Short Walk Caps Long Journey for BVU Senior
Lyme Disease, COVID-19 can't deter a most resilient Beaver student-athlete who, after just three years at BVU, will earn degrees in business and political science before heading to law school.
Christina Schauer accepted an arrangement of flowers and a gift from Coach David Wells on Senior Day for the Buena Vista University women’s basketball program. Flanked by her parents, Penny and Al Schauer, she examined the flowers with a wide smile and the hint of a blush.
She walked approximately 15 strides to center court and took in the scene, the applause. She allowed herself a brief thought: how this day might never have happened.
The BVU record books will show Christina Schauer scored nine points in 10 minutes of action in her penultimate home game as a Beaver senior. The play-by-play account details how Schauer connected on a pair of pressure-packed free throws with 15 seconds left to seal the victory, the team’s first in 20 games of American Rivers Conference competition. Schauer’s charity tosses were anything but charity for Coaches David Wells and Alison Shearer and the competitors like Schauer who worked to turn the corner toward triumph.
“Huge,” Wells says. “Her free throws were huge! I can’t say enough about Christina, who could only play 10 minutes and yet delivered something big seemingly every minute she was on the court.”
“I met Dr. Lisa Best and Dr. Bradley Best when I visited campus. I got the feeling right away how BVU professors want to get to know their students, to connect with them. They care about us.”
Christina Schauer
From Middleton to BVU
Schauer played high school basketball for Middleton High School in Wisconsin, a regional athletic power. As a middle school and high school player, her teams advanced to the state tournament on six occasions and won three state titles. Chronic pain, which she battled throughout high school, kept her from reaching even greater heights on the court.
“I had to medically withdraw from high school twice because of Lyme Disease,” she says. “I was bedridden for 10 months my sophomore year.”
A tick bit Schauer during a hiking excursion when she was 12. Symptoms didn’t develop until she was a freshman, a few weeks after she had four wisdom teeth pulled. Being in bed that long caused her muscles to atrophy as she fought chronic pain, joint pain, and a host of other symptoms, things like sensitivity to light.
“I remember trying a free throw after being sick for so long my sophomore year,” she says. “I couldn’t get the ball to the basket. I’d lost so much muscle.”
“The first time I saw Christina on the court after being out for two years, it brought me to tears,” her father says.
She also lost time academically. Missing a year of school kept Schauer from earning enough credits to graduate on time with her Middleton High Class of 2017. She had to return for a fifth year of high school.
“Most of my friends I’d grown up with had graduated when I went through my senior year again,” she says. “It wasn’t the same.”
Keep in mind this isn’t any academic question-mark. Schauer earned a 3.96 grade-point average in high school to complement a 31 on the ACT. Still, she had to complete a pair of senior years before matriculating to BVU.
Why BVU?
“I wanted to go to a private college in Iowa,” she says, noting how the omnipresent whir of politics in and around Madison, Wisc. (Middleton is a suburb) motivated Schauer to trek south for her collegiate experience. The irony: she sought to study political science.
She landed at BVU in Storm Lake, attracted by its size, its earnest faculty, and its academic strength. She majored in business and political science, taking a host of classes from Dr. Bradley Best, Professor of Political Science, and Lisa Best, Professor of Business and Dean of the Harold Walter Siebens School of Business at BVU.
“I met Dr. Lisa Best and Dr. Bradley Best when I visited campus,” Schauer remembers. “I got the feeling right away how BVU professors want to get to know their students, to connect with them. They care about us.”
And, there was basketball. Then-BVU Head Women’s Basketball Coach Janet Berry, who is retiring this May from the Athletics Department, told Schauer she was welcome to join the team.
“I hadn’t been recruited, really,” Schauer says. “But Coach Berry said there would be a spot for me on the team.”
Schauer connected with teammates immediately and enjoyed the process of rebuilding, then building the foundation for an upstart program. She was part of a team that struggled through a 1-24 season last winter, Wells’ first at BVU. It was a year highlighted with a BVU national title of sorts in women’s basketball—for the team’s 3.855 GPA. Schauer has a 4.0 GPA, straight-As.
“When it comes to being student-athletes, we are students first and then we are athletes,” she says, describing how she’d study on late-night bus rides across Iowa following conference contests. “As a team, we’re very proud of our GPA.”
This season, Schauer was one of six members of the BVU women’s basketball team to earn Academic All-American Rivers Conference accolades.
When not studying or preparing for basketball, Schauer has kept herself occupied in the Center for Academic Excellence, where she serves as one of 35 student-tutors on campus. She advises peers on grammatical revisions needed in term and research papers. She’s the academic assistant for Dean Best in the School of Business, and in that role completed projects, served as an academic tutor, and helped research various legal topics such as contract, employment, and premises liability issues.
Schauer dodged COVID-19 until the start of her last basketball season. She suffered symptoms, then tested positive during the first week of January, a time when only select BVU athletics teams were on campus.
“I quarantined for two weeks in Liberty Hall,” she says. “I was the only person in the entire hall.”
Her teammates followed through on a text tree, sending messages at various points during the day. Coaches Wells and Shearer kept in contact. BVU Security personnel delivered three meals to Schauer’s doorstep each day.
She missed two games to start this season, then eased her way into competition with a 10-minute limitation in the victory over Luther. A doctor has since prescribed an inhaler to help her catch her breath as action continues.
And soon, the season will end and Schauer will continue her work as a tutor and as a student, striving for A’s in classes like theories of criminology, business law, and world civilizations. She’ll complete an Honors capstone that has taken two years of research.
Then it’s off to law school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where Schauer aims to continue her study. The three years of law school will match the three years it took her to earn her bachelor’s degree at BVU.
The student who needed five years to complete high school will graduate from college in three years, most likely with a 4.0 GPA and plenty of wonderful memories from her undergraduate stay, including, but not limited to, a most arduous and lengthy short walk with her parents to center court on Senior Day.
To borrow a sports metaphor, the journey has been a marathon, not a sprint, for this Beaver student-athlete. The resilient Christina Schauer made it happen.