Justine Jacquillard, tennis
Justine Jacquillard learned a lot from serving as a captain of the Southmoreland girls tennis team.
She also learned a lot in the classroom by compiling a 3.85 grade-point average.
The confluence of the two helped her be selected as the female fall sports honoree in the Centennial Chevrolet Scholar/Athlete Spotlight program. She is a daughter of James and Heidi Jacquillard of Scottdale.
“I was kind of surprised to be named captain, but it was a really great role for me,” she said. “It really showed a lot of my leadership qualities. I’m involved in a lot of clubs in school, but not an officer in any of them, so it was a nice way for me to show my leadership skills.”
She was the No. 1 singles player for coach Jim Kessler’s team, which also shows that she can play the game.
“I don’t know my overall record, but there are a lot of good girls out there,” she said. “I actually won the first singles position last year, but I played at No. 2 because I just wasn’t comfortable with it then. This year, I had to take it. I may be the best player on this team, but I always matched up with the best on other teams and, as I said, there are a lot of amazing tennis players out there. When we played Ringgold, they have a girl who is just amazing. We beat them 4-1 and I was the only one who lost. I liked playing her because she was really sweet. I don’t mind losing to a better player, as long as she’s nice. There were some really great girls who played this year.
“We were one game away from making it to playoffs, so it was disappointing. But we lost three of our best players from last year to graduation, so we came in with the attitude that this season wasn’t going to be good at all, so it turned out pretty well. We didn’t make it to playoffs, but we didn’t expect to make it anywhere close to playoffs. Finishing one game short of playoffs was disappointing, but at the same time we were proud of having made it that far.”
As for her captaincy, Jacquillard took it very seriously.
“We did have five seniors, but the rest of the team was pretty young,” she said. “We had 18 girls on the team. Only the top seven positions play, so the other 11 girls play exhibition and some don’t get to play at all. That can make some of the younger girls feel like they were not part of the team. I took on the role of teaching them that they had to take it seriously because after the five of us seniors are gone there will five spots out of the seven open and waiting for them to take one. Most of them will have a spot next year, but they have to earn it.”
Jacquillard plans to study nursing at either Pitt or Duquesne.
“I have always enjoyed medical things and I’ve had this big dream of being a doctor,” she said. “I’d still love to become a doctor, but I can’t go to college and get a pre-med degree and then not go to med school. Not that I can’t do it, but it’s just so competitive, it’s very difficult. So I decided to study to become a nurse practitioner, which is a step down from being a doctor. Nurse practitioners can have their own practice, they can do almost the same things as a doctor, except a doctor has to sign off on some things, like prescriptions and things like that. The doctors pretty much treat nurse practitioners as equals.”
Jacquillard also discovered that being a nurse practitioner can help her stay closer to her patients.
“I talked to a nurse practitioner who said that she spends more time with patients than a doctor could, so that was very appealing to me. I want to go into pediatric care and I want to be able to spend time with the kids that I’m helping. As a nurse practitioner I can definitely do that more than if I were a pediatrician.”
She isn’t ruling out going to medical school, but that would depend on many factors.
“I just need something to fall back on. I wouldn’t want to go through all of this schooling and not have a job coming out.”
Chances are, with her academic background and her leadership ability, we may be calling her “Dr. Jacquillard” someday.