Six afternoons a week at Nathan Benderson Park, a group of middle-aged-and-older women sporting Lycra shorts, tank tops and powerful shoulder muscles step into a skinny boat with their long paddles. Members of the competitive Survivors in Synch (SIS) team, they share a formidable bond—they are breast cancer survivors.

They also have a formidable coach. Angela Long, 56, founded SIS at Nathan Benderson Park 12 years ago. This year, Long was selected as Team USA’s first-ever coach for breast cancer paddlers, and she’ll take 39 women (including eight SIS paddlers) from around the country, who qualified in arduous time trials, to the International Dragon Boat Federation (IDBF) World Championships from July 15-20, in Brandenburg, Germany. While breast cancer paddlers have competed in international competitions as part of their individual club teams, this is the first time they will be competing as nations.

If you haven’t heard of dragon boat, you’re not alone. It’s not a mainstream sport even though it’s thousands of years old and has millions of participants around the world. The first internationally recognized competition was in Hong Kong in 1976. The sport attracts men and women of all ages and all abilities—there is a para-dragon boat team, for example, and a veterans’ team, as well as breast cancer teams.

A standard boat is 40 feet long, fitted with nine benches, two paddlers to a bench. At the front is a drummer who keeps the pace and in the back is a steerer who maneuvers the boat. Unlike in rowing, where rowers sit single file, face backwards and hold two oars, dragon boat paddlers sit two to a seat, face forward and hold one paddle. The sport takes precision and perfect synchronization. Every paddle should enter and leave the water at the same moment for a smooth, fast ride.

This takes practice and total focus. Nathan Benderson’s SIS team came home with a gold medal last year in Ravenna, Italy. Long, who isn’t one for the limelight, can take credit for the team’s success. Unflaggingly cheerful yet intensely serious, she is known for demanding practices, crystal-clear instruction and insistence on technique. She breaks every stroke into four parts and paddlers are drilled on every movement until the stroke is muscle memory.

SIS is only one of the NBP teams Long coaches. She is the head coach for all paddlers at NBP Paddling, which has become one of the most competitive and largest teams in the U.S, with 150 paddlers.

But the SIS team holds a special place in Long’s heart. At 34, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and understands that life can change in a phone call. As part of her recovery process, she worked with local nonprofits to support other cancer survivors until she was tapped to start SIS. For many of the women she coaches, dragon boat has changed their identity from victim to athlete. Some of these women have had double mastectomies. Many have had chemotherapy and radiation. Their bodies look different, feel different, move in ways that are unfamiliar. Survivors In Synch gave these women a place to cry when they needed to, but more importantly, it gave them a place to heal in nature, to feel powerful and to trust their bodies again with other women who have gone through the same experience.

“A lot of the women on the breast cancer team have never been involved in a support group or been involved in a sport,” Long says. “They don’t want to talk about their cancer. They want to move on and find a new identity by becoming physically active and focusing on the future. Dragon boat gives them a new identity. They find a group of women, a common peer group to provide the support they never knew they needed, and now they’re in the best mental and physical shape of their lives.”

The IDBF World Championship races take place July 15-20. In addition to the eight athletes on NBP’s SIS team, 14 other NBP paddlers will be competing.