Lehmann (left) with Kristine Lilly (right), a UNC teammate and a star on the U.S. Women’s National team.
Story by Macy Meyer
Graphic by Tamiya Troy
Photos courtesy of Courtney Lehmann
Courtney Lehmann thought she was dying.
As a soccer player for UNC and a four-sport athlete through high school, Courtney knew injuries well. But this was different. Pain shot from her bruised head to her crushed feet.
The nurses were wheeling her in for her CT scan when she heard a voice from down the hall.
“Courtneyyyy,” the voice called.
It was the last thing she remembers.X
Five minutes left in the 1990 women’s soccer national championship and Courtney was scrambling to get ready. Her coach, Anson Dorrance, had called her number, and she needed to find a jersey.
The Tar Heels were crushing the UConn Huskies 5-0 at Fetzer Field in Chapel Hill. Dorrance was confident his team would win its eighth national title. He wanted to give Courtney, a senior playing in front of a crowd of friends and family from her hometown in Connecticut, a chance to get some minutes as a forward to close out the match.
Courtney Lehmann
She stripped off her keeper jersey. As the backup goaltender, Courtney had assumed that she’d be on the bench for the match unless something happened to Merridee Proost, the starter. “I just never expected to get in the game,” Lehmann said.
Courtney ran onto the field, joining Mia Hamm and Kristine Lilly, two of the greatest players of all time. Courtney stood next to them in a strange jersey. Her heart raced. Her socks didn’t match.
Just seconds into taking the field, UNC drove to the net.
Courtney didn’t mean for it to be perfect, but it was, and the crowd erupted when Courtney’s kick found the back of the net off a header from Kristine Lilly. Lilly was already tousling her hair before Courtney fully realized what she had just done. The 6-0 margin set a record for the largest margin of victory in an NCAA Championship match.
But I shanked it, she thought. She had aimed for the left corner and wound up giving it a right spin off a miss-hit. Courtney didn’t celebrate, didn’t dance, and didn’t slide Mia-esque across the field.
“I was terrified that I just scored,” Lehmann said. “I didn’t know what the hell to do. I just clapped my hands. I’ll never forget it. I was just like, ‘Oh, I guess I should clap my hands really quickly.’”
It was a “Rudy” scenario, but it also felt like a full-circle moment from everything she had endured throughout undergrad.
The medals from that day still hang in Courtney’s office. A shining moment, a lasting reminder. Her students at the University of Pacific know Dr. Lehmann is a national champion, but few know the whole story. Few know how a twist of fate led Courtney to one of the most successful sports teams of all time and how she climbed mountains for that glorious goal. The moment, that fluke, and those medals stand as a microcosm of who she is — a winner, an overachiever. A fighter.
It was more than a win. It was validation of her hard work because just two years prior, Courtney didn’t know if she would ever walk, let alone play, again.
Courtney remembers the day well. She was happy— giddy with excitement. After nailing an interview for a hostess position at Spanky’s restaurant on Franklin Street, she celebrated by driving her motor scooter to get an orange-flavored Slushie. With one hand on the accelerator and the other resting with her slush in the other, Courtney drove back to her dorm.
A car in oncoming traffic didn’t see Lehmann and pulled out for a turn, barreling into Courtney’s moped and sending her tumbling through the air. She bounced off a car hood before smacking her head on the pavement. She didn’t move. Lying on the road all she could do was shift her eyes from right and left.
“I could see that I was bleeding from what appeared to be my ear and I knew I was pretty screwed,” Courtney said. “Everything hurt.”
She was conscious upon arriving at the hospital. Nurses and doctors buzzed around her, trying to do anything they could to stabilize the bleeding from her left foot, which was crushed. Her shin was cracked. She had a concussion. Her right knee was busted open and to this day, gravel from the street sits just under her skin.
“Courtneyyyy.”
Courtney knew it was her coach, Anson Dorrance, and that comforted her; she wasn’t completely alone. “I was terrified I wasn’t ever going to come back out,” Lehmann said.
Dorrance was eating lunch when the lacrosse coach told him about the accident. He left immediately. “When I heard about that, of course, I’m going to respond,” Dorrance said. “These are kids I care about. But we all cared about Courtney. She was just an incredible human being.”
