Friday Features: VSU’s Margaret Stauffer finds strength in team, family
By Mike Perrin
Margaret Stauffer’s collegiate soccer career is over. The
Valdosta State University midfielder from Colorado Springs was a redshirt junior on the field, but she’s hanging up her cleats and moving on. Stauffer is one of 10 Blazers from the original signing class who lifted the young program to the pinnacle of Gulf South Conference soccer, winning the championship by topping perennial power West Florida in the semifinals and top-seeded North Alabama in the Gulf South Conference tournament title game. The Blazers closed out their 2014 season with a 1-0 loss to eighth-ranked Rollins in the South Regional Tournament to finish 12-7-2, short of that dream of a national title, but memories of wins and losses won’t be what Stauffer carries with her beyond college.
“I think the fact that we act as a family really makes us special,” she said. “We work hard for each other and take care of one another. We encourage and forgive each other. We strive to bring out the best of our teammates, both on and off the field. We have never given up, not on each other and not on the team.”
Stauffer found out what encouragement from team and family means in difficult times. On May 5, 2013, while Margaret was in Valdosta at a teammate’s apartment, her father, Ken, collapsed and died at home. He was an athlete, a top wrestler during his days at the Air Force Academy, who would come home from workouts, toss his t-shirt to his wife, “flex his muscles … kiss his biceps, saying it would take the strength of 10 men to bring him down,” Margaret remembered. His death knocked Stauffer for a loop, but she said she never considered leaving school or her team.
“Thinking back, I know that would not have been what my dad would have wanted for me,” she said. “He would have wanted me to stick with it, even though I was experiencing something difficult. I have a letter written from my dad that he wrote when I was in the second grade. I was competing in the Junior Olympics at the time. Some of his words read, ‘Be tough and run through the little aches and pains that pop up during the race (you know, people who don’t run very fast don’t get those).’ Though at the time his words were preparing me for a race, later they would coach me through many challenges. But also, I wanted to stay for myself. I don’t want a challenge to hold me back from achieving my goals.”
With support from her teammates and her coach at the time, Melissa Heinz, Stauffer took the field for the first game of the following season at home against Florida Southern. In front of what was then the second-largest crowd to watch the Blazers play at home, Stauffer got the game-winning goal in the 1-0 victory.
“Before the game, Coach Heinz asked me to step out of the locker room with her for a moment. She took me to our bleachers where a plaque was made stating, ‘In loving memory of Ken Stauffer’ followed by the reference to my dad’s favorite Scripture – I Corinthians 9:24-27. I was glad to know he had a seat in the stands,” she said. “On the soccer field, I can still hear him clearly in my mind, all the one-liner encouragements he preached to me my whole life. I chose to play for the potential my dad saw in me. Scoring is always exciting, but this goal was something special for me. Maybe it felt like a little hope, that in the end everything would be all right.”
After the emotional win, Margaret said she “found my mom immediately and we both cried. I feel like we cried tears of both joy and sorrow.”
Now that her career is over and the first Blazers soccer team is wrapping up its time at Valdosta, Stauffer said it’s difficult to say how she wants to be remembered. “I am not sure I want to be remembered as the player who lost her dad,” she said. “It would be sad if that was my only distinguisher from my peers. I think I would like to be remembered as an example of never giving up.”
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