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OCU’s Beeler uses volleyball as her escape from ICU nursing job, studies
Lacy Beeler glanced around the court at her teammates and marveled. How could they be so calm?
“All these girls are so casual about this,” she thought.
She may have looked the same as them during that Oklahoma City University volleyball match a couple weeks ago, but she felt like a ball of energy. Her mind raced. Her heart pounded. Her stomach churned.
“It was like I was playing volleyball for the first time,” she said.
It was the first time in a long time — and something she thought might never come again.
On the day Beeler and her OCU teammates open the NAIA national tournament, no one is more grateful for the opportunity to still be playing than the senior outside hitter.
First, the pandemic threatened to completely wipe out her final season, but then after it was pushed back to this spring, an academic-eligibility issue forced her to miss the first 10 matches of the season.
If that wasn’t enough, Beeler has spent the better part of the past year working as a full-time ICU nurse, too. Volleyball is her escape.
“She has maybe a different
appreciation for it than some people do,” OCU coach Kristen Coventon said.
Beeler grew up playing sports. Everyone in her family did. Her mom, Susan, ran track at Arkansas while her dad, Darrell, played baseball at Southeastern Oklahoma State. Her brother Dallas played baseball at Oral Roberts while brother Chase played football at OU, then Stanford.
Beeler starred in volleyball and soccer at Jenks High School, and the college scholarship offers came. But she turned them down.
“You know,” she decided, “I think I’m done.”
Beeler wanted a break, but after a year just going to school at OU, she started to miss sports.
“I missed having that purpose of getting up in the morning and being like, ‘All right, I have practice today,’” she said. “I missed being able to work out that competitiveness. I missed being on the court.”
Beeler spent another year at OU sorting out what she wanted to do, then in the fall of 2017 transferred to OCU to play volleyball and go to nursing school.
A year ago, having gotten her bachelor’s degree in nursing, passed her exams and started work on a master’s degree, she took a job as an intensive care nurse at OU Health.
“I was really nervous to do this whole master’s thing and work and everything,” Beeler said, “because I knew it was going to take a lot from me and then a lot of communication and asking a lot of the people that I will be working with and the master’s program professors and my coach and my teammates.”
But something her dad said kept repeating in her head.
“You’re prepared for something like this,” he said, reminding her of all that she’d juggled in high school. “You might as well go out and do it if you really want to play.”
Beeler really wanted to play. Only a few weeks after she began at OU Health last winter, the pandemic hit. She quickly went from an ICU newbie going through orientation to a nurse in an isolation room alone with three COVID patients.
“If something happens, you’re there by yourself,” Beeler said. “No one really has a free hand.”
It was trial by fire, and it was tough. She cared for extremely sick patients, and many did not survive.
“Then with me … I’m working nights,” she said. “You’re having 24-hour days because you’re trying to work nights, and then you’ve got to go to volleyball practice, and then you’ve got to go to clinical for my master’s degree.
“It was a lot of strain.”
The stress only increased when Beeler learned she had an issue with her academic eligibility. She could continue to practice with the volleyball team, but she couldn’t compete until an appeal was approved by the Sooner Athletic Conference and the NAIA.
No one knew how long that would take. A week? A month? More?
Beeler understood she might be devoting time and energy to a season in which she might only get to play a handful of games. But even with the work she was doing and the pressure she was under, she never considered giving up on playing her final volleyball season.
“I wanted to finish it out,” she said. “Especially with everything going on, with how hard it’s been and how much we’ve been wanting a season. We finally got one, and I was like, ‘There’s no way I can give that up.’”
Then on April 1, a call came from the NAIA.
Beeler’s appeal had been granted. A little over 24 hours later, she was on the court at Panhandle State.
“The lights were brighter,” she said. “The butterflies were there.”
But no one was the wiser.
“It was like she had never stopped, honestly,” Coventon, her coach, said. “I know she was relieved and so excited, but I never saw any nerves. I mean, she just kind of jumped right back into it. “We needed her.”
OCU, which had won eight of its first 10 matches, hasn’t lost since Beeler returned, a trend the Stars hope continues Saturday afternoon in their national tournament opener.
Beeler hopes so, too, since about the only thing her career lacks is a national title.
She’d love nothing more.
Still, she appreciates what she’s already done. The sacrifice. The effort. The tenacity.
“I think it has given me the view of not taking things for granted and understanding each thing I do every day … what it truly means to me,” she said.
“Anything is worth it to be able to play.”
Jenni Carlson: Jenni can be reached at 405-475-4125 or jcarlson@oklahoman.com. Like her at facebook.com/ JenniCarlsonOK, follow her at twitter.com/jennicarlson_ok, and support her work and that of other Oklahoman journalists by purchasing a digital subscription today.