After six months of physical therapy I was cleared to return—but my coach moved me down to junior varsity, not believing I was ready. That decision crushed something in me that took years to rebuild. I worked my way back, fought for my spot, and two years later at sixteen I was back competing at the varsity level and had just returned from visiting a college program I was genuinely excited about. I remember feeling so hopeful that day, like everything was finally falling back into place. Then during a high school game a girl slide tackled me. I had a bad feeling immediately but pushed through. When I went up for a header and came back down, my knee gave out beneath me. I knew before I even hit the ground. I had torn the same ACL again.

This time was different. This time I had to make a decision that no teenager should ever have to make—and I chose to walk away from playing college soccer to protect my long term health. I remember my dad crying when I told him. That image never left me. It wasn’t just my dream I felt like I was letting go of. It was his too.

I rebuilt again. I finished high school, played my senior season, and headed to Colorado State University where I studied biology as a pre-veterinary major—because if I couldn’t chase one dream, I was going to chase another. But I never stopped being an athlete. I joined my sorority, found ways to stay active, and eventually started playing flag football just for fun. On what felt like an ordinary day playing with my sorority sisters—no contact, no tackle, no one even near me—my knee went one way and my body went the other. I heard the pop. I fell to the ground. And this time I didn’t cry from the physical pain. I cried because I could not understand how, for the third time, this was happening to me again.

This injury was the worst of all. I had torn my ACL and LCL, ruptured my meniscus from the root, and fractured my tibia. I spent two months in a wheelchair. My mom moved into my sorority house—a house of sixty girls—just to take care of me. I missed everything. I took my anger and my grief out on the one person who sacrificed the most for me. The mental and emotional weight of that recovery was darker than anything I had experienced before. I questioned everything.

After five years at CSU I was burned out from school and not yet ready for veterinary school, so I entered medical device sales—a world that paid well but never once made me feel the way sports did. Three years into that career I realized I was done living someone else’s version of my life.

Because somewhere along the way, something shifted. I found a gym. I found a coach. And I found exercises I had never done in any of my three rounds of physical therapy. The first was something so simple it almost felt silly—step ups. Just stepping up onto a box, slow and controlled. But within weeks the pain that had lived in my knee for years started to fade. Then came split squats, another movement that looked easy but worked muscles I didn’t even know I had. For the first time, I wasn’t just managing my knee. I was building it.

Within six months I squatted 171 pounds—a number I never in my life thought I would touch, let alone after three ACL surgeries. I did twenty bodyweight squats in a row, and I remember hitting rep ten thinking there was no way I would finish, and then somehow I did all twenty, gasping, shaking, and so proud. I was given a training program built for NFL athletes—and while I certainly wasn’t lifting their numbers, I was doing the exact same workouts, side by side with professional athletes, performing intricate and intense training I never imagined my body could handle. I did sled pushes that left my quads more activated and more powerful than they had ever felt, even before my injuries. I was sprinting. I was jumping. I was lifting heavier than I ever had in my so-called prime, and I was completely pain free for the first time in over a decade.

It was a gradual realization, built workout by workout, week by week, in that gym. But it all came into focus one night after dinner with my boyfriend. We got into a deep conversation about life, about the future, about what I had always been passionate about and what my real dreams were. He pulled it out of me that night—the truth I think I already knew. I wanted to be in sports. I wanted to help athletes the way I had just helped myself. And from that moment on, it only grew stronger.

That is when I knew exactly what I was supposed to do.