12 ways of looking at Allison Lawrence

1 --> This could start at the beginning, born as she was in the Sierra Nevada, right in the heart of it, at Mammoth Hospital in Mammoth Lakes, Calif. She was only there a year, not long enough to remember, but the Sierras will always be her cultural home, the place to which she can always return to hit reset.

Just last week: A quick trip back for a one-day ascent of 14,500-foot Mount Whitney, an oxymoron of a mission, a climb intended to return her to her roots before facing the challenge of a lifetime in the coming months.

Or it could start at the end. Not literally the end, but where she is at the moment, just hours away from starting her first season as a Division I head volleyball coach. Her team reports on Monday. Practice starts on Tuesday.

Instead, let's pick a point right in the middle, maybe 17 years in, with a story that begins to sketch the first outlines of the portrait of Allison Lawrence. A recruiting trip for the then high school prospect, from her home in Southern California, up the coast, first to Cal, then to the Oregon schools.

In Berkeley, there sits Bears coach Rich Feller, telling Lawrence she is skilled enough to play at the Pac-10 level, but he prefers his outside hitters to be a little taller. He passes. In Eugene, Carl Ferreira repeats the same thing, then goes with a 6-foot-2 player with half the athleticism for his Ducks.

Stoic and calculating by nature, always analyzing, internalizing, Lawrence listens. The coaches add more fuel to a fire that few see. But Nancy Somera recognizes it. She needed it herself to become a four-year starter at USC, an undersized outside hitter helping the Trojans to the national semifinals in 1985.

She brings Lawrence to Oregon State, the perfect weapon for the coach's offense, and Lawrence remembers. She puts 26 kills on Cal as a sophomore, goes 7-1 against Oregon over four years, her tour de force a 21-kill performance in a 3-0 sweep of the Ducks as a junior. How do you like me now?

Even now, sitting at her desk last week in Providence, R.I., preparing to build on last year's 33-1 finish at Johnson and Wales, Somera easily recalls those four seasons together with Lawrence at Oregon State.

"She was so tough under pressure. I never had to worry about what was going to happen to her out on the floor when it came to crunch time. I wanted balls to go to her because I knew in her head that she wasn't freaking out," Somera says.

"The confidence she brought to the team on the floor will serve her well as a coach. If the team starts to unravel a little bit, they'll be able to look to her for the confidence they need, because she isn't going to be rattled by what's going on. It will be one of her strengths as a coach."

Spot Lawrence on the sideline later this season, maybe the first time you see her in the role of head coach after seven years as a Griz assistant, and you might wonder why she looks like she's in a commercial for deodorant. Never let them see you sweat. But that wouldn't even be close to accurate.

As the coach of the opposing team paces up and down, talking constantly and bubbling over with in-match intensity, and Lawrence doing the opposite, you might ask yourself, Why doesn't she coach … harder? Doesn't she want it badly enough? Shouldn't she make it look like she's fighting for her team?

Believe it: it's all there. It's just buried deeper than it is for most. Way down, where competitive fire burns the hottest, so far down that it rarely makes its way to the surface. Assume it's missing, that she (and her team) will choose flight over fight as a stress response, and you've made a grave mistake.

In practice, in matches, in everything she does as a first-year coach, she'll be true to herself, true to her nature, because anything else is acting, and there is no surer, faster path to coaching failure than trying to pretend you're someone else, someone you're not.

And an image of the first-year coach begins to emerge.

2 --> Now it's time to go back to the start, to John and Helen, newly married but not quite ready to take on society's expected roles of adulthood. They move to June Lake Mountain, just north of Mammoth, working just enough so the rest of their days can be filled with skiing.

It's the environment into which their first daughter is born one year later, genes, influenced by their surroundings, coming together to produce someone whose chosen profession will be a sport that keeps her indoors, under buzzing lights, but whose passion never leaves the outdoors, under the sun.

Maggie will soon be arriving as well, so down the mountain the family goes, back to Southern California. First Burbank, then Glendale, then, before she's in the third grade, Alta Loma, a former orange grove, now part of the growing Inland Empire east of Los Angeles, at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains.

More genetic expression emerges: John, a 7,500-point scorer in the decathlon as a track and field athlete at UC Santa Barbara; Helen, a multi-sport athlete at La Verne. Allison becomes a ranked tennis player in her age group, with eyes on nothing else through the age of 12.

