Between chasing her dreams on the field and dealing with her mother's cancer diagnosis, Victoria Pickett was left with work to do academically before she could follow through on her decision to come to Wisconsin. Delayed but not deterred, Pickett found a support structure at UW that was prepared to provide the help she needed to get back on track in the classroom. |  From Varsity Magazine
BY ANDY BAGGOT
UWBadgers.com Insider
Victoria Pickett was one of the top recruits in North America in the fall of 2012 when she received an impassioned note from Wisconsin women's soccer coach Paula Wilkins.
"A nice, lengthy email regarding myself and why I'd be a good fit there," Pickett said.
An athletic, instinctive midfielder from Barrie, Ontario, Pickett had turned heads when she debuted in the Canadian youth program at age 15, playing on the under-17 squad that won a silver medal in the CONCACAF (Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football) championship.
Pickett subsequently was chosen to play for Team Canada in two FIFA World Cups.
It was during multiple tournaments in the U.S. with her club team, Glen Shields, that Pickett caught the eye of college recruiters. She was a sophomore in high school when her coach "told me to get serious about choosing a school."
Colleges across the U.S. reached out to Pickett, but she wanted to stay close to home for very personal reasons. Her mother, Vanda, had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, so Pickett focused mainly on Big Ten Conference programs, narrowing her list of options to Illinois, Michigan, Ohio State, Purdue and UW.
At one point, Pickett was tempted to bypass Wisconsin. It was supposed to be her last campus visit and she told her father, Vincent, that she was tired of the process and was thinking about calling it off.
"I'd missed a lot of high school already," she said, referring to her campus visits and competition schedule with her club team.
Fatherly advice won the day. Pickett visited Madison and was immediately smitten.
"Thank God I did come," she said. "As soon as I came here I fell in love with it."
Pickett returned the favor by starting all 16 matches she played for the Badgers, accounting for two goals, four assists and eight points while being named Big Ten Freshman of the Year.
But the transition had its challenges.
Pickett enrolled at UW seven months later than originally planned because some holes had to be filled in her academic transcript. The voids could be traced to her mother's illness as well as time spent playing for Team Canada.
"Without their persistence I wouldn't be here. They knew that I belonged here and they believed in me."
"That's why I came late," said Pickett, who planned to enroll in January of 2015 but signed her National Letter of Intent last August. "I didn't excel well in school because of national team things. I missed like 60 percent of a semester in grade 10 and my grades suffered from that unfortunately."
Wilkins and her assistants, Tim Rosenfeld and Kristen Weiss, worked with the UW Admissions Office to help Pickett find a way to fulfill the needed class requirements for enrollment.
Pickett said she took multiple courses, including math, and received satisfactory grades across the board. But she said the NCAA Clearinghouse didn't get her high school transcripts until last summer, a delay that prompted her to visit her guidance counselor's home to get the matter sorted out.
It was a nerve wracking time for Pickett, one of four children whose father works as a firefighter.
"I was really scared," she said of the idea that her college scholarship was in jeopardy. "Depressed, too."
"Thank God for Paula, Tim and Kristen. Without their persistence I wouldn't be here. They knew that I belonged here and they believed in me."
Pickett said she worked closely with LeAnn Bird, one of four full-time learning specialists for UW Athletics who works out of the Office of Academic Services.
Pickett said she got the impression during her campus visits that UW officials were especially focused on academic readiness.
"It's one of the main reasons why I came here," she said, adding that the coaching and academic staffs went above and beyond to make sure her case was addressed thoughtfully and properly.
"It was very impressive, I thought. The other schools, I met with some of the academic advisors, but it didn't seem like a big concern for them. Here it's very important to them."
Pickett and her family rallied around her mother, Vanda, after a breast cancer diagnosis.
The announcement that Pickett signed her National Letter of Intent was dated Aug. 15 -- three days after her 19th birthday -- but she didn't arrive on campus for another week. She and her father made the 11-hour drive from Barrie -- located 70 miles north of Toronto -- while the Badgers were in California preparing to play Pepperdine and UCLA.
There was some thought to having Pickett join her teammates on the West Coast so the bonding process could begin, but Justin Doherty, the UW senior associate athletic director who oversees women's soccer, felt it would be best to let Pickett settle into her dorm room and get her bearings.
Pickett was used to being away from her family thanks to her time with Glen Shields and Team Canada, so homesickness wasn't an issue. Daily phone calls and Skype sessions helped with that.
Turns out getting acclimated to new teammates and coaches wasn't a problem, either.
"The girls have definitely made this experience the best of my life," Pickett said. "From the beginning I was pretty comfortable. The girls welcomed me with open arms and were very supportive. And the coaches are fabulous."
The primary challenge for Pickett was getting into an academic routine.
"The hardest transition was with school, with time management and all of that," she said.
"At first it was very difficult to adjust, I found, because I was missing like three days (of classes) a week sometimes because we'd go to away games, so it was very difficult."
Pickett said her coaches and teammates were caring and proactive in seeing to it that she stayed on top of her school work. Study sessions on the road became routine.
"The constant checkups helped a lot," she said.
Pickett said she also got a wide range of help from faculty members, citing her history and anthropology instructors as being especially adaptable.
"Professors are very understanding of it all," she said. "They said, 'We're here to support you.'"
Pickett said she sensed her coaches were wary of her academic and athletic workload, especially at the beginning of the fall semester when four of her first six matches were on the road. That included trips to Kentucky, Penn State and Ohio State.
"They were nervous at first because, like, the struggles I had to get in, they were skeptical," Pickett said.
Yet not only did Pickett finish her first semester with a 2.6 grade-point average, she cultivated enough trust with her coaches and academic advisors to spend two weeks in early December playing for Team Canada in the CONCACAF Under-20 Championship in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.
"The other schools, I met with some of the academic advisors, but it didn't seem like a big concern for them. Here it's very important to them."
"Right now it's going well," Pickett said of her second semester at UW. "It's going better."
An upcoming academic step for Pickett is identifying a major. She said she has some ideas, mentioning the School of Human Ecology, but isn't sure which way she'll go.
"I'm still searching as to what I really love," she said, adding her goal for the spring semester is to "hopefully set a path and go down it."
Pickett began playing soccer at age 4 in part because her brothers, Marcus and Dylan, were involved in the sport.
Pickett said her mother's battle with cancer offered many inspiring lessons.
"She taught me about perseverance and always having a positive outlook," Pickett said. "Her positivity definitely helped me."
Those insights came in handy over the holidays when Pickett's father found a lump on a testicle, but it turned out to be benign.
"Scary," Pickett said.
All in all, Pickett is in the midst of an enlightening, eventful and satisfying first year as a UW student-athlete.
"I felt OK from the beginning," she said, "but I feel much better now because I've been here longer."
