Glacier alum Avery 2019 GoGriz.com Person of the Year

Teigan Avery, a senior on the Montana women’s golf team, isn’t the 2019 GoGriz.com Person of the Year because she gave the eulogy last month at the funeral for her 50-year-old father, not long after the man who made a career of showing compassion for others wasn’t able to find enough to save himself.

It’s not because she received a cancer diagnosis 17 months ago, thyroid to be specific, then underwent surgery a few months later to clear her of every last vestige of it, while not missing an assignment, an obligation, a practice in the other areas of her life.

It’s not because she overcame an eating disorder as a college student or set up a blood drive at the Davidson Honors College after she was told she would have to put a one-year hold on giving to others the very essence of herself after the cancerous growth was removed.

It’s not because she has continued on as a Division I golfer through it all, without missing a tournament, or kept adding to her growing list of community-service projects, heavy on volunteer, a four-year brought-to-life accounting of the values she learned at St. Matthew’s School in Kalispell.

It’s not because she forges ahead in the field of economics, one of the two majors she’ll graduate with in May, a woman blazing a path in what is still a male-dominated area of study, or because she has two A-minuses on her record. For her academic career. At both Montana and Glacier High. Everything else: A.

There are players on the Griz golf team with a better scoring average than Avery, Montana student-athletes who have known nothing but A’s and possess their own lengthy record of giving back to the community that supports them so well.

This year it goes to a grinder, someone who has endured more suffering in the last two years than most people would want to face over a decade or two, if at all. This year’s winner is one Nietzsche would applaud.

Because Teigan Avery hasn’t just gotten by. She hasn’t just absorbed the blows and stumbled back to her feet, a shell of what she had been and could be. She’s taken the suffering and become better because of it. Stronger even, living a life with even more meaning.

In the same semester she lost her father, she found out last week it was more of the same academically: All A’s. Another 4.0. While the joy is muted -- “I have been in a daze since” his death, she said at his memorial service -- it won’t always be that way. She’s earned the highs that will be coming her way.

“The thing I tell the kids when we’re getting ready for a long season is that life isn’t fair. Instead, it’s how we respond to it, whether it’s on the golf course or in the classroom or in our personal lives,” says Montana golf coach Kris Nord, who’s been guiding athletes for close to 40 years.

She had joined SAAC, the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee that year, and not just as a member but as treasurer in her first year. “My dad taught me, do what you do really well. If I was going to do it, I was going to be all in. I wanted a leadership position,” says Avery. Of course she did. Did we mention she was president of the Economics Club that year as well?

And Nord thought it might all be too much, all that, including the cancer diagnosis, plus golf. He brought up the idea of redshirting, of continuing to practice with the team but sitting out a year from tournament play. Save the time the team spends traveling and in competition and apply it to more pressing matters.

Except to Avery, everything is a pressing matter. And she was not going to give in to time or to cancer or to anything. Especially when someone expressed doubt that she could pull it all off.

“She’s just driven in everything she does,” said Nord. “She wants to do really well, and sometimes you have to remind her that you can’t be perfect at everything. Sometimes you just do your best and accept the result.”

It had happened before, this doubting, when Leila Brown was a sophomore at Dawson County Community College two decades earlier. She had played basketball her freshman year at the school, then got pregnant, with a due date in March, right in the middle of the spring semester.

She was in a physics class, a high-level physics class. She was an expectant mother. She would need to miss some time. “Well, in my experience, pregnant women don’t usually finish the semester,” the professor told Brown. The challenge had been laid out.

“People didn’t expect much from her when she graduated high school in Geraldine, then when she had me,” says Avery.

Her mom’s rejoinder: She married Teigan’s father, Jared Avery, moved to Havre to finish the prerequisites for pharmacy school at MSU Northern and enrolled at Montana, where she became a pharmacist and all but drove to Kalispell to start a new life for her family with her middle finger out the window. Screw the skeptics. And her daughter was there, taking it all in.

