The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Keegan’s competitiveness serves her well in life
Division I college sports are the ultimate dream of promising high school athletes and their parents.
While most find the odds are against them, those who make it can reap lifelong rewards beyond turning pro.
Kris Fisher Keegan, a 1989 Torrington High School graduate being inducted into this year’s Torrington Athletic Hall of Fame, played Division I women’s soccer; the effects still ring in a phone conversation from her car earlier this week.
She’s on her way home to West Hartford after a long day of mediation at a Hartford law firm as vice president and general counsel for a division of PerkinElmore.
“The law profession remains a male-dominated field,” she says. “When women rise in professional ranks, usually you find they were sports-minded as kids.
“I’ve always been ubercompetitive, but in sports you also learn leadership and how to adapt,” she says.
“I loved sports; I was a tomboy growing up,” she says. “My friends and I played on boys teams until we were 12 or 13 because there were no girls teams then.
“The boys would come after us and knock us down.”
Keegan was undoubtedly a prime target not only because she is female, but because she’s very, very good.
She began playing soccer “at a very young age,” started basketball in elementary school and tennis as a freshman in high school, all with the support of parents Marietta and Frank, who never missed a game.
By her senior year, Keegan was two-time AllState in soccer and the Connecticut Girls Soccer Coaches Association’s Player of the Year; AllNVL honorable mention captain of a Raider NVL/ NVL Tournament championship basketball team; All-NVL in tennis for three years, NVL singles champion for two and a key to another Raider NVL/NVL Tournament championship team.
“Soccer is definitely more physical than people think,” Keegan says. “The endurance, physicality and sports IQ it requires tends to translate well into other sports.
“In my senior year, there were multiple DI girls soccer players across the state. We always say it was a special birth year,” she laughs.
The College of William and Mary recruited Keegan. Division I pre-season was a mild shock but the competition was not.
“I wasn’t self-motivated in my own training because everything came easy, so three-a-day’s in college were new,” she says. “My teammates were mentally and physically stronger, so I had to catch up.”
It didn’t take long. She was William & Mary’s co-Rookie of the Year as a freshman, Female Scholar Athlete of the Year as a senior and first team Adidas AllAmerican.
“I wasn’t bigger than other players and I wasn’t faster, but I was smarter,” says Keegan, who graduated cum laude with a degree In government.
A center midfielder who switched to outside back, “My sports IQ let me read the angles and told me where I should be.”
Law school at Northwestern University beckoned. Then the intrinsic DI rewards kicked in, first professionally, then in family life.
“At the end of college, after 15 years of soccer, I was ready to walk off the field,” Keegan says. “I gave everything I could and it gave back.”
Traits that make a Division I athlete don’t disappear with the cleats. And the results go beyond the confidence, intelligence and competitiveness required in a field like law.
Keegan met her husband, Gil, at William and Mary, where he played Division I tennis for a year. They now have three teenage sons, the oldest a freshman in college.
All three of the boys are athletic. Does a Division I background nudge Kris and Gil into the vast pool of parents with sports ambitions for their kids? Quite the opposite. “We don’t have to live vicariously through our kids the way some parents do,” Keegan says.
“A lot of parents don’t have realistic expectations. We can just sit back and encourage them to do their best instead of making it more work than play.”
Nevertheless, like parents everywhere, the Keegans spend much of the time they can squeeze out of busy careers, watching and coaching their kids play sports.
One more distinction: They learned how to cope with a frantic schedule a long time ago while playing Division I sports in college.