Then, an experience that changes everything: She is dropped off at a nearby college for a youth volleyball camp, against her will, kicking and screaming, forced to participate in a sport she views as silly, a gym-class activity, a waste of her time. Five days later, tennis, so much about the individual, is history.

"She loved tennis, but I think the teamwork of volleyball and the camaraderie, it just really hit her," says John. "For the first time she was exposed to a higher level of volleyball and was thrilled by it.

"She loved the athleticism of it, but it was the teamwork of the sport that was really attractive to her. There was a support system built in, with teammates always cheering for each other, and she just loved that."

And the picture of Allison Lawrence becomes a little clearer.

Junior high, then her first club team, then off to Alta Loma High School, a Southern California powerhouse. The first player in school history to become a four-year varsity starter? She went on to be a setter at UCLA. Lawrence becomes the second.

Sophomore year, colleges start to take notice. Michigan, Georgia Tech, Duke, they all reach out, but the Pac-10 is the Pac-10, the best volleyball in the land. It remains the focus. Junior year, more than 300 letters arrive. It's also the year a former assistant coach at USC gets her first head job, at Oregon State.

John and Helen, now both working in education. Allison seems destined to follow the same path, maybe a college professor of English, teaching courses on the writings of David Foster Wallace, who pens in his novel Infinite Jest, "You can be shaped, or you can be broken. There is not much in between."

Enter: Nancy Somera, shaper of young women.

3--> There are no glory days of Oregon State volleyball. There have been moments, but they end up being false starts. No success has ever been sustainable. It's an uphill battle every year, going up against the well-established giants of the sport who view anything less than a national championship a letdown.

In the Conference of Champions, 15 national titles have come in volleyball since 1981.

Somera, the new leader of the Beavers, didn't want to hear it. She'd known nothing but winning, first as a player at USC, later as an assistant in the program under Lisa Love. She was just brash enough to think she was going to build the same thing in Corvallis when she was hired in 1999.

"Before you've been a head coach, you think it's going to be something easy you can do anywhere," she says today, with nearly two decades of perspective to employ when looking back.

Dave Gantt, later a successful coach at Montana State, and Jeff Mozzochi, who would go on to Portland State, were there, struggling, before Somera. In eight years, neither could put together teams that would finish higher than seventh in the Pac-10.

Somera's first two teams continued the same trend: ninth in 1999, a tie for seventh in 2000. During those years, a recruiting trip to Las Vegas led her to Lawrence, another piece of the puzzle she was piecing together, this one so very familiar.

"I was a smaller, ball-control outside hitter, and I got somewhat overlooked in the recruiting process. I felt like that type of player was sometimes undervalued," she says. "I knew the kind of player Allison could develop into. That was my instinct in watching her play."

It was a different world of recruiting then, happening at a slower, more deliberate pace, back before ninth graders became the target of every coach's focus. Or eighth graders and the pressure to make an early commitment and high school or club coaches who became too involved.

Trips to recruit's homes still took place, and final decisions were rarely made before official visits were taken, 48 hours on campus as a high school senior to get a better feel for what a school was all about. Player got to know coach, coach got to know player, and better choices could be made on both sides.

"I didn't have to go through her coaches, so I was actually able to get to know Allison through the recruiting process," says Somera. "You actually got to talk to a recruit and pick their brain a little bit and learn about them.

"As I learned more about her competitive nature and her leadership and the type of person she was, I felt like Allison was somebody I wanted in my gym and wanted on my court, because our team was going to be better if she was."

What Oregon State hadn't done, traditionally, was place fifth in the Pac-10, ahead of Washington and Cal, finish five matches over .500 and make the NCAA tournament, but the Beavers did all that in 2001, Lawrence's freshman season, when OSU was led by a strong-armed outside hitter named Gina Schmidt.

But that success would be fleeting. A loaded team returned in 2002, and the season began with five straight wins before the Pac-10 volleyball gods, endowed as they are by Stanford and USC, looked down, saw what was happening and said, "Not so fast" and put Oregon State back in its place.

"We had a great team. Unfortunately we had a very unlucky season where we had injury after injury after injury. Without our starters, we weren't going to be competitive, not in the Pac-10," says Somera, whose team went from 5-0 to an 8-20 finish.

