2019 GoGriz.com Person of the Year

Friedrich Nietzsche would have loved golf. One of the 19th century's most influential philosophers just had a thing for suffering and the benefits he believed it brought to those who endured it.

So much so that he wished it upon those he cared about most. Suffering, not golf, though maybe he threw in a sleeve of Titleists just to get the ball rolling.

The pursuit of happiness, he believed, the search for pleasure wherever it could easily be found and enjoyed, without investment of time and self, led to nothing more than a dull human existence.

It's called the paradox of happiness, that things done to intentionally and directly increase pleasure are unlikely to result in much fulfillment in the end.

Rather, he believed that suffering and that which could be found at the other end of the spectrum, true joy, can only happen in proportion, that one can never experience the very best of the highs without risking the potential of hitting the worst of the lows.

Do your best to minimize the chance of experiencing pain in your life, shy away from the pursuit of big goals, from giving in to unconditional love, in other words live life near the center, and you're not truly living at all.

Suffering, he told those who sought to hide from it, is what gives the world meaning. Without it, life is worthless, without value. No pain, no gain, right?

It's the difference between the reaction of someone who rolls it in the cup, through the clown's mouth, at the local miniature golf course and that of the person who just birdied that dastardly No. 12 for the first time all season, after a summer of pars and bogeys and wanting to toss their set of clubs into the woods.

Suffering, he said, is the only test in life that can reveal a person's true nature.

Teigan Avery, a senior on the Montana women's golf team, isn't the 2019 GoGriz.com Person of the Year because she gave the eulogy last month at the funeral for her 50-year-old father, not long after the man who made a career of showing compassion for others wasn't able to find enough to save himself.

It's not because she received a cancer diagnosis 17 months ago, thyroid to be specific, then underwent surgery a few months later to clear her of every last vestige of it, while not missing an assignment, an obligation, a practice in the other areas of her life.

It's not because she overcame an eating disorder as a college student or set up a blood drive at the Davidson Honors College after she was told she would have to put a one-year hold on giving to others the very essence of herself after the cancerous growth was removed.

It's not because she has continued on as a Division I golfer through it all, without missing a tournament, or kept adding to her growing list of community-service projects, heavy on volunteer, a four-year brought-to-life accounting of the values she learned at St. Matthew's School in Kalispell.

It's not because she forges ahead in the field of economics, one of the two majors she'll graduate with in May, a woman blazing a path in what is still a male-dominated area of study, or because she has two A-minuses on her record. For her academic career. At both Montana and Glacier High. Everything else: A.

There are players on the Griz golf team with a better scoring average than Avery, Montana student-athletes who have known nothing but A's and possess their own lengthy record of giving back to the community that supports them so well.

But they haven't been named the GoGriz.com Person of the Year, which is now in its fifth year. There are no spelled-out criteria for what it takes to be chosen. We just know it when we see it.

There have been stories of feel-good international mission trips. Of overcoming hardships, one physical, one brought on through bullying, last year's winner, Dante Olson.

This year it goes to a grinder, someone who has endured more suffering in the last two years than most people would want to face over a decade or two, if at all. This year's winner is one Nietzsche would applaud.

Because Teigan Avery hasn't just gotten by. She hasn't just absorbed the blows and stumbled back to her feet, a shell of what she had been and could be. She's taken the suffering and become better because of it. Stronger even, living a life with even more meaning.

In the same semester she lost her father, she found out last week it was more of the same academically: All A's. Another 4.0. While the joy is muted -- "I have been in a daze since" his death, she said at his memorial service -- it won't always be that way. She's earned the highs that will be coming her way.

That is if Nietzsche's theory holds true.

"The thing I tell the kids when we're getting ready for a long season is that life isn't fair. Instead, it's how we respond to it, whether it's on the golf course or in the classroom or in our personal lives," says Montana golf coach Kris Nord, who's been guiding athletes for close to 40 years.