“She’s been a really powerful example for me. When people discount her, it really frustrates her. She loves to prove people wrong,” says Teigan. “She’s pretty bad ass.”

It was a Christmas present, passes to Northern Pines, a gift, out of the blue, from mother to father and daughter.

“I just figured it would be a summer activity that she and her dad could do together,” Leila says. “Just to go out and have some father-daughter time. I didn’t know it would turn into what it did.”

They went out for the first time that April, she and her dad. She was nine. It was cold and they just wanted to get going, so they didn’t warm up. Her dad pulled an ab muscle on the first tee, so he offered to caddy.

“He noticed I was making good contact every time and it seemed I had a natural aptitude, so he was like, We’re going to stick with this,” Avery says of her dad. “That’s my first memory. A cold day, my dad getting hurt, and I was out whacking the ball.”

There are some people who just shouldn’t play golf. Planners, who need everything to go according to schedule, right down the most minor detail. High achievers, who can’t accept anything but excellence in everything they do. Perfectionists, who can shoot even par but still fret over that missed three-footer on No. 6.

But there is a reason, after picking up the sport at the age of nine, that she practiced, drilled and played her way to a spot on a Division I team, a reason that more fits her driven personality.

“Golf is not a game of perfect, but you’re trying to achieve perfection. You never will be able to. The trying is what hooks you. It’s been the cause of a lot of frustration for me,” she says, of trying to tame the untamable.

Like the time she finished second at state as a freshman and then again as a senior, both times coming up two strokes short.

But there was the state title as a sophomore, in Missoula, when her back-to-back 72s got the better of McNeil by a stroke. And the repeat as a junior, when she rallied from four down with three holes to play to force a playoff, which she won.

“The thing that stands out most is she’s a real good putter. That’s what you want people to say about you as a golfer,” says Nord. “If we had a putt we needed to be made, I’d rather have Teigan putting it than anyone else.””

She started in political science, seeing it as the path to law school. She has kept the major but has since passed on going into law, just as she flirted with the idea of going all in on medical school before reconsidering.

“Economics is known for that,” says Amanda Dawsey, chair of the economics department at Montana and Avery’s advisor and mentor. “In general the undergraduate ratio is 2:1 male to female, and it gets worse as you move up the chain. At the full professor level it’s 6:1.

Everything was going according to plan, just the way Avery likes it. She was a Women’s Golf Coaches Association All-American Scholar as a freshman, Academic All-Big Sky as a freshman and sophomore.

She finished with a stroke average of 79.89 as a freshman, ranking fourth on the team after playing in all but one tournament. She played in every tournament as a sophomore, taking more than a stroke off her freshman-year average, finishing at 78.83.

She even harpooned her white whale the summer after her freshman year, winning the Montana State Women’s Amateur title.

Then one day in the summer before her junior year, she noticed a small lump on her neck. She blew it off. Her doctor didn’t, and she said the words that bring a sense of dread to anyone who’s ever been a patient, awaiting the report, expecting the routine, the all is good, see you next year: I don’t like that.

That’s how it started, with a warning to prepare, if not for the worst then at least for something that was likely to be anything but routine. “As soon as she said that, I had that feeling. I just knew,” says Avery.

They took a biopsy. Avery caddied that afternoon, ferrying around something that weighed her down much more than just a golf bag.

A week passed by. Finally, after a hiking trip to the Jewel Basin, she got word. On a scale of 1 (the best news) to 7 (the worst), she was told she fell in the 5-6 range. They were 90 percent certain she had cancer.

It was thyroid cancer, one of the most benign a person can get, which was encouraging, but it was still the dreaded C word. And what 20-year-old gets cancer anyway? And did that mean she would be at a greater risk for other cancers? And on and on the questions hit, the next one harder than the last.

“It was just devastating,” says her mom. “It’s like the world falls out from beneath you when it’s your child. My dad passed away from cancer. All these things start going through your head.”