"The program kind of took a hit. It made the 2001 season look like a fluke instead of the start of something, instead of a program that was building and growing, which I think it was."

Lawrence would lead Oregon State in kills in 2002, as a sophomore, as she also would in 2003 and '04.

On Nov. 26 of her senior season, the Beavers swept the Ducks in Corvallis in straight sets. One night later, in the final match at Oregon State for both Lawrence and Somera, who would soon leave for South Carolina, they went out together with a 3-0 win over Portland.

In each of Lawrence's four seasons at Oregon State, a Pac-10 team would go on to win the national championship, Stanford in 2001 and '04, USC in 2002 and '03.

"The hardest thing about coaching at a school like Oregon State was that you were going up against established programs who had the ability to bring in some of the best players in the country every year," says Somera.

"I thought we could be competitive with every team, but to beat some of them, everything had to line up and we were going to have to catch some breaks. You might be playing and competing well, but you might go three weeks without a win. I told recruits, If you don't like hard, don't come."

North Dakota isn't Stanford, which won last year's national championship, nor is Northern Arizona a UCLA or Northern Colorado a Washington, but it's 1999 all over again, then for Somera, now for Lawrence, both with eyes on competing with the blue bloods of their leagues.

Montana has finished in the bottom half of the Big Sky 14 times the last 20 seasons, all false starts and no success ever being sustainable. It's become a shared belief, with good reason and based on consistent results, throughout the league: nice program but rarely threatening. Sound familiar?

The Big Sky isn't the Pac-10 (or now Pac-12), so Lawrence's challenge isn't as great, but the two coaches' first-year tasks mirror one another. Somera wanted one thing above all else for her program: to consistently be competitive.

And that's been the Grizzlies' most glaring shortcoming, winning eight or fewer matches four of the last five years, with 38 3-0 losses the last three seasons alone. More than number of wins, it's what Lawrence, through her team's level of competitiveness, will be evaluated on in her first season.

Somera doesn't know much about the Montana volleyball program outside of Lawrence and even less about the Big Sky Conference, but she knows the coach. Knows her intimately, even if they have been apart for more than a decade. "Allison is more than ready for the challenge," she says.

4--> Lawrence didn't go to Oregon State wanting to be a coach. But seeing the role that Somera took on in her own life and in those of her teammates, she became intrigued, and a seed was planted.

"I put her on a pedestal," Lawrence said in January when she was hired. "She was a woman I wanted to emulate in a lot of ways, so I started to imagine myself being like her, doing what she did.

"It started out as a thought in the back of my mind and became a career path I wanted to explore."

With her playing career finished after the 2004 season and still the 2005 spring semester away from leaving Oregon State with a degree in philosophy, Lawrence coached that winter and spring a team of 12-year-olds for a club in Corvallis.

And that was that, a career set in motion. Her players adored her. She loved the sport, but, most important, she loved them back even more. She had no idea it could be like that, the role of a coach. The feeling she got. The difference she could make. How could she possibly pursue anything else?

That she would one day became a Division I volleyball coach, then, isn't surprising. But the path she followed to get there, having to ride out the missteps of the coaches under whom she worked the last half decade, wouldn't be advised for anyone hoping to move up the professional ladder.

5--> Nate Michael spent one year on the men's volleyball team at San Diego State, redshirting his lone season as an Aztec before the school cut the program. He remained in San Diego and played two years at Grossmont, a junior college, then spent his final two years on the team at NCAA Division III La Verne.

Armed with a degree in TV communications that he earned in 2002, Michael got a job with Mark Burnett Productions, working in post-production, tape logging and story editing for The Restaurant, Survivor and the first season of The Apprentice.

Done playing and just starting a career, he assumed he was finished with volleyball, but there was a new club in the area, and it was taking off. And did he want to be involved? Presented with a fork in the road, he chose the path less traveled. On his first team he coached Maggie Lawrence.

Maggie's sister, meanwhile, had graduated from Oregon State, had uncovered her interest in coaching and had moved back to Southern California.

"When she got back to town, we knew we wanted to have Allison on staff because we were trying to gather all the good coaches we could find for our club," says Michael. "That's when we met."

A quick aside: It's an odd thing, the Claremont Colleges, especially for those who are used to traditional standalone universities. Sharing one big campus in the Inland Empire are five schools: Pomona College, Scripps College, Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College and Pitzer College.

