The 90th anniversary of the formation of Conference Carolinas is on Dec. 6, 2020.
Sometimes a bad moment can be turned into something great. A perfect example is Lees-McRae women’s soccer legend Ashley Rogers.
She is not doing what she is today without a terrible moment on the pitch transforming her life off the pitch.
All soccer players – and really all student-athletes – will tell you that one of their biggest fears is tearing their ACL (anterior cruciate ligament), but when Rogers had this happen to her at Lees-McRae she found a unique way to turn a negative into a positive.
“Before I tore my ACL, our goalkeeper actually tore her ACL as well and I had the opportunity to watch her surgery, which actually happened a week before mine,” Rogers noted. “It was the first time I had ever seen a PA working and I kind of was able to understand what their role was and what they were doing. I thought it was pretty amazing and I thought, ‘Wow, I would want to do that.’”
Fast forward to 2020 and the 1996 Conference Carolinas Women’s Soccer Player of the Year is now working as a neurosurgical physician assistant at Orlando Regional Medical Center in downtown Orlando, Florida.
Despite knowing that she might eventually one day be a PA, Rogers continued her efforts with the beautiful game for a few years after graduating from Lees-McRae.
“I did a grad assistantship at Eastern Illinois and I stayed there for three years and coached and continued to play soccer on my own,” Rogers said. “Two more ACL tears later, I decided it was time to focus on my career and I went to PA school. I loved coaching, I really did. I loved coaching at the college level. I just knew it was time to focus on other things. It was definitely hard. I am still the biggest soccer fan ever, but I just don’t play it as much as I would like.”
A native of Florida, Rogers was easily sold on Lees-McRae “because nothing can beat a fall soccer season at Lees-McRae in the mountains.”
“Going to a smaller school is not necessarily for everybody, but it was everything for me. It was a tight-knit community and I felt like I was part of a family. I felt important to the college.”
The Lees-McRae women’s soccer family from Rogers’ time on campus continues to this day. In fact, Rogers and her teammates turned another negative into a positive in 2020.
“With quarantine and COVID it has been a unique opportunity because now we have a bi-weekly Zoom meeting,” Rogers relayed. “It’s sort of put us all back in touch and now we can spend every other Friday night talking about some of our favorite games and some of our favorite memories from our favorite things in general to even the silly things we did while we were there. It’s been a great way to connect back with teammates that maybe you had lost touch with.”