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Allison Harris was in elementary school when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She watched her mom fight through treatment and exhaustion, push to make it to games and keep going when her body wouldn't cooperate. And she watched the doctors — the way they cared for her mom and, just as deliberately, for the family around her. They knew which sports Harris played. They asked about her sisters. They made something terrible a little more bearable, and she has wanted to be one of them ever since.
Getting to Portland State wasn't simple. School after school told her she'd have to choose — pre-med or Division I softball, but not both. Some said outright that she'd need to go somewhere smaller if she wanted medicine, and at one point she nearly gave up the sport entirely just to keep her path open. Portland State said yes to all of it.
"I'm just proud that I did it," she says. "I was told so many times it wasn't going to be possible. And now I'm going to have the degree in my hand to prove it."
Harris plays catcher, the one position on the field that faces every teammate on every pitch and touches the ball on every play. When things get tight, eight sets of eyes turn to her. The role suited her. Her leadership has never been the loud kind, but it has always been present — in her body language, in the way she steadies the people around her, in a philosophy she took to heart from the start.
"Lead with love," Harris says. "If someone used that to describe how I was as a teammate, that would be my ideal wording."
She has long believed that how you do one thing is how you do everything, and she built her years at PSU on exactly that kind of consistency. Softball, she'll tell you, is a sport built on failure: a .300 batting average means you came up short seven times out of ten. So she learned to trust the process, to separate a hard day at practice from a hard week in life, and to believe that steady effort matters more than any single result. That belief carried her through a demanding pre-med biology degree, through early-morning weights and long afternoon practices, through the late nights before big exams when everything felt like too much. On those nights, her parents were on the other end of the phone, reminding her that she had done hard things before and could do them again.
Harris also spent four years building something bigger than her own résumé. As Cohesion Executive on the Student Athlete Advisory Committee, she created programming to bring athletes together across PSU's different teams. The idea was sparked by a freshman-year roommate assignment that paired her with a track runner and showed her how much was possible when athletes looked beyond their own rosters. Along the way, she paid close attention to the women leading around her, across the athletic department, across campus and throughout Portland's growing women's sports community and let their example shape her own sense of what she could become.
Harris is returning for a fifth year as she works toward medical school and, eventually, radiation oncology. She wants to be the kind of doctor her mother had, the kind who shows up for the whole family and not just the patient. Four years at Portland State brought her one step closer.
