On November 2, a nineteen-year-old freshman on the women’s basketball team from Mount St. Joseph University scored the first official points of the 2014/2015 college basketball season. Normally the world would take little notice of a Division III college basketball game, let alone a Division III women’s basketball game.
But this was different. The NCAA moved the game up by two weeks because that freshman, Lauren Hill, has a rare and incurable form of brain cancer that doctors say will most certainly kill her before the end of the year. In a recent interview, Lauren said when her doctor told her last year that she had, at most, two years to live, she was breathless “for a couple minutes.”
A couple of minutes? News like that would knock me out for a good long time, I think. But this young teen asked only if she could continue playing basketball. And continue she did for the rest of her senior year in high school, through radiation treatments, experimental chemotherapy, and worsening symptoms.
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But Lauren had loftier goals. She was determined to play in at least one college game.
To date, Lauren has received the Pat Summitt Most Courageous Award from former Tennessee head coach Pat Summitt—a woman who also understands something about facing adversity, having been forced to end her own career to fight a battle with Alzheimer’s. Lauren’s picture is on a special-edition Wheaties box, and she’s received countless messages from ordinary people and athletes like basketball superstars Elena Delle Donne and LeBron James.
But Lauren isn’t taking this journey for the accolades. She’s taking it because, when she received her diagnosis in 2013, a doctor told her that pediatric brain cancer “needed a face.” Lauren has become that face, through the Cure Starts Now Foundation and the Layup 4 Lauren Challenge.
Lauren knows that she cannot avoid death forever. But it is clear that this inspiring young woman will not go gentle into that good night.
What is the toughest challenge you’ve ever faced?