"Life has thrown so much at Teigan so fast that it's definitely been unfair to her. She's had every right to break down and give something up, and I would not fault any choice she would make. And she hasn't. I'm amazed at her strength."

It was Nord who in the fall of 2018 made a mistake. He suggested to Avery that he didn't think she could do everything she thought she could do, not with the recent news that a biopsy had come back more than likely positive for cancer. She would need surgery later that fall.

She was a double major. She was helping the search for a new dean for the Davidson Honors College, where she herself had accomplished her goal of turning her Montana experience into something Ivy League-level,

She was helping select the next batch of Presidential Leadership Scholarship winners, something she herself was coming in and is on her way going out.

She had joined SAAC, the Student-Athlete Advisory Committee that year, and not just as a member but as treasurer in her first year. "My dad taught me, do what you do really well. If I was going to do it, I was going to be all in. I wanted a leadership position," says Avery. Of course she did. Did we mention she was president of the Economics Club that year as well?

And, because school, athletics and service in its various forms wasn't enough, she had her requirements for the Honors College, which asks its students to follow the traditional path toward a degree, then add eight honors experiences on top of it, while keeping a lofty GPA.

To say those chosen few in the Honors College are the best of the best would be a disservice to hundreds of other high-achieving students on campus, but it would be fair to call them pursuers of excellence, those to whom that comes quite naturally.

"She not only fits in here, but Teigan stands out," says Kaetlyn Cordingley, Director of Career Development at the DHC. "They are students who coming in we have high expectations for. They meet our expectations almost always and often exceed them."

And Nord thought it might all be too much, all that, including the cancer diagnosis, plus golf. He brought up the idea of redshirting, of continuing to practice with the team but sitting out a year from tournament play. Save the time the team spends traveling and in competition and apply it to more pressing matters.

Except to Avery, everything is a pressing matter. And she was not going to give in to time or to cancer or to anything. Especially when someone expressed doubt that she could pull it all off.

"She's just driven in everything she does," said Nord. "She wants to do really well, and sometimes you have to remind her that you can't be perfect at everything. Sometimes you just do your best and accept the result."

It had happened before, this doubting, when Leila Brown was a sophomore at Dawson County Community College two decades earlier. She had played basketball her freshman year at the school, then got pregnant, with a due date in March, right in the middle of the spring semester.

She was in a physics class, a high-level physics class. She was an expectant mother. She would need to miss some time. "Well, in my experience, pregnant women don't usually finish the semester," the professor told Brown. The challenge had been laid out.

"Well, I'm going to prove you wrong," said Brown, now Leila Avery, who gave birth to Teigan that spring. "And I did. I did really well in the class. Had her in the middle of the semester and still finished with a 3.5."

There were more doubters, of course, of this new mom at 19, who had been raised by a single mother, her dad out of the picture for the early years of her life. Everywhere she turned she found people who wanted to set a low bar for what they thought she could accomplish.

A college degree? Doubt it. Pharmacy school? Hah!

"People didn't expect much from her when she graduated high school in Geraldine, then when she had me," says Avery.

Her mom's rejoinder: She married Teigan's father, Jared Avery, moved to Havre to finish the prerequisites for pharmacy school at MSU Northern and enrolled at Montana, where she became a pharmacist and all but drove to Kalispell to start a new life for her family with her middle finger out the window. Screw the skeptics. And her daughter was there, taking it all in.

"She's been a really powerful example for me. When people discount her, it really frustrates her. She loves to prove people wrong," says Teigan. "She's pretty bad ass."

So who would have been surprised the fall of Avery's freshman year at Glacier High, after finishing first or second at every tournament she had entered that fall, when she read the Class AA state golf tournament preview in the Great Falls Tribune, the one that failed to list her as someone to watch, and used it to fuel her own internal furnace?

Like mother like daughter: she'd show them. She opened with a first-round 74 at Meadow Lark Country Club, five up on the only other player to break 80, with just 18 holes to go. Mission accomplished.

