Now, just a week after the Flyers’ glorious soccer season came to an abrupt end with a 3-1 loss to Virginia Tech in the second round of the NCAA tournament — it was UD’s only loss in 23 games this year — no player is putting Tucker’s preaching into practice better than Lauren MacCormick.
An All-Atlantic 10 first-team selection as an athlete and an academician, the Flyers’ senior captain and leading goal-scorer, MacCormick will graduate in December with a pre-med degree — which she amazingly completed in 3 1/2 years, each semester on the dean’s list — and by next fall she hopes to be in medical school.
Before that she intends to do volunteer medical work in a Third World county, preferably, she said, working with AIDS patients in Africa.
“She is an amazing person,” Tucker said. “She was the best target player in the league — one of the very best in the nation — and she likely could have gone on to play in the women’s league, but she has her sights set on the medical field.
“From the first day she got to school — actually even before she signed with us — she let it be known that academics were very important to her.”
‘Passion for medicine’
Tom MacCormick admitted he had some second thoughts when his daughter told him she wanted to play major-college soccer — coming out of McNicholas High School in Cincinnati, she’d chose UD over Ohio State, Vanderbilt and Georgia — while tackling the difficult pre-med curriculum:
“Some people questioned me, ‘If you have a pre-med student, do you really want her trying to be a Division I athlete, too? Both require so much time.’
“I kind of sweated that a whole lot: ‘What if she screws up the whole med school thing?’ ”
And he knew the challenges of Division I sports more than most. He had played football at South Carolina for a season before the books-and-ball combo became too much of a burden, he said. He gave up football and, like his daughter, got his degree, in business — in 31/2 years. Since then, he’s worked in sales.
“On straight commission,” Lauren said. “And sometimes that meant working as many as 100 hours a week.”
She said her dad and her mom, Veronica, did everything they could to give her and her older sister a good life.
“My dad’s a really big influence in my life,” Lauren said. “I really admire what he’s done in his life. He’s Native American and at times he had a tough childhood. There wasn’t a lot of money.
“His mom raised he and his two brothers on her own. She left the reservation (of the Pawmunkey tribe in Virginia) long enough to make it better for her children. She worked hard in a factory, and because of it my dad was one of the first from his family to make it out of poverty and go to college.”
While she said her grandmother has, by choice, moved back to the reservation near Richmond — “my dad has offered to help her financially, but she loves living there” — she, too, is a role model for Lauren.
The plan to work with “under-served populations,” as Lauren put it, is rooted both in her familiarity with the plight of many Native Americans and, her dad said, from a soccer trip to South America when she was younger:
“She came back and said, ‘Dad, those people are really poor.’” He said those images still strike a chord with her today.
“Part of it is having some perspective,” Lauren said. “It’s strange that my soccer career is over — especially when I was so involved in it just a week ago — but I’m also excited to move on to the next part of my life. I’ve come to realize that as much as I love soccer, I feel the same passion for medicine.”
Soccer and studies
This past season the 5-foot-9 forward had nine goals — five of them game-winners — and six assists for 24 points. That’s almost triple her statistical output of last season.
“She developed as much over four years here as any player I can ever remember us having,” Tucker said. “And as a captain she was spectacular. She’s not the ‘rah-rah’ type. In fact, she doesn’t say a lot, but she had the respect of every girl on this team. She was a great leader — both for what she got done on the field and off it.
“If she wasn’t playing a game or practicing, there’s a good chance she was studying.”
And that’s why Tom MacCormick said it didn’t take long for him to realize his fears about his daughter “blowing” her academic chances were unwarranted:
“I think if you followed her around for three days straight you’d find she didn’t waste three hours. She knew where she had to be and she got there.”
Even when it’s meant closing one door behind her and then walking through the next.
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