And they have athletic programs, with the five schools becoming two: the Pomona-Pitzer Sagehens and the Claremont-Mudd-Scripts Staggs and Athenas.

In 2007, while working toward a degree in applied women's studies at Claremont Graduate University, which she would earn in 2008, Lawrence was coaching at Pomona-Pitzer. Pretty much next door, Michael was doing the same thing at the rival school.

One evening the cross-campus rivalry was renewed. As it did twice that season, Michael's team came out on top, and that was the least important thing to come out of the teams' matchups. At least for the future of the two assistant coaches.

"After one match, both coaching staffs went for dinner at the same place," says Michael. "We started hanging out socially after that. The rest is history."

6--> Raised in Clovis, just northeast of Fresno, Michael, too, had long been drawn to the Sierra Nevada. That's why he proposed to Lawrence on a camping trip to Thousand Island Lake and they got married at June Lake.

Here is why Michael went all in: because he recognized that Lawrence, just by his being around her, was making him better than he ever would have been on his own. Yes, it relates to coaching as well and gives a glimpse into the way her teams will function and the reason they'll be successful.

"She was never bossy, like, I'm going to take you in the direction we're going to go. You don't realize it's happening, but you follow her lead and direction when it comes to responsibility and work ethic, but you thought you were in the driver's seat the whole time," he says, as if trying to explain a magic trick.

But it's not magic, it's not a trick, and it's not an act. "It's the kind of thing you know you can have longevity with. You know she's going to see it through."

7--> First, Pomona-Pitzer in 2007. Then west on the 210 to La Verne in 2008, working under the legendary Don Flora, a season that ended 27-3 and with a loss in the Division III national championship match.

By 2009, it was time for a new adventure in a new land: another successful Division III school, Trinity in San Antonio, Texas, working under another coaching legend, Julie Jenkins.

The itinerant life of a coach had begun.

"I knew if we were both going to be coaches, one of us had to take the lead and pursue it at the college ranks, and that was going to be Allison," says Michael, who was hired to run a volleyball club in San Antonio. "She had a lot more momentum and was a lot more prepared for it."

The Tigers made the national quarterfinals, Michael was running his new club, all was right in their world. After years of piecing together different coaching jobs, the couple had found some stability. Both were ready to settle in. It probably wasn't Texas forever, but it was the right place for that time.

Until the life of a coach -- a new job opportunity, another potential move, hearts to search -- sent everything spinning. In the summer of 2010, Montana coach Jerry Wagner reached out to Lawrence about an opening on his staff, less than a year after she and Michael had moved to Texas.

There was a connection. Wagner had been an assistant at Oregon State in the 90s and had recruited Schmidt, the big-swinging outside hitter, to Corvallis. Schmidt was the player Lawrence most looked up to as a freshman for the Beavers.

Wagner was gone from Oregon State before Lawrence arrived, but with Schmidt on his staff at Montana, he wanted to get the gang together in the same program for the first time. It was Division I. There was familiarity. She couldn't see a downside. Lawrence wanted in.

"There was a lot of discussion, because I didn't support it at first," says Michael. "We'd only been in Texas for a year. It was cheap and we were both making money. I thought we should stay there and save and get established before looking again.

"We knew Missoula was the kind of place we both wanted to be. It reminded us of our roots in the Sierras. We loved the idea of being there, but I didn't think it was the right time for it. I thought, this is crazy. But that's what you do when you're trying to move up in the coaching world. You have to take it."

They moved north, bound for Montana, sight unseen.

8--> The late 80s and early 90s were halcyon days for the Montana volleyball program. Under coach Dick Scott, the Grizzlies were annually among the Big Sky's best before breaking through with back-to-back conference championships in 1991 and '92, with another shared title in 1994.

There were NCAA tournament appearances in 1990, '91 and '94, but Montana dropped back to the middle of the pack in 1995, missing the Big Sky tournament. The Grizzlies won a tournament match in 1996. It would be 2013 before that happened again.

It's now been more than two decades of mostly forgettable seasons, with a highlight popping up here and there, and one perplexing question: Why? In a department that sets championships as its default goal each year, the volleyball program has had just four winning seasons since 1994.

If there was a moment when it felt like it might be happening, that the Grizzlies were finally breaking free of the chains of mediocrity, it came on Nov. 26, 2010, in a semifinal match at the Big Sky tournament in Portland at the end of Lawrence's first season on staff.

