“To make it in aerospace you have to stand up for yourself in a male-dominated environment. And that’s very rugby, right? You have to hold your ground.”
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Jerremy Lorch, 45, lives in Pittsford, and is a founder of the WNY Wreckers wheelchair rugby team.
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Zoë Koniaris is a rugby star at Princeton University double majoring in mechanical and aerospace engineering with a life goal of getting people to Mars and other planets. She wants to give humanity the tools to expand outward into the universe and explore the vastness of a mostly untold galaxy.
For now, Koniaris’ short-term goals are played out on a field where, as a 5-4 senior, she has started every varsity game for the Princeton Tigers and just scored back-to-back tries. For the rugby unfamiliar, a try is like scoring a touchdown in football, in this case worth five points not six.
Koniaris is a Carmel High School graduate, who fell in love with space as a little girl, was a National Merit Scholarship finalist and recently earned the Brooke Owens Fellowship, an elite program for “exceptional minority undergraduate women in aerospace.”
The irony of Koniaris’ two favorite things on the earth, which are also her greatest successes, are not lost on her. Rugby and aerospace. Aerospace and rugby. It seems to be a combination that clicks.
Two of Koniaris’ greatest role models are rugby-playing women astronauts and she is battling on the field and studying in the classroom to be the next in line, following in the footsteps of Jessica Watkins and Anne McClain. Both played rugby internationally for team USA.
Watkins, 36, is an American NASA astronaut, geologist and aquanaut who won a DI national championship with Stanford in 2008, was a USA Rugby Collegiate All-American from 2008 to 2010, Women 7s Rugby World Cup semi-finalist, and on the USA Eagles team in 2009 as an international rugby player. She was also the first Black woman to complete an International Space Station long-term mission in April 2022.
McClain, 45, is a colonel in the U.S. Army, engineer and a NASA astronaut who was a flight engineer for Expedition 58/59 to the International Space Station. Her call sign, Annimal, dates back to her rugby career where she also played internationally.
The connection between rugby and women astronauts, Koniaris says, is fairly simple to explain.
“There are not a lot of women in aerospace in general. And so, to really make it in here, you have to be really confident in yourself and willing to stand up for yourself in a male-dominated environment,” she told IndyStar last week. “And that’s very rugby, right? You have to hold your ground.”
‘I’ve always just thought space was really cool’
Koniaris didn’t always love rugby, but she did love space from a very young age. Born in upstate New York, she lived in Miami for a bit and then Philadelphia before the family moved to Carmel when she was in sixth grade.
At the time, her parents, Leonidas Koniaris, a general surgeon, and Teresa Zimmers, a biologist, both worked as professors at the Indiana University School of Medicine. They are now at Oregon Health & Science University.
They were busy, but they always found time to take Koniaris and her sister and brothers, Angelike, Nikolas, and George, on trips and family adventures. It was in Ohio at a space museum as a little girl that Koniaris became enamored with the field.
“I remember looking at the exhibits about what the astronauts do on the International Space Station and thinking that was really cool,” she said. “I’ve always just thought space was really cool.”
But before space, Koniaris knew she needed engineering. For school projects, she would construct marshmallow-spaghetti bridges and build windmills out of paper cups. In high school, her love of engineering catapulted to a new level when she said Carmel teachers pushed her to be her best.
As she immersed herself in engineering classes, Koniaris was also president of the Carmel High School Democrats Club and the Students Demand Action, a group working to end gun violence. As student activists gathered to call for universal background checks on gun purchases in 2019, Koniaris was there and interviewed by IndyStar.
“We need our representatives to value more than reelection funds and support from the NRA,” she said at the time.
While at Carmel, Koniaris worked on electoral campaigns for Sen. Joe Donnelly, Sen. J.D. Ford and Dee Thornton when she ran for the U.S. House of Representatives. She was part of local races, too, including Miles Nelson’s run for Carmel City Council.
She played cello in the Philharmonic Orchestra and volunteered for United Sound, teaching students with special needs to play different instruments. All the while, she started applying to colleges where she could chase her dream of working in space.
Koniaris decided on Princeton, which is ranked 12th in the nation for its aerospace engineering program and is the top Ivy League school for the major. She had no trouble getting accepted as a top scholar and National Merit finalist.