"They are going to write an article about who to watch for, and they are not going to mention me?" says Avery. "That just fired me up. I went out and shot the best round by a lot."

But she was a freshman. And that was a lot to take to bed that night. As a junior golfer she had won her age group seven times and the overall 17-and-under state title four times, but this was something new. People were watching. Now there were expectations to do it again.

"I was really nervous and wasn't comfortable with the position I was in. I had a lot of experience winning before, but not that. I put a lot of pressure on myself, but I wasn't ready for the experience yet," she says.

She closed with an 82, lost by two strokes to Kortney McNeil of Billings Senior and didn't try to forget the memory. Instead she tucked it away, ready to be brought out and used to sweep away any urge to skip some time on the indoor simulator the following winter.

It was a random gift that got Avery on the course in the first place, and it was probably fortuitous. At that point basketball had grabbed her heart and wouldn't let go. "It's still the one sport I probably love the most, but I'm 5-foot-4, so ..."

It was a Christmas present, passes to Northern Pines, a gift, out of the blue, from mother to father and daughter.

"I just figured it would be a summer activity that she and her dad could do together," Leila says. "Just to go out and have some father-daughter time. I didn't know it would turn into what it did."

They went out for the first time that April, she and her dad. She was nine. It was cold and they just wanted to get going, so they didn't warm up. Her dad pulled an ab muscle on the first tee, so he offered to caddy.

There were no swing-and-misses and only a few balls that were not struck purely. It was her first time with clubs in her hands, and she showed signs of possessing a gift, if only it would be given her full attention.

"He noticed I was making good contact every time and it seemed I had a natural aptitude, so he was like, We're going to stick with this," Avery says of her dad. "That's my first memory. A cold day, my dad getting hurt, and I was out whacking the ball."

That she was drawn to sports -- basketball, soccer, softball, swimming, and she's been skiing her entire life -- is an easy vein to follow on the family tree.

Her mom excelled in volleyball, basketball and track, the middle of the three getting her to Dawson County Community College. Her dad, also raised by a single mom, found his outlet in football and basketball at Joliet High and a discovered a father figure in coach Weldon Amundson.

After Jared Avery served in the Navy and got his degree from Oklahoma State, he returned to Montana and got his first teaching and coaching job in Geraldine, because if Amundson had had that kind of influence on him, why wouldn't he want to give kids the same life-changing experience?

Geraldine is where he met Leila Brown, and their daughter is their histories merged together and brought to life. Both had childhoods that were far from storybook, and both saw education as their way to make things better, easier.

Both attended graduate school at Montana, she in pharmacy, he in counseling. And Teigan was there for it all, too young at the time to appreciate the sacrifice, the late nights of studying, the investing in what would be an improved life for her and later her brother.

"They both knew what education meant for them," says Avery, who was reading Harry Potter by the time she was in second grade. "They embodied the American dream in that they moved from one socio-economic strata to the next, and that came from their education.

"So I'm a balance of the nature vs. nurture argument. It's my nature that I'm so motivated, but my parents both nurtured me to place a lot of importance on school and set high standards for myself."

There are some people who just shouldn't play golf. Planners, who need everything to go according to schedule, right down the most minor detail. High achievers, who can't accept anything but excellence in everything they do. Perfectionists, who can shoot even par but still fret over that missed three-footer on No. 6.

"Golf is tough if that's your personality," says Nord, Avery's coach the last three years at Montana. "If you're not at ease and at peace with where you are, it's a really hard game." Indeed. In his role as golf coach, he's 98 percent dealing with the mental, two percent the physical.

So it's been an odd fit, the squared away Avery pursuing a sport with a round ball and round holes. As she has come to learn, the ball and club face are in contact with each other for about one second over the course of a four-hour round of 72 strokes, give or take.

