Be A Maverick. The University of Texas at Arlington
Diving in
Robyn Cox began her SeaWorld career selling fish for visitors to feed the dolphins. Now she feeds them herself—often after they jump 20 feet over her head, dance in circles or jet through the water as she grips their dorsal fins.
The 1996 UT Arlington psychology graduate is a senior animal trainer at the San Antonio adventure park. As a star of the Viva! show, she similarly rewards beluga whales for propelling her under water as she balances on them before they flip her 10 feet above the pool at Beluga Stadium.
Despite the constant smile, there’s a tinge of trepidation each time she performs.
“You must keep in mind that you’re working with animals,” she said. “You can’t be 100 percent sure that they’re going to do what you ask them to do.”
After failing to land an animal training job on her first try, Cox took the fish-peddling gig and later worked in the park’s aviculture department. Two years later, she scored the career she’d dreamed about as a teenager.
“It’s extremely tough competition,” she said of the animal training field. “There are not a whole lot of openings, and a lot of people who want them.”
SeaWorld animal trainers must be scuba certified and pass a rigorous test that includes freestyle and underwater swimming, diving and treading water using only their legs. A microphone audition requires them to read part of a show script.
Pass the test and they get an interview. Then they must convince park officials that they’re interested in more than just playing with dolphins. Experience with animals is helpful but not a prerequisite. Once hired, they’re assigned to a show.
Viva! features trainers, divers, aerialists and synchronized swimmers performing with Pacific white-sided dolphins and beluga whales against a backdrop of water screens, waterfalls and fountains. It’s high-flying, high speed and high energy—with a high degree of difficulty that requires impeccable timing.
For the 5-foot-4 Cox, the hardest stunt to master was the dorsal tow, where two dolphins make like ski boats as she rides between them.
“They’re very fast and very powerful, and their dorsal fins are slippery,” she said with a laugh. “Once you figure out the correct body position, it’s not that difficult.”
Growing up in Arlington, Cox had an assortment of dogs, birds, fish, hamsters, gerbils and a cat named Kitty that lived to be 22. She and her husband, Brian, who works in SeaWorld’s animal care department, have three dogs at their San Antonio home.
She decided she wanted to be a dolphin trainer in junior high.
“Knowing her love for animals, Robyn just thought that would be a fun job,” said Sherry Gould, her mother. “She just never wavered from that idea. After her first trip to SeaWorld in ninth grade, the thought was cemented in her mind.”
Thinking she needed a marine biology degree, Cox spent two years at Texas A&M-Galveston. When she discovered that psychology was actually the preferred field for animal trainers, she enrolled at UT Arlington.
Just like her older brother, Clay Gould. A baseball star who later became UT Arlington’s head coach, Gould died of cancer in 2001 at age 29. The University’s baseball stadium bears his name.
Pictures of Clay and his daughter, Logan, hang in Robyn’s locker at SeaWorld. His memory is never far away.
“Clay did so many amazing things in such a short period of time,” Cox said. “I could look up to him and know that was what success looked like personally and professionally.”
For the 33-year-old marine mammal trainer, success often takes the form of breathtaking water acrobatics. Dives, flips, somersaults, twists, rides and games with animals that she’s taught—it’s her dream career.
“Doesn’t every teenager want to be a dolphin trainer at some point?” she asks.
Maybe, but most never get there.