Then & Now: Allison Beatty
Allison Beatty is used to coming up with what can be difficult answers to simple questions.
When asked what she remembers most about her remarkable three- sport athletic career at Mead High School, she was ready.
“Having just awesome teammates, great teammates, and great coaches,” she said. “As I go through (life) people talk about leadership. I had great leadership models, and maybe haven’t even seen as good of leaders since. I was absolutely in a totally unique, totally unprecedented pool of leadership talent. And team camaraderie. Any records I’ve been a part of are absolutely because of that.”
Beatty certainly had her share of records during her three years in high school.
Soccer: A 59-2 record with a state championship as a sophomore in the fall of 1993 and a third-place finish as a senior under coach Dick Cullen.
Basketball: A 78-9 record with a state championship as a senior in 1996 after fifth- and third-place trophies the two previous years under coach Jeanne Helfer.
Track: Second in the javelin as a sophomore followed by two state titles, a personal-record throw of 155-feet, 3-inches that still stands as the city’s best, and third- and first-place team trophies the last two years under coach Annette Pedersen and javelin coach Arne Tyler.
Does one accomplishment mean more than the rest?
“The championships with the teammates that overlapped sports mean the most,” Beatty said. “There’s something about being able to share all the sweat, all the work, all the collective kind of dreaming with the same group. Maybe it makes it bigger, maybe makes it more powerful. There is certainly something about sharing with a group. You don’t have to talk about it because you shared the same thing.”
Her achievements didn’t end there.
After leaving Mead, Beatty threw the javelin for Stanford, finishing second in the Pac-10 meet and earning NCAA All-American honors along the way. After majoring in human biology, she did research at Vanderbilt for three years and then earned Masters degrees in public health and business administration at Boston University.
None of that prepared her to explain the astounding success she had in high school.
“To say I’m amazed by what we accomplished, absolutely,” she said. “I could never hope to reproduce that success. I would never expect that from my children. If I was to go next door and tell someone I was part of all these championships. … It’s a little absurd, to say the least.”
It brought to mind Homer and why he wrote “The Odyssey” “way back in the way back,” she said. “Those wins were never the lasting rewards. … A final record isn’t something worth reminiscing about, but the journey is. People haven’t lost that idea since.”
Beatty tends to strip down all those trophies.
“I think I have more vivid memories of gut-busting practices than I do of most of our championship wins,” she said. “When you’re doubled over, feeling like you’re about to puke, and you hear teammates encouraging you with spare breath they don’t have, you become invincible. … What you get from your teammates is better than all the talent in the world.”
The satisfaction she gets from her life is similar.
Her research at Vanderbilt involved the study of ACL injuries.
“What I found most compelling about the job was I got to work with a whole swatch of people, statisticians, surgeons, patients, to come up with this end product, which was a study to help patients,” she said. “I wasn’t the expert in any one of these fields, although I had been a patient. I like being the glue.”
Not sure if she wanted to do research the rest of her life, Beatty decided to pursue a MPH and was convinced to add the MBA.
Planning to stay in Boston for another year before returning to the Bay Area with her significant other, a doctor, Beatty accepted a business planning and development fellowship at Newton-Wellesley Hospital.
“I’m not a graduate student any more but they still don’t pay me the big bucks,” she said. “I do all the work, get some great opportunities and some great exposures. It’s like an extra year of training they pay me for.
“I get to work with all different kinds of people every day and help them make their jobs easier and better, which often involves making lives better for everyone around them. That’s the great part about healthcare. I never do the same thing two days in a row and I always learn something new every day.
“What’s not to like?”
To fuel an obvious competitive Jones, Beatty has taken up triathlons and marathons, with the Boston Marathon her next challenge. She competed in the inaugural Coeur d’Alene Ironman triathlon but an injury hampered her performance, if not the experience.
“I can’t really recall how uncomfortable I was at mile 130 in Coeur d’Alene because my IT band was about to snap,” she said. “But I do remember a conversation I had with a complete stranger, and how it made those last 10 miles seem to glide by.”
She’s not trying to duplicate her past success, just add memories from competition in an extraordinary life.