Nord won’t deny it. He had to wear two hats when Avery told him the news, that she had cancer and would undergo surgery in November 2018. “It was tough to hear it and then play the role of both person and coach,” he says.

“I kind of struggled going back and forth on the role I was playing. I felt like I had to play both. My first thought was to try to talk her into redshirting,” he says.

She had surgery to remove the growth 13 months ago. It was cancerous, as they suspected, and it had spread to some surrounding lymph nodes, which it wasn’t supposed to do. That news, all good but with just a dash of lingering doubt -- okay, why are we finding it over here? -- will stick with a girl.

“That fear never goes away. I had my yearly checkup on Nov. 15, a year out from surgery, and I’m cancer-free. With this type of cancer, I know I’ll likely never get it again, but there will always be anxiety going into those checkups,” she says.

“It’s something that’s totally out of my control, so worrying about it doesn’t do a whole lot for me, but it will always be there in the back of my head.”

Instead of sitting back and giving in, Avery took her body into her own hands, in a manner of speaking. See her today and she doesn’t look necessarily like a golfer. She looks like she could be a member of almost any of Montana’s teams, her 5-foot-4 stature notwithstanding.

Because she’s learned through her own studying that five hours of exercise per week is the key for anyone to exponentially decrease the odds of ever having to hear, I don’t like that. It’s no guarantee, but it’s something.

“I really made some lifestyle changes. I eat more healthily, and wellness has become my passion since the diagnosis,” says Avery, who turned the idea into her capstone project in the Honors College.

“It’s trying to understand academics and exercise and how students frame their decisions to allocate time and what things get in the way of them exercising enough.”

On Nov. 18, escorted by campus police to the rental she shares with teammate Faith D’Ortenzio and with Nord there for additional support, the officer told her the news: her dad had earlier that day taken his own life.

A guidance counselor and a basketball coach, Jared Avery had made a career, a life, of helping others, in decisions both big and small, giving some students a supportive push toward their dreams, others a helping hand to pull them back on the right track, talking others off the ledge of despair and back to safety.

He saved lives, some literally, others just by keeping them on the path toward graduation. For her dad, it was all about compassion for others, Avery said at his memorial service. His greatest gift was that he turned that compassion for others into belief in them, which they then internalized.

“My dad saved so many kids,” she says. “Counselors aren’t supposed to have their own problems. He never showed any signs of depression. But you never know what’s going on behind someone’s eyes. They have a whole world of emotions and experiences you don’t know or understand.

“He didn’t think he could admit he was having problems, and obviously he was. One day the problems just overwhelmed him, and he wasn’t himself. That’s the only way I can figure it out. And now he’ll never be able to be himself again.”

There is another tied-in element to the story. Avery is now the vice president of SAAC, has been since the start of the fall semester, back when her father was able to tell her how proud of her he was. The new Big Sky Conference-wide initiative that each school’s SAAC is focusing on this year? Mental health awareness.

A month before her dad took his own life, SAAC received a shipment of bracelets stamped with: Be Strong. Ask for Help. “Compassion for others is hard. Compassion for yourself is harder,” Avery said last month at the memorial service at Glacier High. “But compassion for yourself is strength.”

Avery could have graduated in May, in 2019, but she loves school and the challenges it brings, and she loves the University of Montana too much to want to make it an abbreviated stay. She also loves the idea of graduating in 2020, “you know, like 20/20 vision,” she says.

That 20/20 vision also works in the other direction, looking backwards. She sees the version of Teigan Avery who arrived on campus in August 2016, the one who thought she had it all figured out. Little did she know what was to come. If only she could go back and clue her in.

“I’d say, be flexible. The road I’ve been on is not what I envisioned when I was a freshman. I’d tell her that it’s okay, that life throws curveballs at you and you have to adapt to those and adjust your plans,” she says.

“Also, I’d tell freshman me to give myself a little more grace and understanding. Have expectations for yourself but don’t beat yourself up over things.”