The other three hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds? That's a lot of time for someone to set up shop inside their own head, to constantly play back the shots that have been mishit, the opportunities squandered, to review on loop the ball that landed in the desired spot but the ground was hard and the ball raced over the green and into a bunker and why oh why do I do this to myself?

"It is incredibly frustrating. It's a sport you have very little control," says Avery, who thrives in every other area of her life by being in full control, of her time, of her effort, of her schedule. Of everything. But yet golf has drawn her in since that cold day at Northern Pines.

"You can have the best-laid plans and expectations for how your round is going to go or how your next shot is going to go, but even those best-laid plans don't always work out."

But there is a reason, after picking up the sport at the age of nine, that she practiced, drilled and played her way to a spot on a Division I team, a reason that more fits her driven personality.

"Golf is not a game of perfect, but you're trying to achieve perfection. You never will be able to. The trying is what hooks you. It's been the cause of a lot of frustration for me," she says, of trying to tame the untamable.

Even par is not perfect, not like a 4.0 in the classroom. It's simply a tip of the cap that you did just fine. Of course you always could have done better, you know that right? A 70? Nice! But an up-and-down on No. 14 would have had you in the 60s, and how great would that have been? Want to give it another go? Thought so. See you tomorrow!

It's a sport that taunts a person: try and try again, but you'll never beat me. Still, she persists.

"The best competition round I've ever had, I shot a 68. And I had a bogey. I thought, well, I could have done better there. You'll always be able to do better in golf."

Like the time she finished second at state as a freshman and then again as a senior, both times coming up two strokes short.

But there was the state title as a sophomore, in Missoula, when her back-to-back 72s got the better of McNeil by a stroke. And the repeat as a junior, when she rallied from four down with three holes to play to force a playoff, which she won.

She'll always have the edge when the scores are tight and it comes down to a battle of nerves when standing over the ball on the final green, with everyone watching and everything on the line. The flat stick is her best weapon.

"The thing that stands out most is she's a real good putter. That's what you want people to say about you as a golfer," says Nord. "If we had a putt we needed to be made, I'd rather have Teigan putting it than anyone else."

It all drew the attention of Butler of all places, the coach there knowing that anyone who could excel in a place like Montana would do just fine at his school in central Indiana.

But all those 4.0s had her looking east, toward the Ivy League schools. Or maybe Wellesley, the all-female school in Massachusetts, the launching pad that had produced Madeline Albright, Hillary Clinton and thousands of other women like Avery, who were hard-wired to shoot for greatness.

It didn't hurt that the Wellesley campus reminded her of the books she started reading as a second grader. "I thought it was one of the most enchanting places in the world. Hogwarts but real. But my athletics side would have been unfulfilled there," she said.

Brown, the Ivy located in Rhode Island, was interested, but what if she could get the best of both worlds, her past syncing up with her future?

She had been raised for a time in family housing at Montana. Her dad had coached the Grizzlies, working as a graduate assistant under Don Holst while getting his degree in counseling, part of the staff that celebrated in Bozeman after Montana shocked the Big Sky and won the league tournament in March 2002.

Those ties ran deep, and they meant more to her than any grass that may have appeared greener elsewhere, on the other side of the country. She committed to then coach Matt Higgins on Sept. 1 of her senior year.

"A lot of my classmates were like, Oh, you're only going to UM? like it was just the school down the road. They didn't really get that this is a Division I program," she says.

She'd show them -- again! -- by taking her golf scholarship, her Presidential Leadership Scholarship, the 55 credits she had earned through AP courses and tests at Glacier High and turn Montana into her own elite experience, local edition. She'd make it the big time.

"Getting accepted into the Honors College helped me turn the University of Montana into my own Ivy. The Honors College presented the ability to turn UM into a more rigorous experience and into more of a challenge," she said.

"It was important to me to add to the academic rigor of my experience. It's an amazing community in the Honors College."

She started in political science, seeing it as the path to law school. She has kept the major but has since passed on going into law, just as she flirted with the idea of going all in on medical school before reconsidering.

