It’s impossible to miss Samantha Hoopes in the 2016 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. She’s dominated the Swimsuit Issue for the last three years. Her most recent feature can be found here.
Last week I had an opportunity to crash Sports Illustrated’s Swim City launch event in Manhattan to chat it up with the 25-year-old model from Doylestown, Pennsylvania. As the glasses-wearing, dad bod’ed co-founder/editor of a thriving men’s lifestyle publication, I have pretty much nothing in common with a genetically-perfect 5’8″ super model. Except one thing: We both went to school at Penn State, which makes us de facto friends off the bat. Right?
Hoopes lit up when we started chatting about Penn State (..her favorite bar was The Den, mine Pickles and The Phyrst… yes, she’s been back to a game), so I asked her about something I read a long time ago: Did she really want to be a gym teacher if her modeling career didn’t explode?
Answer: Yes.
Close your eyes and imagine Hoopes as a Gym teacher for just a second. It’s impossible. In what alternate universe is Samantha Hoopes is a gym teacher instead of a highly successful model living in L.A.? But, life is weird and wild and, hey — how can you ever really know what you *really* want to do with your life when you’re 20 and having too much fun in college?
Above are some highlights of our conversation, which happened right next to @blkhrt‘s pop-up Schick Hydro barber shop, where they were showing off how the new Schick Hydro 5 offers superior protection against irritation.
If life throws Hoopes a curve ball and she does actually become a gym teacher, her students will be lucky for two reasons: They’ll never have to run the miles and they’ll have a three-time Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model as a gym teacher.
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