All great athletes on the college and professional levels must overcome adversity and pressure from personal lives, coaches, teammates, fans or their own roadblocks to reach their ultimate goal of becoming the best performer possible.

Some collapse under the pressure and some simply refuse to face it.

But a number of athletes persevere beneath the weight of great expectations.

Georgetown senior track star Sasha Spencer is one of those athletes.

Each time she leads her team during practice, each time she stretches before a meet and each time she sets herself at the blocks, people watch her. They scrutinize her every move, her every mistake. Spencer’s expectations mean that she will often settle for nothing but the optimum performance, both on and off the track.

Determination

Yet, Spencer refuses to crumble, excelling because she wants to succeed and not because every one else expects it of her.

“The biggest decision that I’ve had to make was reclaiming running for myself,” Spencer said. “I couldn’t run for anyone else. I had to realize that every meet wasn’t the `be-all-end-all.’ I had to learn to ignore what other people have to say. I had to have faith in my talent and training.”

That faith in her own skill and preparation has composed a significant portion of Spencer’s development over her four years at Georgetown. However, the means of discovering that trust and growing into a mature athlete with a rock-hard determination was not always easy.

Director of Track and Field and Cross-Country Ron Helmer agrees.

“The maturation process at times may have been a painful one for her,” Helmer said.

“She had the character to make the hard choices that were right for her. They may not have been the most popular ones with her coaches and teammates, but she had the conviction to find a good outcome in them.”

The most difficult choice that Spencer had to make was to set her goals above those of most college athletes, to move in a direction away from the customary one-meet-at-a-time approach to strive for loftier goals.

Spencer can pinpoint two specific incidents that served as motivational launching pads for her increasing ambition.

When Spencer was a freshman, she competed against and defeated onique Hennagan, a 2000 Olympian, in the 400-meters at North Carolina. It was the only race Hennagan lost on her home track during her four years in college.

As a sophomore, Spencer participated in USA Track and Field Championships in Eugene, Ore. Whether she lined up against the high-caliber athletes in the blocks or sat next to them in the cafeteria, she knew that she wanted to compete at their level.

“Just being in that environment [of great runners] showed me that if you work at it you can get to the next level,” Spencer said confidently. “That turned my eye to something beyond the college level.”

Helmer thinks she can achieve those goals.

“I believe she decided who she wanted to be and how she wanted to be viewed and she followed through on it,” Helmer said. “I think that is a great accomplishment. She is a very strong, powerful woman capable of accomplishing anything she sets her mind to.”

Starting Blocks

While it may have been her biggest decision, Spencer does not believe that choosing to run for herself is her most rewarding achievement. She reserves that distinction for her relationship with her mother.

“[My biggest accomplishment] has been developing an admiration for my mother,” Spencer said. “You often take for granted what your parents do for you. I’m in awe of her strength, because the things that I’ve had to deal with don’t even compare [to those my mother had to deal with].”

One of those things that Spencer admires in her mother is how she dealt with the loss of her husband, Spencer’s father.

Spencer’s father died when she was nine years old, leaving her mother to raise Spencer, Spencer’s older brother Darren and younger brother Jarred all by herself.

“I was very close [to my father],” Spencer said, tears forming in her eyes. “I was daddy’s little girl.”

Despite the tragedy, Spencer says her father’s passing altered her life. “I value the person [his death] has made me,” she said. “I wouldn’t change the person I have become because of it.”

It is that resolve to confront and overcome every challenge life throws at her that has allowed Spencer to develop into a competitive athlete and a compassionate person.

Humility

On the track, few Georgetown athletes have excelled like Spencer has in championship situations.

“Those settings are often where I do my best running,” she said.

A seven-time All-American, she has competed at prestigious events like the 1998, 1999 and 2000 USA Track and Field Championships and the 2000 Olympic Trials.

But throughout all of her success, she has always practiced one virtue: humility.

“When I line up at places like the Olympic Trials, I’m humbled out of respect for what the other women have accomplished in their sport,” Spencer said. “I want to be the best, [but] I don’t want to be revered. You walk a fine line because there’s a point where you stop being humble.”

According to Helmer, Spencer is far from that point.

“She thinks before she acts and she presents herself appropriately, not out of arrogance but because she was taught respect and understands how to treat people,” he said.

At George Mason during her freshman year, Spencer found out that she had qualified for the 1999 USA Track and Field Championships, the very competition where she would later find reinforcement for her competitive edge.

After the announcement was made, Spencer turned to her mother, who watched her race from the stands, hugged her and said, “Mom, I’m coming home.”

Spencer had not been home to Salem, Ore., since the winter of her freshman year because of the expensive cross-country trip, and Spencer and her mother’s excitement for an all-expenses paid trip to Eugene, Ore., a city near her hometown, was palpable.

Compassion

Spencer has translated that respect for her mother into a variety of community service projects, demonstrating compassion going hand in hand with her background.

But one ministry project that Spencer took part in stands out above the rest.

Prior to her freshman year at Georgetown, Spencer traveled with her local Christian youth organization to a small, underprivileged town in Mexico a few miles outside of Tijuana to build houses for impoverished families.

The trip was organized by Amore, a Christian-based group that works closely with other service organizations to coordinate missions to poverty-stricken communities around the world.

Spencer chose to dedicate her time to this service organization, because it was important to her that “she put things in perspective” before coming to school. “The biggest thing I learned,” she said, “was that my concept of needing something is grossly exaggerated.”

Having witnessed extreme poverty, Spencer’s most poignant impression of the trip occurred after she and her fellow workers had completed a home for a mother and her two children.

“I remember two little boys who would run around the site and pick up nails,” Spencer said. “Their mom made doughnuts for everyone. [I couldn’t get over] her selflessness in wanting to be hospitable.”

“[On the last day the woman] wept so hard she couldn’t speak. She couldn’t believe that we had [built her a house]. One of the little boys translated what his mother was saying through sobs.”

Raising Expectations

Today, Spencer satisfies her love for community service by working with two organizations, Georgetown Athletes’ entorship Enterprise Program and the Avenue Program, that use athletics to stress to young children the importance of receiving a college education.

As a member of the GAME Program, Spencer visits middle and elementary schools, while as a member of the Avenue Program, a non-profit organization that provides kids with successful role-models, she and a number of former Olympians run athletic clinics at youth and after-school programs.

“I like the fact that we can plant a seed in some child’s mind that it is a normal expectation to go to college,” Spencer said. “Not just `maybe [they’ll go].'”

Spencer’s parents had always made it clear that she and her brothers would continue their educations past high school.

“Going to college was just something we did,” Spencer said. “It was expected.”

After many years of hard work, Spencer fulfilled that expectation by traveling from her hometown of Salem, Ore., in the fall of 1997 to attend Georgetown, one of two schools that she applied to.

Stanford was the other.

“Academically, I couldn’t go wrong,” Spencer said, adding that she chose Georgetown because of her initial impression of the athletic program.

Despite a strong track record in high school, including the title of Oregon Female Athlete of the Year in 1996 and 1997, Georgetown did not recruit Spencer.

Instead, Spencer wrote a letter to Georgetown at the end of her junior year to see what the school had to offer. She visited Washington, D.C., a few months later, and Helmer traveled to her home in Salem a week after her visit to sell the Hoyas program.

Now, after coaching Spencer for almost four full years, Helmer ranks Spencer as one of the top five female athletes he has coached at Georgetown.

“[But] I have a feeling that [Spencer’s most memorable] moment is still in front of me,” Helmer said. “That’s how I truly feel. She has the capacity to produce great things.”