What other path would anyone have expected but economics, one of those male-dominated fields where people would look at her and think, What's she doing here? More doubters! Just like all those rounds on the course, when she had to prove herself as the lone female in another foursome that was dripping testosterone.

"Economics is known for that," says Amanda Dawsey, chair of the economics department at Montana and Avery's advisor and mentor. "In general the undergraduate ratio is 2:1 male to female, and it gets worse as you move up the chain. At the full professor level it's 6:1.

"It's striking because there are more female undergraduates now than there are male, so the number of men is even more disproportionate. It can be an aggressive field. I don't think we have an aggressive culture, but our ratio is still 3:1."

Avery took an entry-level economics course in high school and loved it. She followed up by reading Freakonomics and was hooked.

"I picked economics because I'm really good at it and it's really fascinating to me. But there's another reason I want to keep going in economics. I almost feel obligated, because I'm a girl who gets it," she says.

"I think a lot of girls get discouraged from going into it. I want to be another example of a woman in economics."

Dawsey is from Auburn, Alabama, so she gets sports. Really gets sports. She fell in love with Duke when she traveled to central North Carolina for a summer program on the school's campus when she was in junior high, and it never left her. She attended the school as an undergrad on an academic scholarship.

The Blue Devils won a men's basketball national championship in 1991, her senior year of high school, then repeated when she was a college freshman at the school, another of the Cameron Crazies. She earned her Ph.D. at Maryland, itself a school with high-profile sports.

But golf? Yeah, she never really got it. Still doesn't. But she can understand how Avery excels in the sport.

"What separates us from other social sciences that are interested in human behavior is that we're really interested in measurement," she says. "You have to have an attraction to the technique. You have to be meticulous about taking logical steps, and she has that in spades.

"The kind of person who's attracted to that and who's able to be patient and learn those mechanics, it seems like a golfer. It seems like those skills would be just as necessary in golf as they would be in economics. It makes a lot of sense."

And so Avery arrived on campus in August 2016 and immersed herself in the entirety of the college experience like few have in the school's history. It wasn't just academics and athletics. She has a list of service, both on campus and off, that runs of full page.

"If we're putting together a list of names of who could pick up the ball and run with something, Teigan is always on that list," says Cordingley of the Davidson Honors College, who arrived on campus prior to Avery's sophomore year.

"She is someone who will say yes and do something very well. Some students are more for themselves. Teigan is for the betterment of the whole."

And not just within the figurative walls that enclose campus, those that would keep separate the important issues of a student on campus from those people living and working in the community of Missoula.

It was in Avery's sophomore year that Missoula mayor John Engen approached the university, specifically Honors College students, about coming up with a policy solution to address the issue of affordable housing.

It struck home to Avery, because the summer before, she had moved from the dorms to off-campus housing.

"She came to me with her interest in being part of our Quest program, Questions for Undergraduates Exploring Social Topics," says Cordingley. "Even with all the things she was doing, she went all in."

With Engen's office more interested in in-fill than sprawl, Avery and her team focused on ADUs, or accessory dwelling units, most easily pictured as someone's garage becoming an apartment and someone's -- a student's perhaps? -- living space.

After an initial investment to convert the space, it would be income for the homeowner, an affordable place for someone to rent in a location that keeps them closer to the core of the city. What Avery and her team found were impediments that, over the years, had been set in place by the city, things that made it more difficult to achieve something that would benefit Missoula.

They won the challenge and earned an internship in the Office of Housing & Community Development.

"Their pitch was around the policies that needed to change to make the development of ADUs easier for homeowners and more accessible to renters," says Cordingley.

"The outcome of their internship was putting together a guide for Missoulians who wanted to go through the process of getting an ADU approved. That handbook is available."

Everything was going according to plan, just the way Avery likes it. She was a Women's Golf Coaches Association All-American Scholar as a freshman, Academic All-Big Sky as a freshman and sophomore.

