Lauren Spring: ‘Hope is a really powerful tool’

 Photos courtesy of OSU Athletics

 



Lauren Spring did one better than obey an admonishing adage. Even in the context of helping those in need, she did not peer down at her beneficiaries. On the contrary, she literally looked up to them.

She did this in the midst of fitting children for much-needed footwear. She did this while rinsing the feet that had long lacked sturdy shoes, if any shoes.

Together with 10 of her fellow Ohio State student-athletes, she took these steps to ensure cozier and confident steps for impoverished Ecuadorian youth. By her estimate, the Buckeyes brought and distributed 800 pairs over a five-day visit last May. (In a diary on the OSU athletics website, one of her project colleagues, fencer Natalie Falkowski, counted 857.)

Being the Buckeyes’ lone hockey representative in a conglomeration of 10 athletic teams, Spring was naturally primed for humble takeaways.

“Seeing how just a small gesture…can put such a smile on a young child’s face just really puts things in perspective,” she offered last week in a phone chat with Pucks and Recreation.

A senior forward for the Buckeye women, Spring bears the portfolio of a depth contributor on the ice. She just finished the regular season 10th on the team with 11 points on the year. Or, to put that another way, she is one of 10 OSU skaters to have cracked the double-digit point plateau.

Patience paying off is another motif transcending her two worlds. As an underclassman, she witnessed back-to-back coaching changes as Nate Handrahan and Jenny Potter were dismissed in successive years. Her third Buckeye bench boss, Nadine Muzzerall, took the team through growing pains in a sub-.500 2016-17 campaign.

But the program has accelerated its resurgence this winter to the tune of a 21-9-4 regular-season record. An at-large bid to the NCAA tournament or an automatic bid via the WCHA playoff crown — all of which would be program firsts — are tantalizing possibilities.

Meanwhile, Spring is up for individual hardware as one of five finalists for the 2018 Hockey Humanitarian Award. As the first OSU women’s player to achieve this status since Jody Heywood in 2008, she has drawn national publicity through her extra-mile mentality in community service.

“There are times where you’ve had a long day or had a long week,” she conceded. “With school and our sports, we have a lot on our plate. But I think it’s important to suck it up sometimes and get out there and help others. It can teach you a lot about yourself, and you always walk away feeling like you made a difference in someone’s life.”

The HHA’s official press release made a passing reference to Meals on Wheels as one of Spring’s initiatives with her fellow pucksters. But the Buckeyes’ annual multi-sport, international journey on behalf of Soles4Souls is the meat of her candidacy.

Whether that pushes her above her four fellow finalists will become apparent April 6 at the Men’s Frozen Four. First things first, assuming Muzzerall’s squad stays on its trajectory, it will nab one or more March milestones between the boards. If it does, those achievements for Spring and her senior classmates will lend an element of symmetry to her 2017-18 academic year.

 

OSU’s community service all-stars

If each school year or hockey season begins once its predecessor ends, then the start of last summer set a tone for a line of long-awaited gratification in Spring’s OSU swan song. Of joining the school’s Soles4Souls alliance, she said she “had been interested in doing something…for a while now.”

Born in the successive wakes of the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, the Tennessee-based Soles4Souls equips underprivileged domestic and global communities. It accepts monetary donations as well as shipments of new or used footwear, the latter of which is repurposed.

But Spring craved the charity’s most personal option for involvement. She could not help but catch wind of OSU’s constant commitment to the cause, as then-teammate Alex LaMere went to Costa Rica for it in 2015. Another batch of Buckeyes represented the organization in a journey to Jamaica following her sophomore year. Later that summer, one more selected group made the same mission to Bolivia.

With Ecuador, the fourth time was Spring’s time this past May.

“I was super grateful I was one of those that got chosen,” she said.

Besides Spring, the 2017 Ecuador excursion included two football players plus one apiece from women’s basketball, women’s fencing, men’s gymnastics, men’s soccer, women’s soccer, men’s swimming and women’s volleyball. It was an oft-overlooked form of diversity she had long wanted to explore.

