality.

Professor John Reap, Fremd’s advisor and an assistant professor of mechanical engineering, says Fremd’s interests in engineering differ from her peers.

When given the option to choose the assignments to work on, he said, Fremd gravitates toward medical-oriented projects.

“There are a lot of hard-working students in the first engineering class,” Reap said. “I think what separates Jen from some of her peers is her genuine desire to help other people.”

Fremd worked with health science students on diabetic testing projects and on creating a meditation space for students to separate themselves from the buzz of social life on campus.

Reap said the majority of engineering students don’t have the same desires Fremd has.

“It doesn’t matter so much what they work on, as long as they get to apply their science and math and create technical things,” Reap said. “For Jen, I think the drive really is she thinks those things are interesting, but she really wants to use that to help other people and that really makes Jen a very special individual.”