She finished with a stroke average of 79.89 as a freshman, ranking fourth on the team after playing in all but one tournament. She played in every tournament as a sophomore, taking more than a stroke off her freshman-year average, finishing at 78.83.

She even harpooned her white whale the summer after her freshman year, winning the Montana State Women's Amateur title.

She was ready for more improvements in her scoring. More A's in the classroom. More service opportunities. More championships. More everything.

Then one day in the summer before her junior year, she noticed a small lump on her neck. She blew it off. Her doctor didn't, and she said the words that bring a sense of dread to anyone who's ever been a patient, awaiting the report, expecting the routine, the all is good, see you next year: I don't like that.

That's how it started, with a warning to prepare, if not for the worst then at least for something that was likely to be anything but routine. "As soon as she said that, I had that feeling. I just knew," says Avery.

They took a biopsy. Avery caddied that afternoon, ferrying around something that weighed her down much more than just a golf bag.

A week passed by. Finally, after a hiking trip to the Jewel Basin, she got word. On a scale of 1 (the best news) to 7 (the worst), she was told she fell in the 5-6 range. They were 90 percent certain she had cancer.

It was thyroid cancer, one of the most benign a person can get, which was encouraging, but it was still the dreaded C word. And what 20-year-old gets cancer anyway? And did that mean she would be at a greater risk for other cancers? And on and on the questions hit, the next one harder than the last.

"It was just devastating," says her mom. "It's like the world falls out from beneath you when it's your child. My dad passed away from cancer. All these things start going through your head."

Nord won't deny it. He had to wear two hats when Avery told him the news, that she had cancer and would undergo surgery in November 2018. "It was tough to hear it and then play the role of both person and coach," he says.

The former wanted to do everything he could for his athlete, to make sure her needs were being met. The latter wondered what it would mean to his roster. Would she ever play again? Did he have to reevaluate his recruiting, would he have to bring in someone else?

"I kind of struggled going back and forth on the role I was playing. I felt like I had to play both. My first thought was to try to talk her into redshirting," he says.

Oh boy. Here's somebody else trying to tell Leila's daughter, blood of her blood, what he thought was best, what he thought she should do. Give ground instead of digging in her heels and fighting? He had no chance.

"She wanted no part of that. She wanted to keep things normal and routine, even though they weren't going to be. She was dealing with a different hand than the rest of the team was dealing with," Nord says.

Of course she was forced to make certain concessions. She was used to donating blood every eight weeks, one donation followed up by scheduling the next, on the first date she would become eligible. Now she was told she was ineligible.

So she put those energies into organizing a blood drive at the Davidson Honors College through the Red Cross. The drive brought in 38 donors.

She had surgery to remove the growth 13 months ago. It was cancerous, as they suspected, and it had spread to some surrounding lymph nodes, which it wasn't supposed to do. That news, all good but with just a dash of lingering doubt -- okay, why are we finding it over here? -- will stick with a girl.

"That fear never goes away. I had my yearly checkup on Nov. 15, a year out from surgery, and I'm cancer-free. With this type of cancer, I know I'll likely never get it again, but there will always be anxiety going into those checkups," she says.

"It's something that's totally out of my control, so worrying about it doesn't do a whole lot for me, but it will always be there in the back of my head." And that's some high-level suffering. Nietzsche would approve.

Here's the thing about Nietzsche. He believed that a person is composed of two distinct parts, a creative one and that which is created. Think: a soul and a body, the latter simply a vessel for the former, a lump of clay ready to be molded.

All that suffering he thought was good for a person? The body is what suffers. It's the mind's job to try to create something from that suffering.

Instead of sitting back and giving in, Avery took her body into her own hands, in a manner of speaking. See her today and she doesn't look necessarily like a golfer. She looks like she could be a member of almost any of Montana's teams, her 5-foot-4 stature notwithstanding.

