Next stop: Med school
Stonington softball great Mallory Kane excited about accomplishing another major challenge at UConn
Her father would preach to Mallory Kane and her siblings. Don't be ordinary. Do something extraordinary.
There were times the only frame of reference Kane, a 2016 Stonington High School graduate, had for that goal was softball. She practiced four and a half hours per day with her travel ball team sometimes, all defense, so that she could track down any fly ball hit to the outfield from any angle. She earned an opportunity to play at Division I Lafayette College in Easton, Pa.
And then her sophomore year in college she suffered a career-ending injury, a broken sesamoid bone in her foot. She couldn't run for a year and a half.
It was then, without softball, that Kane, already on a pre-med track at Lafayette with a major in neuroscience, became perhaps her most extraordinary.
Aside from her classwork and labs, she volunteered at the Lehigh Valley chapter of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. She undertook 30 hours of training as a crisis counselor, volunteering on a crisis text line. She became an emergency medical technician. She wrote her senior thesis on pediatric epilepsy. She studied tirelessly for her Medical College Admission Test (MCAT). She interviewed for admittance to medical school at seven different programs.
She got admitted to medical school at three universities, including UConn, where she will begin Aug. 12.
The exhilaration in her voice is palpable.
"It's so exciting," the 22-year-old Kane, a 2020 Lafayette grad, said in a telephone interview this week. "I feel like I've been working for as long as I can remember to achieve this goal. I feel like I'm the luckiest person ever. I feel like everything is coming together. Being in medical school will be such a special feeling.
"... They say you should have at least one interview by Oct. 15 and
it was Dec. 20 that I got my first interview. After that, they just kept coming. The first was (New York University), which is crazy; it was the highest-ranked institution I interviewed at. I had read books on how to prepare yourself how to interview. I hadn't actually experienced the stress ... being interviewed by physicians is a very stressful experience. It's a very special experience."
Afterward, she called her dad and mom, Bill and Sue Kane, back in Mystic.
"I told them how special it felt," she said. "I felt like I was on a different mission and now there were all these people I related to. It was very motivating."
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When Stonington softball coach Ann-Marie Houle first met Kane, she was the little sister of all-state pitcher-outfielder Theresa Kane, a member of the Class of 2014, with Mallory not yet in high school.
"We met her as Theresa's sister," Houle said. "She had streaks of pink in her hair. I thought, 'This is not Theresa.' That was funny. (Mallory will) be so mad at me for saying this. I thought, 'This one's a little bit spunky."
Theresa, now Houle's assistant coach, went on to play at Division I Georgetown. Mallory went on to hit lead-off for Stonington, earning Class M all-state honors for three consecutive seasons as the Bears' center fielder.
A left-handed slap-hitter, Mallory batted .620 as a senior with a single-season program record 57 hits and 36 runs scored. She hit .555 for her career with an astounding 181 hits and 141 runs scored. And yet Houle attests to the fact that Kane was never pretentious.
"When I coach, they're people," Houle said. "That's probably why I loved Mallory. My love and respect for her had nothing to do with statistics. She's kind, so funny.
"When I think about (my son) Josh's doctors, what you like about them, they're nurturing and yet they have the backbone to be a doctor. Mallory makes the hard choices when she has to. She hasn't made easy choices. She's made the hard choices and made it look easy."
When Kane found out in April she was accepted at medical school, she FaceTimed Houle to tell her.
"It's so fun as a coach," said Houle, whose 17th season this spring never happened due to the COVID-19 crisis. "These are the moments that make you so proud. She's kicking butt. She's just the whole package."
Kane started 19 games in left field as a freshman at Lafayette, batting .293. She hit .500 with runners in scoring position. She didn't make an error.
Kane said she still dreams about softball. Her dad taught her everything she knows about the game. Her travel team, the Rhode Island Thunder Gold under coach Dave Lotti, afforded her opportunities to showcase her talent in tournaments across the country.
She believes that background is part of what brought her from a timid Little Leaguer to a confident young woman who knows what to say to individuals as young as 12 and 13 who text her on the crisis hotline.
Kane will soon be honored in a white coat ceremony as she begins medical school, a rite of passage meant to welcome students to the practice of healthcare.
"I wanted to be the one up at the plate," Kane said. "I wanted to be the one diving into home or catching a fly ball. I craved that pressure. I wasn't someone who shied away from that.
"I think there's something to be said for people who want to be the ones. We're on a battlefield right now with COVID and hospitals. Somebody has to do it. Somebody has to step up. I didn't always know what I wanted to do but I knew I wanted to make a difference. I just kind of found myself in science. This is how I can make a difference."
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Kane describes the arduous process of studying for and taking the MCAT, a 9-hour exam needed for admittance to medical school. It's broken up into four sections: chemistry and physics, critical analysis and reasoning, biology and biochemistry and, finally, psychology and sociology. There is a 10-minute break between each discipline.
"Oh, my goodness," Kane said by way of an opening to her explanation. "It's absolutely crazy what they expect. The MCAT, it's extremely intense. I took it in Warwick, R.I., at a testing center. I spent from 8-5 staring at the computer. I studied so long, for months."
Her first practice score wasn't want she expected, which motivated her, she said.
By the time she took the actual test, she scored a 516, which Kane said placed her between the 94th and 95th percentile.
"I took the test and then I had to wait a month and a half to get my results," she said. "After the test I came home and I thought, 'It was awful. It was so much harder than the practice test.' I was so nervous. When I found out my score, we were all just crying; there were so many tears."
Just like the hours she spent sprinting after fly balls, studying for entry into medical school required the same level of preparation, Kane said. For example, the critical analysis portion of the MCAT proved to be her most difficult challenge.
"It was all passage-based with tons of background information. To understand anything the passage says ... that was my worst score on the practice one. Like, 'How am I ever going to figure this out?' she said. "That's what I did every single night, force myself to read history articles.
"I got 99th percentile on that section, one point away from a perfect score. It was from the practice . ... Preparation is what leads to good performance, being willing to out-prepare people. I was 5-foot-nothing, 102 pounds at our first weigh-in (freshman year for softball). I was the smallest person in the Patriot League.
"I wasn't going to make it unless I out-prepared."
Kane chose UConn because of its proximity to home, as well as for what she calls a "personality fit."
She is interested in narrative medicine, in which she could use her background as an English minor to help be more attuned to her patients, but she won't need to decide her specialty at UConn for a few more years.
All Kane knows is she's embarking on something that's out of the ordinary.
"They changed the Stonington softball program forever. That can never be disputed ... not for any fame, they never cared about that," Houle said of Mallory, as well as older sister Theresa. "(Bill) wanted them to be great and I agree with that.
"You're only in this life one time; you want to be extraordinary. That puts her on the path to where she is now."
v.fulkerson@theday.com
Editor's note: This is the seventh and final story in an occasional series about former local athletes who went on to be part of the medical profession.