Two days before she boarded American Airlines Flight 77, Mari-Rae Sopper sent an email to her friends and family with a subject line that captured everything she had spent years working toward: “New Job New City New State New Life.”
She was walking away from a $98,000 attorney salary in Washington, D.C., to accept a $27,000 head coaching position at the University of California Santa Barbara.
She joined the Cyclone gymnastics team as an unheralded freshman walk-on. Through her work on the squad, she
earned a full athletic scholarship for her remaining three seasons and was named Iowa State’s Most Valuable Gymnast as a senior before graduating in 1988 with a bachelor’s degree in exercise science.
Former Iowa State gymnastics coach K.J. Kindler recalled Sopper’s impact on the program during her collegiate career.
“She did a great job for ISU,” Kindler told the Iowa State Daily in 2003. “She was a top all-arounder at the time and had a huge impact on the team.”
Sopper earned a master’s degree in athletic administration from the University of North Texas in 1993 and a Juris Doctor from the University of Denver College of Law in 1996.
Sopper then moved to Washington, D.C., where she served four years as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Judge Advocate General’s (JAG) Corps, specializing in appellate cases.
“She started out as a defense attorney, and then went into defensive appellate,” her mother Marion Kminek told the Punta County Sun on Monday. “That’s where she shined, writing the papers and the whole thing for the appellate court.”
After completing her military service, Sopper worked as an associate at the law firm Schmeltzer, Aptaker & Shepard while remaining active in athletics as an assistant coach and choreographer at George Washington University and the U.S. Naval Academy club program.
However, Kminek noted that her daughter remained determined to pursue a full-time collegiate coaching career.
“She was prosecuting the little guy, and she hated it,” Kminek said. “She always wanted to be a college gymnastics coach.”
Kindler similarly recalled receiving an email from Sopper shortly before her departure. “She gave up a job where she was making three or four times as much to do something she had always wanted to try,” Kindler said.
On the morning of Sept. 11, Sopper prepared for her cross-country move accompanied by her pet cat, Luther.
Former Navy JAG colleague Jim Bailey drove Sopper to Dulles International Airport, helping her unload her luggage and pet crate. At airport security, personnel required Sopper to carry the cat out of its carrier through the checkpoint before placing it back inside with the assistance of bystanders.
Sopper boarded American Airlines Flight 77 en route to Los Angeles to begin her coaching duties. Hijackers took control of the aircraft and crashed it into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. local time, killing everyone on board—including Sopper, aged 35, and her cat—as well as 125 personnel inside the building.
Sopper was interred at Arlington National Cemetery. The Navy JAG Corps dedicated a conference room inside the Pentagon in her honor. She is also memorialized at the Pentagon Memorial in Virginia and the National September 11 Memorial in New York City.
Her mother will speak at the Military Heritage Museum in Punta Gorda later this morning.
