Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
by Tom Archdeacon
Last year at this time Brooklyne Mason was in the midst of quite a memorable semester at Wright State.
The Raiders senior soccer player – and team captain – from Middletown High School had taken a medical redshirt year, but still showed up for practice every day and went to games at home and on the road so she could help her teammates by doing manager’s duties.
She also took a full load of courses — 18 credit hours — and finished with a perfect 4.0 grade point average.
Oh, and one more thing:
She gave birth to a 7-pound, 4-ounce son on Nov. 29 that she and boyfriend Trevor Swaney – a former All-Horizon League second-team pitcher for the Raiders – named Greyson.
“At first it sounded a little weird to say it,” Brooklyne admitted. “I was a soccer player. I was a student. … And now I was a mom.”
But that, as they say, was easier said, than done.
During this past spring semester — with Greyson just a few months old — she worked an internship as a WSU strength and conditioning assistant at the Setzer Pavilion.
Now living in Miamisburg with her boyfriend and son, she had to be at work at 5:30 a.m., often after she’d been up much of the night with Greyson.
She carried a 15-hour class load, practiced and lifted weights with the soccer team and ended the term by graduating with a Sports Science degree and a 3.76 GPA.
This fall term, as a Business Administration grad student, she’s toned her body, regained her wind — “She’s in better shape now than before she had the baby,” said Trevor — and is back playing soccer for the resurgent Raiders, who had a rough non-conference schedule, but have emerged as one of the best teams in the Horizon League.
For Brooklyne, her soccer career — which began in Middletown’s youth program, advanced to the Ohio Galaxies club team and saw her become one of the best soccer players in Middies’ history – is now winding down. The Raiders have one final home game next Friday against Detroit Mercy and the Horizon League Tournament starts three days later.
After that it’s settling into her role as a mother and beginning her career, possibly with a fellowship at a local health network.
All this is a far cry from that spring day in 2017 when she listened to Trevor’s urging and begrudgingly took a pregnancy test.
“I had had morning sickness a couple of days in a row, but I thought I was just sick,” she said. “I had no clue I was pregnant, but Trevor kept pushing me to get the test and finally I did, just to shut him up.
“I went into the bathroom, took it and just went numb. I laid the test on the counter, walked into the bedroom where he was and said, ‘Just go in there.’
“He did and when he came back, we were both silent and just hugged. We were in shock. It didn’t seem real.
“Weird as this sounds, the first thing that crossed my mind was soccer. ‘What was I going to do?’ I didn’t know if I even wanted to go through with it. I didn’t know if I was ready for any of this.”
She said she first went to see the team’s athletic trainer at the time:
“I told her I’d taken two pregnancy tests and thought I was pregnant and didn’t know what to do. I was crying. My boyfriend was crying. She gave me some information and set me up with an appointment at a women’s clinic in Huber Heights. They talked to me about all my options, gave me an ultra sound and that’s when it all changed.
“I saw the baby’s heartbeat on the screen and my mind changed. The entire time Trevor had said we’re going to raise this baby and now I agreed: ‘That’s my baby and I’m keeping it for sure.’”
Next came the tasks of telling their parents. Trevor’s live in Wheaton, Illinois and he waited to do it face to face when they came for the baseball team’s Senior Night.
Brooklyne’s folks – Dennis has worked 30 years at AK Steel and is a Middletown Christian football coach, Heather is a home health care nurse – live in Middletown.
“One of the offices I work at is near Wright State so she came to see me on my lunch hour,” Heather remembered. “I figured she was coming because she needed money, or food, but then she told me.”
Heather said she figured her daughter broke the news to at her work because her reaction might be more constrained around her coworkers.
“I was upset,” Heather said. “It’s not that I wouldn’t love my grandchild, but I just knew it was going to be harder for Brooklyne now.
“As a parent you always want it to be better for your kids. She was getting a good education and I just wanted her to mature more, to get a good job, buy a house, have a family. But the order of things wasn’t right now.
“Kids can make it a lot tougher on themselves.”
Brooklyne said she then told her dad:
“I’ll never forget it. I was sitting on the couch. Trevor was there with me. Dad was in a chair and I just said, ‘I’m pregnant.’
“He just said, ‘Are you saying you’re having a baby?’
“I said, ‘Yes,’ and then it was this awkward silence in the living room for about an hour. My dad was just looking out the window.
“He told my grandma the next day he was emotional. He said he thought everything would change and he’d never see me play soccer again.”
Initially, she said she worried about the reaction of her WSU coach, Pat Ferguson, who also coached her club team:
“He can be hard to read. Sometimes he’s stern, but we’ve also known each other a long time. I was nervous to tell him. I had just been elected the team captain and I felt like I let people down.
“I told him I’d heard the baby’s heartbeat and the first thing he said was, ‘How’d that make you feel? How cool was that?’
“I was like, ‘Yeah, it was awesome.’
“And he said, ‘We still want you to be a part of the team. We can talk later about how much you want to be involved, but you’re part of us.’ He was great. He was really understanding.”
Her teammates were, too, when she gathered them in the dressing room and, in an emotional session for many, told them what was happening.
- “Everybody at Wright State has been great to me,” she said. “When some of the administrators see me, they ask about Greyson. People really care. It’s made me realize more and more, I ended up at the right school.”
- Read more in the Dayton Daily News