But once at the university, Koniaris began to notice something interesting. There were a lot of women in her major who also played rugby.
‘Stuck with it and now I’m obsessed’
Growing up, Koniaris never considered herself an athlete. She played soccer when she was little, ran some cross country at Carmel and often went to the gym to work out. But sports weren’t where she excelled.
While at a club fair as a freshman at Princeton, she saw a table set up for the women’s rugby team. She’d never played before and knew little about the sport.
“They had a lot of energy, and it seemed really fun, and it also seemed like a lot of the girls in my major played rugby,” she said. “So, I tried it out and went to the first practice and just kind of stuck with it. And now I’m obsessed.”
At the beginning of her sophomore year, rugby switched from club to a varsity NCAA sport, but Koniaris tore her ACL and was out for the season. Her junior year she returned and picked up where she had left off, becoming a star front rower and hooker, which is like the center in football, hooking the ball to the quarterback.
Koniaris and her team recently got their first program victory as a varsity team, winning 59-0 against Bowdoin. “They were a DIII team though, so we had to pound them into the ground,” she said laughing.
While the team is 1-4, that win “was a really historic moment for the program and Zoë,” who had 100% tackle completion in the game,” said Elliott Carr, assistant director of athletics communications at Princeton. “And you know, years from now, people are going to look back at the team and at her and what they’ve started.”
Koniaris was good enough to play this summer in the Women’s Premier League for the Colorado Gray Wolves, the highest-level of 15s rugby women can play. Fifteens is a different style of rugby than 7s, which is the form of the sport played in the Olympics.
As a hooker in four games, Koniaris helped the team rack up a 3-1 record. The Gray Wolves went on to win the 2024 WPL Championship. Koniaris was back at Princeton by then, but she felt a definite sense of pride.
It was while in Colorado playing rugby and working at BAE Systems as a systems engineering, integration and test intern on the Mission and Space Vehicle team, which she landed as part of the Brooke Owens Fellowship, that Koniaris started to dream bigger. Maybe one day, she could work and play rugby.
After graduation, Koniaris plans to move to Denver where she said there are a lot of job opportunities in aerospace and try to make a team in the new Women’s Elite Rugby, America’s first pro women’s league which launches in 2025.
“That’s what I would like to do if I can make it work,” she said. “Have my job and play.”
Whether she will become a rugby-playing astronaut remains to be seen, but she has no plans to give up either any time soon.
The possibility of life on other planets, Koniaris said, is the most scientifically and philosophically interesting question of the modern day and she wants to spend her career engineering for space exploration.
“I would like to contribute to human exploration of space, whether that’s as an engineer on the ground or in whatever way I can be most helpful to the mission,” she said. “But the thing I want to work on the most in my life is getting people to Mars or other planets, having humanity expand outward into the universe and explore.”
More with Koniaris
Her advice to young boys and girls: “Following what you love is really important. What feels important to you? Where is your passion? And just follow that because that’s how you live the most true and authentic life. When I was younger, I was really into planning out my life because I’m just really type A in a lot of ways. But I think maybe letting go of that a little bit and following your passions and just seeing how that develops. And then lift others up as you go for sure.”
Her journey in aerospace engineering: It has taken her from Texas to New Jersey to Greece. Before her Colorado internship, Koniaris was an intern at NASA SEES at the UT Center for Space Research, contributing to the Mars Exploration Team. She worked on nuclear fusion applications for deep space propulsion at Princeton Satellite Systems. At EMTech Space (a European Space Agency contractor), she did systems engineering for the first Greek space mission.
Beyond space: Koniaris is on the varsity student advisory council at Princeton, a group whose mission is to create positive change on campus. “We talk a lot about mental health and what resources are there for student-athletes. Right now, we’re trying to make a women in sports affinity group. I’m very passionate about women in sports and the experience people have on their teams because it’s had such a positive impact on me that I want to help share the love and good experiences.” She is also one of Princeton’s representatives to the Ivy League Student-Athlete Advisory Council.
Missing Carmel: Koniaris said she misses a lot about Carmel, mostly the restaurant Yats and the Christkindlmarkt. She also likes to tell people she meets that she is from the roundabout capital of the world.
Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on X: @DanaBenbow. Reach her via email: dbenbow@indystar.com.