The Lehmann family was home in Newtown, Connecticut, more than 500 miles away. Carol Lehmann received the call from a nurse and it knocked her flat. It’s a mother’s worst nightmare.
“I’ve only had three calls like that in my life and each of the three times, my knees have just buckled and I’m carrying on the conversation on the floor,” Courtney’s mother said.
After her accident, Courtney Lehmann waits while her parents packed the car in Chapel Hill to return to Connecticut for the summer.
Courtney spent a few days in the hospital. She left stitched-up and bandaged, looking physically broken. But her spirit wasn’t.
Courtney hated the month she spent in a wheelchair. She hated the limitations, the restriction. Despite her left foot still being permanently disfigured, she refused to give up soccer. She didn’t care if it took months of physical therapy. Through sheer willpower, Courtney returned the next fall season and played her entire junior and senior year.
If scoring the final goal in a national championship is any evidence, Courtney conquered every trial, every tribulation.
“It was the sixth goal, it wasn’t like anything was at stake, but it was validation of the hard work and overcoming of the injuries that really threatened my ability to play let alone walk like a typical abled human being,” Courtney said. “It was a wonderful fairytale ending.”
“That was a bit of a tear-jerker for everybody,” her mother said, remembering the wave of emotions that came over her seeing her daughter hold the championship trophy.
“It was a triumphal moment,” Carol said. “Euphoria.” X
Courtney was not always the starting goalkeeper, but she always worked in practice as if she was the starter. Here, Courtney and the other goalkeepers are engaged in a “dueling goalkeepers” practice exercise.
Don’t ever tell Courtney Lehmann that she can’t do something — because then she’ll have to prove just how wrong you are.
“Courtney is full of piss and vinegar in the most positive way,” Dorrance said.
It’s that gritty and can’t-stop attitude that led the world-famous coach to ask Courtney to join his team. A fateful day brought Dorrance to Carmichael Gymnasium where Courtney was playing goalkeeper in a round of recreation miniball. He saw the 5’4 spunky first-year blocking shot after shot. He wanted her on his side.
“I just have a lot of respect for this brave little girl that came in there, basically with the trees, and fought them tooth and nail every day,” Dorrance said.
She wasn’t the starter, but she was often the hardest worker, inspiring the team with her tenacity and courage. “I think it’s just in her DNA,” Carol said. “We always try to inspire our girls and remind them that they were only held back by themselves.”
Courtney played volleyball, basketball and soccer, but her first love was baseball. In elementary school, when she was told that only boys played baseball, she answered by becoming a pitcher on a Little League team.
When she was told as a 10-year-old, “girls don’t play soccer,” she proved them wrong. When she was told she wasn’t allowed to join the Little League as a girl, she became the starting pitcher in the All-Star game. When she was told she’d always be physically impaired, she scored the final goal in the 1990 NCAA title game.
And when she was told academia is difficult for a woman, she became an accomplished English professor.
Lehmann, an English professor and director of the Humanities Scholars Program at the University of the Pacific, smiles while addressing 1,000 people at the University of the Pacific.
“Dr. Lehman has single-handedly been the most influential person I have met during my time in undergrad,” Arooba Lodhi, a student of Courtney’s Powell Scholar program, said. “Dr. Lehman has obviously come through so many struggles in her life, but there is something inherently stronger in a person and a woman, in general, to not let those things always weigh them down.”
She’s learned from those years with UNC soccer what it means to overcome, to be battered yet to stand tall, to roll with each punch before triumphing.
Despite not playing professional soccer, she keeps that winning attitude as a professor. While teammates Lilly and Hamm achieved Olympic glory, Courtney achieved academic glory through a Ph.D. She had achieved the highest honors in college athletics and now achieves that highest honors as a renowned educator at the University of the Pacific. She’s the Director of the Humanities Scholars Program, author of three books, and winner of the 2016 Distinguished Faculty Award.
“I just really believe in building that better world now,” Courtney said. “And that certainly goes back to playing on a team where we wouldn’t settle for not being our best. Not just athletes, but our best inner person. And that’s what I try to do as a teacher in my classroom, always.”