“That was close to my other favorite part of the trip,” she said. “We do our best to reach out and get involved with other student-athletes, to get out of our comfort zone.”

Barely two weeks removed from the academic year, Spring and her new OSU teammates gelled through an enhanced road trip. On May 11, they connected through Atlanta, where they had four hours of bonding in the busiest airport on Earth.

Once they set down their final leg and returned to ground transportation, the scenery solidified their motivation. The potential in the Ecuadorian people was evident enough, but so was the shortage of prerequisite needs. Through rides as long as four hours each way to each spot on the itinerary, the scenery seldom changed.

“Ecuador as a whole was all in poverty,” Spring recalled. “To see that constantly was really eye-opening."

Stepping outside to meet the locals at a given journey’s end was a more heartening revelation. On the group’s first day of service, Spring made a new kind of forward troika with the aforementioned fencer Falkowski and All-Midwest midfielder Nikki Walts. With each child’s shoe size established, they dug for matches in their inventory.

“It was hard work,” she offered, “but it was the most rewarding hard work that anybody could ever do.”

The subsequent work-play pattern was, most naturally, anything but foreign either. Once their young hosts were properly equipped, the Buckeyes engaged them in basketball, soccer and volleyball.

For Spring, originally from Kelowna, B.C., the lack of blades and frozen water to put them to was a second-nature sacrifice. This mission was bigger than the game that has defined her upbringing and participation in OSU athletics. But more recent developments have illuminated the chances of bringing winter sports to Ecuador and vice versa.

Getting the wheels rolling

Back in her study-skate vortex nine months after her mission, Spring absorbed a timely and intriguing revelation. With cross-country skier Klaus Jungbluth in Pyeongchang, Ecuador has its first native child in the Winter Olympics.

“I did not know that,” Spring admitted when the subject came up last week. “That’s very, very cool.”

Not so surprisingly, Jungbluth is a comprehensive cosmopolitan. Through his various athletic and professional journeys, he has become fluent in Czech, English, German, Italian and Norwegian.

But even in his Hispanophone homeland, Jungbluth has resorted to roller skis for sustained training. He often does the same in Australia, where he is still working toward a degree in sports science.

Having spearheaded the prerequisite establishment of an Ecuadorian skiing federation and passed the trial, Jungbluth is serious about solidifying a foundation. Prior to the Games, he told Australia’s ABC News, “I think what I’ve tried to do here is to set an example that if you want to achieve a goal, even if it’s difficult or its very far away, you just have to keep trying. That’s an example I want to set for my family, and my kids, but also for the people pursuing a sport in Ecuador.”

Could more roller skis and their ice-skating alternative cousin thus be in the country’s future? Spring knows that the necessary “pride” is there, and added that Jungbluth’s groundbreaker “speaks volumes for that individual.”

And while no stand-ins for skates, pucks or twigs entered the equation on her Ecuadorian expedition, her presence may resonate. It certainly does not hurt that staffers from the Nashville Predators also paid a Soles4Souls visit there in 2017.

Regardless, the mere word of Jungbluth’s travails through Europe, Australia and Asia could widen several avenues for his young countrypeople. The new soles from without will allow one to exert the newly inspired soul within.

And if Spring, as part of the assortment of athletic visitors from yet another land, can add more to those tangible and intangible necessities, she will take even an uncredited tertiary assist on the play.

“Hope is a really powerful tool,” she said. “With athletes from all different sports going there, it gives people a lot of hope. It can be extremely powerful, it could definitely be a motivator for a lot of those children. You would hope for that for sure.”

Spring intends to stay in Columbus and pursue a career as a physical education teacher. But she is not relinquishing her takeaways or connections from her coveted Soles4Souls stint.

“In the big picture, all children are the same,” she said. “Whenever I have the opportunity to help a kid grow and learn and become successful, whether it’s a small thing like they figure out how to tie their shoes that day or to jump a little bit higher, I take it.

“That’s the kind of impact any educator wants to have on their students. I think we did that while we were in Ecuador.”