Carol was born in the small town of Hazelton, BC. Her parents were hard-working individuals who came to Canada as refugees from Vietnam. Carol grew up with two brothers and two sisters who motivated and supported her to play every sport she could.

At the urging of family and friends, she joined her high school wrestling team at age 15 and has enjoyed and excelled at the sport ever since.

She was recruited by Simon Fraser University in 1998 where she later received a BA in Psychology. She made the Junior World team in 1999 and in 2000 she made both the Junior and Senior World Teams. Since then, Carol has relinquished her position on the senior national team only once in her career. Unfortunately, it was the year leading up to the 2004 Olympic Games. Carol's Olympic Dream hit a snag when teammate, mentor, and role model, Lyndsay Belisle, pursued her Olympic Dream in 2004. Carol lost to her at the Canadian Olympic trials, but supported her as a training partner all the way to Athens. 

This snag fuelled the fire to become an Olympian. Determined to make the 2008 Olympic Team, Carol moved from Vancouver to Calgary in 2006. She left her friends and family, and put her academic career on hold to enable her to focus solely on her training and pursue her Olympic Dreams to the fullest.

Now that she has achieved her goal of competing for Canada at the Olympic Games in Beijing and met success there with a gold medal win, Carol has been working on new goals. She has been working on her Masters degree in Counselling Psychology and she is also training to be the best wrestler that she can be. She has her eyes set on London 2012.