The night after Thanksgiving, No. 4 Montana faced host and top-seed Portland State, which had rolled to a 14-2 league record. Yet it was the Grizzlies who were dominant in the opening sets, rolling to a pair of 25-18 wins to take a 2-0 lead into the break. The nearly 700 in attendance were in a state of shock.

Montana needed just one more win to advance to face Northern Colorado the next night in the championship match. Just one more. Alas, the Vikings stormed back to win in five sets, and it hasn't been the same since.

A second 6-23 finish in three years cost Wagner his job after the 2014 season. Brian Doyon, who kept Lawrence on staff, coached the Grizzlies to 41 losses in two seasons, more than half via 3-0 sweep. He stepped down in November.

It was a time of helplessness for everyone involved, of difficult questions, of powerlessness, like every option had finally been exhausted. Hope, which had been hanging around, seemed to depart for good. Optimism was nowhere. It was finally settled. Montana was just never going to be competitive again.

"We were very frustrated, very confused, because we didn't know what to do to take that next step," says Mykaela Hammer, recruited by Wagner, coached by Doyon and now set to play for Lawrence.

"There was lots of uncertainty about the future, because we had tried so many different things within our team, and nothing ever changed."

9--> Here is Somera: "I talk to my teams a lot about what I call competitive integrity. If you're in the practice gym and the coach isn't looking at your court, how are you going to take your reps? What kind of standard are you going to hold yourself to?

"There is only one way to do things, and that's the right way. If you hold yourself to that standard every rep, every rally, every set, every match, then you're going to maximize your potential."

It's the same message Lawrence has been preaching since she was hired in January. But commitment is hard, especially when being average is so much easier and when it's what you've become accustomed to and grown comfortable with.

She's faced resistance, as expected. Everyone is on board when a new coach is hired. Not as much when new, more demanding expectations are put in place. Not as much when behaviors, attitudes and efforts are called into question, by someone who used to play the good cop, the assistant coach everyone liked.

But without changes, often painful and uncomfortable, in the day-to-day, the program's overall direction has no chance of pointing toward new, better outcomes, toward brighter days.

There is no reason Montana can't be great again, just like before. But that's been uttered now going on decades.

10--> Somera again: "Potential is one of those things where nobody really knows how good you can be. To find out, you have to really push yourself and really go for it. That's one of the hardest things about coaching women. There is a fear of failure that has to be overcome a lot of the time.

"Many don't really want to lay it on the line all the time, because what if it's not good enough? It's not always easy to pull that out of your players, and sometimes your players don't like you in the process, because it's uncomfortable.

"But you need to be comfortable being uncomfortable, because that's what your opponent is trying to do. If I can make you a little uncomfortable in the practice gym, that's a good thing. Then when an opponent does it, you can deal with it. You're going to be a great competitor and not crumble.

"I think that's what athletes who play for me learn and that they can translate to real life, that it's not always going to be easy. But you never give up. You just keep pushing, you keep grinding, you keep reaching deeper and find whatever it takes. It's how you reach your potential and have no regrets."

Last fall Somera's team at Johnson and Wales won its first 33 matches of the season. The Wildcats lost just two sets in those matches.

The secrets are hidden in plain sight for all to see, but they are capable of being unlocked by only a few. Somera holds the key, as did Flora and Jenkins. If it was passed down to Lawrence, as everyone hopes, the long-lost treasures of Griz volleyball will soon be rediscovered.

11-> If you're wondering what Montana might look like, might perform like, under Lawrence, at least down the road, probably years from now, a match at the West Auxiliary Gym in 2013 is instructive.

Late that season Montana built a 2-1 lead on Idaho State, but the Bengals fought back to take the fourth set. In the fifth, the Grizzlies raced out to a 9-4 advantage.

Idaho State coach Chad Teichert took a timeout and calmly talked to his team. His tone had no The sky is falling! urgency. He didn't raise his voice in an effort to spark his team. He didn't need to. He didn't berate them, he didn't question their heart. He talked to them.

With the gym rocking, with Montana on the verge of knocking off the team that would go on to win that month's Big Sky tournament, with Brooke Bray bouncing the ball, ready to serve for the Grizzlies, Teichert sent his players back to the court with a simple message: "You can do it."

