Becca Wann, '14

Your first impression of Becca Wann, ’14, probably depends on where you meet her. Face her in a game—or watch her from the stands—and you’ll see a determined and aggressive competitor. A two-sport athlete, the 5’10” senior brings a single-minded intensity to her game on both the soccer field and the basketball court.

“I love competing,” she says. “If there’s a ball in the air or loose on the court, I’m going after it.”

Sit down with her for a conversation, however, and you might find yourself wondering if this is really the same young woman. In person, Wann is politely soft-spoken, talking earnestly of her dedication to her teammates and, even more so, to her church and to her deep faith.

That faith led Wann—who started playing soccer at 6 and basketball at 8—on what would prove to be an unusual path for an aspiring Division I athlete in a youth-sports culture where parents begin speaking openly of college scholarships before their kids are even out of grade school. At first Wann, like many promising young players, found herself caught up in the all-consuming intensity of travel and club teams, with a heavy schedule of practices and weekend games and tournaments. But then in eighth grade, she attended a youth camp with her church, and everything changed.

“My faith is a big part of who I am,” says Wann. At the youth camp, she says, she realized that with her travel-team commitments, “I was keeping myself and my family away from church on Sundays.”

She decided to play only for her school teams, abandoning travel sports for the time being. “I knew that if I laid that down, in due time, God would bring it back to me,” she says.

Plenty of people warned her this decision would be a terrible mistake, that “no one comes and looks at high-school team players anymore,” she says, and indeed, travel- and club-team coaches are known to discourage playing for school teams as an unnecessary, and even unwise, distraction for a serious athlete hoping for college recruitment.

Yet when it came time to search for colleges, Wann had three clear goals: to play Division I, to play both soccer and basketball, and to stay close enough to home to continue attending her church.

If those goals might have seemed naively over-ambitious considering the choice she’d made to put her faith above her sports, her commitment to them never wavered.

“And my parents said, ‘Find what you want and don’t settle.’”

She didn’t. And for four years with the Richmond Spiders, she’s risen to demands of the grueling schedule of a two-sport, Division I athlete. “I love it,” she says. “I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t.”

Still, “Being ‘in season’ from August to March is a long time,” admits Wann, “with the practicing, the travel, the games, getting back at two in the morning and having to be in class at nine and back to practice in the afternoon. There definitely comes a point in January and February where I start to wear down a little, but my coaches have always done a good job recognizing that, and my teammates do a great job of picking me up.”

Despite an impressive list of accomplishments, including a series of A-10 recognitions in both sports and, in soccer, being named an NSCAA Division I All-American and being part of the U.S. Women’s National Team that won a gold medal at the 2012 FIFA U20 World Cup in Japan, what Wann values most about her Richmond experience is those teammates.

“I can honestly say that my teammates here are my family, on both teams,” says Wann. “I am extremely blessed to have 45 teammates I would do anything for and who would do anything for me.”

For Wann, it’s hard to imagine the future beyond graduation, when those teams won’t be central to her life. A psychology major, she’s thinking about trying to play professionally after graduation, with a longer-term goal of working with youth in some capacity.

In the meantime, she says, “I am not the type of person to stress out about stuff a year in advance.” With the same faith that has guided her life so far, says Wann, “I figure doors will open and opportunities will come.”

Photo: Frank Straus, Richmond Athletics