After the Crossroads

Two years ago, a sophomore on the Carroll track team made the trip to compete at the NAIA Track and Field National Championship in Gulf Shores, Ala. For her, it was the culmination of a season that would prove to be a crossroads in her life and the first step down a path to a future that she only dreamed she could achieve.

Bethany Lacock grew up on a ranch on the Montana Hi-Line just outside of the tiny town of Hinsdale, the intersection of Highway 2 and State Route 537, on the banks of the Milk River. There were 25 people in her high school and she graduated with five other students in her class.

For many kids, the environment might be frustrating or stifling, but for Lacock, it was perfect. She loves the sense of community in her hometown and most of all, her shyness didn't doom her to a lonely existence.

"Our school is so small that it is almost like a family and people learned to read her signals," said LaMae Lacock, Bethany's mother. "It was like going to school with a bunch of cousins because there are just so few of them. There are times when Bethany could be shy, but there are times when she was forced to participate and interact with her classmates. In sports, everyone has to play. You have to be nice to everyone or you aren't going to have enough kids to fill a team."

Bethany thrived in her small town and also thrived in athletics. She was a great basketball player for a team that played in a state championship game her senior season, but she was also a great track and field athlete.

Track and field at Hinsdale is a difficult sport to participate in. There are no high jump or pole vault pits, no paved surface in town, with exception of the highways. The track is an unmaintained dirt oval that remains under snow and ice most of the season. When the snow finally relinquishes its grasp on the track, weeds immediately sprout to take its place.

Lacock and the rest of the Hinsdale track team spent much of their time in the high school gym where they could line up just two hurdles in a row for practice. Occasionally, the athletes would make the trek to Glasgow, just east on Highway 2, where they would practice on the rubberized track.

Athletics were a huge part of her adolescence, but being an athlete in college was out of the question.

"Sports weren't really in the picture at all for me at college," Bethany said. "My parents weren't really excited about me doing sports. I chose Carroll because I wanted to become a pharmacist and Carroll really had things lined up to do pre-pharmacy in two years and be ready to go, where other places it would have taken three or four years."

"We knew that she had chosen a difficult major and that school was going to be a long haul," LaMae said. "It was fairly important to us to that she got through in two years, which would be hard enough without athletics."

As her senior year began to wind down, the itch to participate in the sports that were such a huge part of her upbringing didn't go away. Since she was more-or-less committed to Carroll anyway, she thought it would be worth a shot. She contacted the track and field team, a scholarship offer followed as a multi-event athlete.

Her parents found comfort in her plan to head to Carroll for two years before transferring to a pharmacy school, but still, they weren't sold on the idea of her being a college athlete.

"My plan was just to go two years and head out," Bethany said. "My parents were still hesitant. They told me if I didn't want to do track, we would figure something out and not to worry about the scholarship money."

Even though Carroll is a small school of just 1,400 students, it was a big adjustment for someone from Hinsdale. Lunchtime was one of the most stressful times of the day for the shy kid from the Hi-Line.

"When I first came to Carroll, I couldn't go to lunch at noon because, if I went at noon, everyone was there. I couldn't handle it," Lacock said. "With Carroll just being 1,400 kids, I don't know how I could have survived at a school with 10,000 or 15,000."

During her freshman year, track wasn't what she hoped it would be, either. The demands of being a college athlete were hard and her shyness didn't help her develop bonds with her teammates. Entering her sophomore season, she hoped to just get through one final year and head to pharmacy school.

She began working out with a crew led by senior Tori Nickol and started to develop a bond with the players around her. She also started to show improvement on the track.

"I wanted to just get through that sophomore year and go to pharmacy school," Lacock said. "I told myself, 'I am only here for the money.' It was so hard getting through that second fall conditioning, but I started working out with a great group of athletes and coming out of my shell and making friends. I also had some big gains in my marks and times."

While she was coming into her own on the track, Bethany started second-guessing her career choices. She didn't enjoy her pharmacy classes as much as she thought she would, more importantly, she was opening up in the environment of the track team.

"When I started building relationships, I became less shy and more a part of the team," Lacock said. "I felt that I was really growing as a person here and as a member of the track team. I felt like if I left, I would stop growing and go back into my shell and I wanted to continue that positive growth."

The improvement on the track was also a big factor. She was encouraged by her development in competition. Her original goal of qualifying for the national championship transformed when she made the trip.

