THE BUCCANEER | CAMPUS FEATURES
VARSITY SOCCER PLAYER SHIRZAD:
‘COLLEGIATE ATHLETICS WAS ALWAYS THE DREAM’ Emma Shirzad and I first intersected more than three years ago. She and her classmate, Madeline Hart, were playing on the boys’ middle school football team and I was thrilled to profile both pioneering young women for our School’s magazine, The Buccaneer. I knew then that it wouldn’t be my last time writing — and bragging — about Shirzad. Emma Shirzad’s first memories are framed by soccer. The youngest of four siblings, she remembers afternoons spent kicking around a ball on the sidelines of their games. Shirzad’s first official foray into the sport was in third grade when her mom signed her up for travel soccer. “Collegiate athletics was always the dream. For these travel teams, playing collegiate athletics was the expectation,” Shirzad said. That dream will become reality for Shirzad in the fall when she steps two cleated feet onto the turf at Carnegie Mellon University as a student-athlete.
32
