Mary Mobley '23 Recruiting Profile

In the past, I constantly worried about being cut from my soccer team. I was barely scraping through tryouts each year, and I felt my play was mediocre at best. This all changed when the COVID-19 lockdown started. After going without soccer practices or games for months, I realized I loved playing soccer and couldn’t imagine life without it. I started practicing on my own daily. I would take the ball outside and shoot at my garage until the neighbors (all professors) asked me to stop because they were trying to teach their online classes and the ricochets made too much noise. After practices started again, I still wanted to work harder and get better, so I started attending extra practices with my coach's other teams in older age brackets (two and four years older). I started improving. Through constant hard work over the past year and a half, I brought myself from being an average player for a 2006 Tier 2 club team to being a regular player for a 2003/2004 Discovery team.

In the present, I am continuing to work hard to improve. I practice at least 12 hours a week with several different teams, including a 2006 Tier 1 team, 2003/2004 Discovery team, and the Irvine Valley College women's soccer team. On days I don't have practice, I can usually be found at the field on my own or playing pick-up soccer with people in my neighborhood.  I have gained a reputation for hard work among my high school teachers, college professors, and soccer coaches, who have all singled me out as an example for others.

I have a 4.84 high school GPA, a feat I have achieved by taking 3 college classes per semester (and two each summer) along with my high school course load, all in order to reach my goal of graduating high school in 3 years with an associate's degree. I took the SAT in seventh grade just to get into a special program called Duke TIP. After studying hard for it, which involved teaching myself math that I had never learned before, I scored 1390, a score in the 94th percentile for all students. Next year, I plan to take the SAT again and am confident I will score even higher, as I have now taken and excelled in both college English and college algebra.

These are just a few examples of my mindset: if I want to achieve something, I work to earn it. I bring this same attitude to soccer. I've loved soccer ever since I was three and I saw people playing through the car window as I drove by. My love for the game drives my desire to play college soccer, and I'm willing to do what it takes to get there.