Lexie Wescott has seen twists and turns throughout her soccer career

Video Interview

MENOMONIE (November 11, 2020) - The road to playing collegiate soccer was filled with twists and turns for Lexie Wescott, and that didn't change once she got to UW-Stout.

"I actually wasn't even thinking about playing soccer in college, just because of my high school experience and injuries I obtained," the Blue Devil senior tri-captain from Lake Geneva said. "I only started talking to coach (Ryan) Raufus a month before preseason started and I ended up joining just two weeks before we had to move in for preseason."

A serious hip injury midway through Wescott's high school time not only put her future college playing career in doubt, but her high school playing career as well.

"I had a pretty substantial injury that kept me from playing for a period of time," Wescott said.  "Essentially, my hips shifted out of place and the doctors weren't sure if I was going to ever get back to playing soccer normally again. That answer wasn't the one I wanted to hear, so I worked insanely hard to get back to a healthy state. Through physical therapy and daily chiropractic adjustments I was able to continue to play less than six months later."

Stout had the major Wescott was interested in - entertainment design - and the soccer program called. Wescott made it into the Blue Devil lineup for a few games her freshman season, then saw action in just about every game as a sophomore, including making her first career start.

Then the twists and turns began at Stout. While Wescott saw action in 18 games as a junior, she and the team did not play a single game at home in 2019 due to construction on Nelson Field, with all 18 games on the road. The field was completed for this season but then, of course, 2020, leaves us in the midst of a pandemic and the competitive portion of the season was canceled, but not the season. The soccer team, along with all of the Blue Devil athletic programs, have been working to make the year 2020 a practical working experience.

As a captain along with Caylee Boone and Marissa Steele, Westcott has been working to keep her teammates, returners and newcomers, as involved as possible.

"When Caylee, Marissa, and I were chosen as captains back in April, none of us realized how different our season would be," Wescott said. "We didn't know that our preseason wasn't going to happen; we didn't know that practices would be split into groups; and we certainly didn't know that there would be no competitive play this season.

"Something that Caylee, Marissa, and I do really well is bring a positive energy and work ethic onto the field. It's super important to make the most out of the situation we are in, and if the team sees that the captains are being positive and coming in and working just as hard every day, they will respond and feed off of that energy the same way."

The practices have been different. Since beginning practice about two to three weeks ago, the coaching staff has opted to practice on the newly completed field several times a week starting at 7 p.m. to avoid missing class time. But the weather in Wisconsin has taken an early turn towards winter , with a snow storm two weeks ago, followed by frigid, below-freezing cold.

"Despite practicing at 7 p.m. in the freezing temperatures the last couple weeks, everyone has come with a positive attitude and has been working hard," Wescott said. "With no competition to prepare for this season and having to maintain socially distant at practice, it has really allowed us to focus strictly on our fundamentals and footwork instead. It's been fun to take a step back from the competition and to focus on the small things that make a huge difference in our skills and abilities on the field."

With practice not starting until mid-October, much of the usual team-bonding experience was seriously threatened.

"Because we had to miss out on our team bonding activities due to COVID in the beginning of the year, it's especially important for us to make the new players feel comfortable," Wescott said. "We try to do outdoor activities as much as we can before the weather gets cold, so we can interact with each other off of the field as well."

In contrast, last season's continual road trip helped with the some of the team bonding. 

"Managing school and a sport at the same time has its challenges alone, but having to travel for every game, made it even more challenging," Wescott said. "Luckily the team had a great mentality about it, and we knew that it was just part of our job as a student-athlete that season. Because we were traveling so much - over 60 hours of bus travel - homework and watching movies were the main activities taking place on the bus, but we managed to sneak in a couple karaoke and dance party bus rides along the way."

With career plans to become a 3D animator, Wescott has worked to balance her class load with athletics.

"Being an art student and an athlete is not easy," said Wescott. "The majority of my classes conflict with practice or game days, and doing my homework on the bus isn't really an option, since I need to be in the art building to do most of it.

"Even though it's not easy, I still love it. It requires me to be that much more determined and to have that much more time management skill. Being in a major that is constantly gaining more attention from the professional field and is constantly getting better national ratings is neat. It is super rewarding knowing that the hard work I put in is going to get me to where I want to be once I graduate from the program and being an athlete on top of that has provided me with even more skills to be successful in my career."

Wescott has always had a fascination with movies and how they are put together. 

"I've always been intrigued with how movies were made," Wescott said. "I would watch the 'behind the scenes' of every movie I could. When this interest initially was sparked, I wanted to do cinematography, which is the filming of movies, but after taking a bunch of different classes in the digital media field, I realized that I enjoyed the computer side of things more. My interest then evolved into 3D modeling and animation.

"UW-Stout's entertainment design program focuses on the collaborative side of art and technology and offers three different concentrations; comics, animation, or video production. I have a concentration in animation, so most of my projects involve 3D modeling and animating, as well as other art classes like, drawing, digital imaging, painting. Up until last year, I was doing a lot of short animated projects that focused on the fundamentals of animation and modeling.

"Last semester, I was in a class that required me to be in a small production team and to create a professional level animated short totally from scratch. My production team and I did all the modeling, rigging, texturing, and animating for our animated short. This collaborative project brought both entertainment design students and game design students together to create a high-grade animated project."

Animation production appears to be in Wescott's future. The pandemic wiped out her internship opportunities this past summer, but she is looking forward to an internship for next summer. 

As far as soccer, Wescott is scheduled to graduate December 2021 and plans to take her second senior season next fall. She has been able to find positives out of the negatives of 2020 and shares those with her teammates.

"Something that I try to stress to the team is that this 'off' season," Wescott said using the air quotes,  "is going to be what we make it. It is important to understand that what's going to make us better this season is not through competition, but it is our mentality, hard work, and dedication that we have towards the sport."