In other words, she's fit, ripped. She's prepared her body to fight back. Because she's learned through her own studying that five hours of exercise per week is the key for anyone to exponentially decrease the odds of ever having to hear, I don't like that. It's no guarantee, but it's something.

"I really made some lifestyle changes. I eat more healthily, and wellness has become my passion since the diagnosis," says Avery, who turned the idea into her capstone project in the Honors College.

"It's trying to understand academics and exercise and how students frame their decisions to allocate time and what things get in the way of them exercising enough."

This should be the point of the story when the corresponding joy happens, right? That she had a breakout season last spring and posted a career-best stroke average and shook up the Big Sky Conference Championship by earning all-league honors with a top-10 finish?

That she added another Women's Amateur title over the summer? That she crushed it in the fall?

Nope, none of that happened. Then, on Nov. 18, escorted by campus police to the rental she shares with teammate Faith D'Ortenzio and with Nord there for additional support, the officer told her the news: her dad had earlier that day taken his own life.

A guidance counselor and a basketball coach, Jared Avery had made a career, a life, of helping others, in decisions both big and small, giving some students a supportive push toward their dreams, others a helping hand to pull them back on the right track, talking others off the ledge of despair and back to safety.

He saved lives, some literally, others just by keeping them on the path toward graduation. For her dad, it was all about compassion for others, Avery said at his memorial service. His greatest gift was that he turned that compassion for others into belief in them, which they then internalized.

"My dad saved so many kids," she says. "Counselors aren't supposed to have their own problems. He never showed any signs of depression. But you never know what's going on behind someone's eyes. They have a whole world of emotions and experiences you don't know or understand.

"He didn't think he could admit he was having problems, and obviously he was. One day the problems just overwhelmed him, and he wasn't himself. That's the only way I can figure it out. And now he'll never be able to be himself again."

There is another tied-in element to the story. Avery is now the vice president of SAAC, has been since the start of the fall semester, back when her father was able to tell her how proud of her he was. The new Big Sky Conference-wide initiative that each school's SAAC is focusing on this year? Mental health awareness.

A month before her dad took his own life, SAAC received a shipment of bracelets stamped with: Be Strong. Ask for Help. "Compassion for others is hard. Compassion for yourself is harder," Avery said last month at the memorial service at Glacier High. "But compassion for yourself is strength."

Of course Nietzsche never said suffering would lead to joy. Instead he preached that it brought meaning to life. And maybe that's where this has all led, for us and for her.

Avery could have graduated in May, in 2019, but she loves school and the challenges it brings, and she loves the University of Montana too much to want to make it an abbreviated stay. She also loves the idea of graduating in 2020, "you know, like 20/20 vision," she says.

She sees everything clearly now, now that 2019 is soon turning to 2020. It's no longer law or medicine she intends to pursue. She wants to follow in Dawsey's footsteps, perhaps become a professor of economics one day, to become a mentor of young women who've been told they can't or shouldn't or have no business, forever her mother's daughter.

"I see Teigan as a triple threat of a human," says Cordingley. "She a great athlete, an incredible human, and she's a good person.

"It matters tremendously to Teigan to help other people. If her story helps other people, that is what would give it additional meaning to her."

That 20/20 vision also works in the other direction, looking backwards. She sees the version of Teigan Avery who arrived on campus in August 2016, the one who thought she had it all figured out. Little did she know what was to come. If only she could go back and clue her in.

"I'd say, be flexible. The road I've been on is not what I envisioned when I was a freshman. I'd tell her that it's okay, that life throws curveballs at you and you have to adapt to those and adjust your plans," she says.

"Also, I'd tell freshman me to give myself a little more grace and understanding. Have expectations for yourself but don't beat yourself up over things."

Maybe that's what all the suffering has been for. A game plan for success in golf. More important, a game plan for winning in life, courtesy of the 2019 GoGriz.com Person of the Year.

University of Montana Athletics

Players Mentioned

Teigan Avery

Faith D'Ortenzio

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