He exhibited no stress, no concern that the match was getting away from his team, no tension, just full belief that his team had another opponent right where it wanted it. And his team's attitude and performance reflected it.

Remember what Somera said about Lawrence, about never being rattled and giving her team the confidence it would need from the sideline? In that match in 2013, it was on the other bench. It's no wonder Lawrence has Teichert sharing space on the same pedestal she originally built for Somera.

After Teichert's timeout, the Bengals scored 10 of the next 11 points to hush the crowd and stick a dagger in Montana's hopes of an upset.

If Somera is Lawrence's inspiration, Teichert, even though he and Lawrence have never sat down and talked coaching, would be her Yoda, a term quite possibly derived from the Hebrew word yodea, meaning "one who knows."

Teichert stepped down from his position at Idaho State two years ago, leaving ISU as the winningest coach in program history. He returned to Wyoming to teach and coach at the high school level, a role he'd held before taking over the Bengals in 2008.

His team at Star Valley High in Afton won the state championship last fall. It was Teichert's 11th state title.

Reached last week, he doesn't remember the match in 2013 in Missoula -- And why should he? It's not like his team did anything out of the ordinary. -- but he offers this as an explanation for why it might have played out like it did.

"It just seems to go better in volleyball if the coach is calm and collected. There are other coaches who aren't that way, and some of them do well, but I think your team is better off if you're calm and paying attention so you can be helpful," he says.

"One of the things I tried to do is make it about the kids and not about me. When you're mindful of the kids and what's going on, you're more aware of their capabilities." One who knows.

When Teichert took over at Idaho State in 2008, it was a program not unlike Montana's today. The Bengals were coming off a 6-23 season that cost the previous coach his job.

He doesn't sugarcoat it. It was a long process. The Bengals lost their first seven matches under Teichert and only made a modest improvement that first season, upping their wins from six to 10.

Instead, it was behind the scenes where the real changes were occurring. In recruiting, in accountability, in practice habits. By 2013 his team was the Big Sky tournament champion. The following year, the regular-season champion. "It takes a while to turn things around. It doesn't happen overnight," he says.

Continuing on, he keeps it simple. Too simple. It's encouraging in that it feels like anyone could do it. It's also maddening that he doesn't share more insight, because what he does is not easily replicated.

He is the ice to Somera's fire, but both approaches work. Both coaches produce winning teams that believe they can run through brick walls.

"I just tried to recruit good athletes who were good kids and tried to help them be the best they could be," Teichert says. "We got good kids who wanted to be good volleyball players. They wanted to work hard and compete and get along with each other."

12--> For more than a decade, since that team of 12s in Corvallis, coaching had been Plan A for Allison Lawrence. For the longest time, that's all she needed. A year ago she was forced to ready a Plan B for the first time.

Doyon kept Lawrence on staff when he arrived early in 2015, but entering the 2016 season, she had made up her mind. She was done. She was leaving volleyball.

Everything she knew about coaching, what she'd learned from Somera, what she believed coaches like Teichert were doing, it wasn't being done that way at Montana. And she couldn't be a part of it any longer. What she was seeing, and mostly powerless to change, was driving her away from volleyball.

A new job was lined up, ready for her to start at season's end. It was outside of college athletics, but it would keep her family in Missoula, where it wanted to be.

"The choice to leave volleyball, that was the sacrifice choice," says Michael, who owns and runs the Montana Volleyball Academy. He and Lawrence have two young sons. "We made the choice to stay here, because we love this place. This is where we want to raise our family."

All that knowledge, all that experience gained over the years, all that ability, all the gifts, all that potential, never to be given an opportunity to shine. It would have been a shame, a calamity to lose a gifted coach to the scrap heap of broken dreams.

It wasn't the traditional path, working as an assistant for seven seasons under two head coaches who were asked to clear out their office before they wanted to, but Lawrence was the right person for the job when she was announced as Doyon's replacement in January.

She aced every element of her interview when she pursued the job after Wagner was let go, a key to getting the position this time around. The depth of her answers and the understanding she displayed would have given Somera goose bumps and had Teichert nodding his head. One who knows.

The work has only just begun. And she knows it, but she's in it for the long haul. Of course, Lawrence knows what it means to persevere. And if anyone knows something about climbing to new heights, it's a child of the Sierras.

University of Montana Athletics

Players Mentioned

Mykaela Hammer

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