[5][6][7] She attended Kingston's Wyoming Seminary, a college preparatory school very close to her birthplace in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.

Around 1927, at a Water Polo-like contest between her Wilkes Barre YMCA team and the recently formed Scranton Swimming Association at the Wilkes Barre YMCA Pool, Hoffman's swimming ability was discovered by Scranton Coach Hoadley Hagen who admired her speed and agility.

[8] She set a world record, though perhaps unofficial, in the 200-yard breaststroke of 2.55.8 at an international meet between the United States and Hungary in New York, in July 1932.

She graduated the Wyoming Seminary in 1929, and began at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts in the fall of that year.

[15][16] Having just turned seventeen while still a student at Wyoming Seminary, she qualified in breaststroke for the 1928 Olympics at the trials at Rockaway Park in Long Island, New York in early July, 1928.

[16][17] Travelling with the team, she then competed in the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam finishing third in her first heat, and fifth in the final of the women's 200-meter breaststroke event with a time of 3:19.2.

The 1928 Olympic women's team was managed by Hall of Fame Coach Bob Kiphuth of Yale University.

[25][26] In June 1934, she did statistical work for the Department of Planning and Research at the newly formed National Recovery Administration in Washington, D.C. for around fifteen years.

Pursuing a career in education, by the 1950's she coached basketball and chaired the Physical Education Department at Wyoming Seminary,[29] which she had formerly attended, before becoming a mathematics teacher at the Shipley school, a prep school for Bryn Mawr College, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.