"I thought that if I qualified, it would be enough," Lacock said. "It would mean that I actually did something with my track career but, I knew that I could do more and it really motivated me to stay here. I talked to coach (Harry Clark) earlier in the season about staying, but after I went and competed and saw the environment, I knew that was wanted to do."

"That year had a huge impact on her," Clark said. "A lot of our athletes change a lot during their career and it is really fun to see, but with Bethany, the change was profound, more than the average athlete and it all started with that sophomore year."

She worked with her academic advisor and with other professors to change her major to pre-physical therapy, a career that she was excited about, but had convinced herself that was too competitive to even attempt. Her budding confidence allowed the dream to reenter her mind.

Her parents were concerned about the transition, but the support that Bethany received from people around Carroll, both on the track team and academically, assured them that she was being taken care of.

"An amazing part of Carroll is that people can explore options and dream big, then dream bigger," LaMae said. "She got great support from her advisor after she changed her mind. It was very important to us that she finished in four years and everyone at Carroll made sure that happened."

After making the trip to nationals her sophomore season, she now hoped to earn All-American honors.

During her junior year, she was poised to make the podium at nationals before the javelin, the second to last event, but she failed to earn a mark and it eliminated her chances to finish in the top-eight.

She began her senior year with high expectations and entered the NAIA Indoor National Championship ranked fifth in the pentathlon. Despite putting up her personal best score of 3,391, she finished eighth overall, her first time on the podium, but she didn't feel like she gave it everything she had.

"It was actually kind of frustrating," Lacock said. "I had a really solid day, but I ended eighth. When I looked back at it, I am happy that I was on the podium, but at the time, I felt that I should have been higher."

She entered outdoor nationals again ranked fifth in the NAIA. She had two goals in mind: get on the podium and break the school record.

She started off with the hurdles and finished with a time of 15.69 seconds for eighth place overall, more than a tenth of a second off her best, however. In the second event, the high jump, she finished sixth overall with a jump of 5 feet, 0.25 inches. The jump was three inches below her personal best, but still, she was in the top eight.

She kept improving with the shot put where she finished fifth and closed out the day with the best 200-meter dash time of her career at 26.17 seconds. She sat seventh after the first day of competition. Three more events were left on the docket, including the dreaded javelin, her worst event and the one that caused her to miss the podium in 2017.

She started day two with her highest finish a fourth-place mark in the long jump where she went 17 feet, 0.75 inches.

Next up, javelin.

She struggled with shoulder problems all season, and the anxiety was high but ultimately unfounded. The first throw hit tip down and recorded a mark. She went on to take 10th in that event with a throw of 95 feet, 11 inches, just an inch off her personal record.

"As soon as she stuck that, I knew she would be an All-American," Clark said. "The 800-meter run was going to determine her final standing, but I knew that after her work and last year's disappointment, she was going to end her career the way she wanted to finish."

She cruised to a sixth-place finish in the 800 with a personal-best time of 2 minutes, 22.94 seconds to close out a fifth-place overall finish She also became the first Carroll woman to surpass 4,600 points in the heptathlon, finishing with a new school record of 4,602.

"It feels amazing, it feels really great to feel like all of my hard work and sacrifice paid off," Lacock said. "When I came in, there were two other freshmen multi-athletes and I felt like we didn't know what we were doing. It feels so good to know that it was worth those first few years where I felt like I didn't belong."

More than accomplishing her goal on the track, Lacock has become a leader.

"Her leadership became as important for our team as anything she did on the track," Clark said. "She has always had the work ethic, she got that from her parents and her upbringing on a ranch on the Hi-Line, but she showed the younger multi-event athletes how to translate that work ethic into improvement."

"I feel like I have come into my own," Lacock said. "In high school, I was a leader, but those were all kids that I knew my entire life. To come to college and make friends on a big team and to have a leadership role has meant a lot to me. I wasn't very good as a freshman and I felt like a fraud. To end up as a role model as a senior feels really good."

She now steps away from her athletic career for good, her eligibility exhausted. She isn't leaving early, instead is leaving after a career where she became the greatest multi-event athlete in Carroll history. For Lacock, she is satisfied and now looks forward to her next chapter.

"I am sad that I am not going work with my teammates that are so dedicated and work so hard, but at the same time, I am happy with what I accomplished," she said. "I left it all out there and I am not sad that I don't get to come to come back tomorrow and do it. I will get to do more cool things in the future. I might weigh a couple more pounds when I do it and that is OK, too."