Sam Nichols wasn’t recruited to play soccer at Waynesburg University.

After an ACL injury derailed her senior season in high school, Nichols, who enrolled at Waynesburg mainly due to influence from her brother, Ben, who graduated from Waynesburg in 2016, decided to join the team under first-year head coach Laura Heethuis in her freshman year of 2014.

She ended up starting all 19 games that season, and helped the Yellow Jackets to an appearance in the Eastern College Athletic Conference [ECAC] South Tournament.

By the time Nichols’ Waynesburg career was over, she had started 70 games of the 71 games that the Jackets had played.

Although she didn’t recruit Nichols, it didn’t take Heethuis long to notice her athletic ability.

“We knew from day one seeing her play that she had some gifts that were going to help us,” Heethuis said. “Her pace is something that—you can’t really teach that. That’s God given. So, we knew that was definitely something that was going to help us. So, it was just a matter of each game and going through experiencing it…She gained confidence with it.”

Although Nichols was a midfielder in high school, she moved to center back at Waynesburg, at first working in tandem with Jordan Eicher, who graduated after Nichols’ freshman year.

Starting as a freshman on a squad that had eight seniors, the level of experience of the team made it easier for Nichols to transition to the college game.

“My freshman year when we came here, we definitely had a really good group of girls…,” Nichols said. “We had an older team, and I was definitely used to playing with an older team when it came to freshman year.”

Waynesburg didn’t have a lot of success in Nichols’ final three seasons, with the Jackets never finishing with a winning record. This season, Nichols was one of just five seniors on a team where underclassmen made up a bulk of the production. This past year, Waynesburg started off hot, winning four of its first six games, but stumbled down the stretch, finishing 3-6 in Presidents’ Athletic Conference play.

For Heethuis, Nichols and the rest of the senior class, they have seen the program through ups and downs, and hopefully left it by catching a peek of a promising future.

“They came in not knowing who their coach was,” Heethuis said. “If they were recruited by [former head coach Carl Griffiths], they kind of lost that relationship along the way. So, they came here, hopefully solely for academics, and had a soccer piece along with that. So, they’ve kind of seen things from the very bottom and what we’re continuing to build.”

According the Heethuis, Nichols was a “lead by example” type of player. Although she wasn’t known for her words, Nichols said she was able to get her teammates ready to play.

“In the locker room before games, if our team didn’t seem as excited as it should be, I was kind of the one that [played music] and went around, talked to everybody and got everybody pumped up to play basically,” Nichols said.

Heethuis described Nichols as somebody who wasn’t afraid to speak her mind.

“She is extremely black and white,” Heethuis said. “She’s going to tell you exactly what she’s thinking, she’s going to wear her heart on her sleeve, she’s going to work hard and expect the best out of you, and she’s not going to have a problem calling somebody out and challenging them. So, we definitely saw her grow in those areas, and it’s something that we will miss.”

After Nichols graduates with a degree in criminal justice, she plans on becoming corrections and parole officer at Franklin County PA Corrections and Parole. Since Nichols was so used to playing soccer with the same group of people during her middle and high school years, getting familiar with new teammates was a benefit of deciding to play soccer at a Division III level.

“I definitely would have missed out on the soccer environment and just like new soccer family that I came across,” Nichols said. “All throughout my middle and high school years, I played with the same group of girls. It was just like a fresh start coming in [to Waynesburg] with a new group of girls and starting relationships with them and getting close to them.”