Draper Player Helps Aggies Advance To MWC Tournament
Nov 14, 2014 03:45PM ● By Ron BevanDraper’s Lauren Roundy capped off her senior season with a goal to help Utah State advance to the Mountain West Conference tournament.
Utah State senior forward and Draper resident Lauren Roundy wasn’t ready for her collegiate soccer career to end. With just two games left in the season, on Oct. 26, the Aggies needed to secure a win to move on to the Mountain West Conference tournament. Plus it was Senior Day, the last home game for Roundy and the other five Aggie seniors.
So the former Alta athlete made sure her team would advance, scoring the first goal of the game and assisting on a second, giving Utah State a 4-0 win over Nevada and helping the Aggies advance to the MWC tournament in San Diego.
“I scored in the first 12 minutes of the game,” Roundy said. “It was a way for me to say goodbye to my school.”
Roundy started in all 19 games for the Aggies her senior year. The daughter of Glen and Sharon Roundy helped the team to a 10-7-2 overall record and a 6-4-1 conference standing. She has played forward her entire career at Utah State.
“I am the only one that hasn’t been moved to other positions on the team,” Roundy said. “The coaches like my aggressive style. I like to make contact with the defender to know where she is and then make my move.”
Ironically, it was a coach’s decision at Alta that may have driven Roundy to her success at Utah State. Roundy came to Alta her junior season after two years playing at Alta’s rival, Brighton. She helped win Alta’s third state 5A championship in a row as a junior, but found herself outside looking in for her senior year.
“I was cut from the team as a senior,” Roundy said.
Alta would go on to win a fourth-straight state title without Roundy.
But she wasn’t ready to give upon her soccer dreams. She had already committed to taking her soccer skills to Utah State prior to her high school senior season and trained harder than ever to increase her abilities.
“I learned a lot about myself when I was cut from Alta’s team,” she said. “I used it as a motivation. I wanted to achieve more with soccer after that happened. I’m not the kind that just rolls over.”
Honing her skills to a sharper level with Avalanche, her club soccer team, Roundy practiced hard that year and felt confident when she arrived at Utah State. The confidence carried her through to a four-year career.
Roundy redshirted (a delay, usually for a year) her first year at Utah State and then saw action in 17 games in 2011 as a sophomore. She started in two of those outings.
She earned a starting position on the Aggie squad eight games into her sophomore season and scored her first collegiate goal the same year. She wouldn’t give up the starting slot the rest of her collegiate career, although an injury put her on the sidelines for seven matches as a junior.
Roundy scored the winning goal in the opening game with Creighton her junior season. She added three more this year as a senior.
Now, she is ready to take on far bigger goals in life. She is set to graduate from Utah State in December with a degree in psychology and exercise science. She is also getting married shortly afterward, to a former middle school classmate, Bridger Dallimore.
“We knew each other when we were younger but never dated,” Roundy said. “Then, about a year ago, he was the umpire at my brother’s baseball game. My mom kept saying how cute he was. I guess mom always knows best.”