It’s a gray day in early October and Lauren Stollar is signing backpacks.
Vidas Field sits a dozen blocks from Drexel University’s campus. The field is named for Vince Vidas, an alumnus who played on the Drexel football team that hasn’t existed in over four decades; today, the field played host to the women’s soccer team.
It’s a bleak afternoon. The threat of rain is omnipresent, the gray clouds rolling one by one over the apartment complex framing the pitch. The day started gray and stubbornly refused to change, the sky matching the steely silver of the bleachers at Vidas.
This is not what Lauren Stollar is used to. This is not where she came from. This temperature is decidedly too cold.
A crowd of about 150 braved the blustery west Philadelphia afternoon to watch the Alumni Day contest, and a couple dozen are now waiting in the field-side pavilion, eager to greet their sons, daughters, brothers, sisters and friends.
Stollar has a writer from her school’s independent newspaper, me, waiting to meet her for the first time. She has a sweaty uniform to remove, navy blue sweats to don, a postgame meal to scarf, teammates to laugh with. She has homework to finish.
But right now she’s signing the backpacks of elementary school soccer players, girls who want to be just like her when they grow up, and that’s what she’s focused on. She’s smiling at the girls, one by one, making small talk, doling out her signature.
She’s not focused on the food the rest of her body is desperately reaching for or the 20-year-old waiting by the fence with a recorder.
Stollar is there, now, in the moment. She’s in no rush. She has no family waiting for her in the pavilion. Her parents are five thousand miles away in Honolulu, where she grew up.
As the first player from Hawaii in Drexel soccer history, Stollar is thousands of miles from home.
When she finishes signing each and every backpack, she greets me with a smile and a handshake.
She’ll be right out, she says.
In Hawaiian, Honolulu means “sheltered harbor.” To beach-starved Americans sprawled across the 48 contiguous United States, it means vacation. To the roughly 400,000 people currently living in the largest city on the island of Oahu — and to the thousands of dislocated Honolulu residents, including Stollar — it means home.
Stollar was born on the island, a native Hawaiian; her mother, Cynthia, was the same, born and raised in Hawaii. Her parents met on the island, working together in the years immediately following their college days. Her father, Michael, played soccer for Tufts University before fortuitously finding his way to the far-away islands and meeting what would turn out to be much more than a colleague.
“It’s kind of weird how my dad ended up in Hawaii,” Stollar says, brushing stray strands of hair out of her eyes, the wind still relentless. She chooses not to elaborate. She’s perfectly content with the way her family shook out on Honolulu, her home.
When she was young she spent her time basking in the sun and venturing to the nearby beaches. She essentially lived the picturesque Hawaiian childhood, the one kids all over Kansas can only daydream about — well, almost; she never learned to surf. She can stand up on the board, she says with a laugh, but that’s about it.
Her high school, Punahou School, sits just over a mile and a half from the southern coast of Honolulu and Magic Island Lagoon and a mile and a half, in the opposite direction, from Puu Ualakaa state park.
The Lagoon’s waters dance an idyllic azure. The views from atop Puu Ualakaa, a popular hiking destination, offer a stunning view of the entire island of Honolulu.
“You could just drive a little bit to get to nice hikes, or just drive a little to get to the beach,” Stollar says.
There are precious few places in the world that look like Hawaii, but, of course, a younger Stollar didn’t take notice.
“I didn’t think it was anything special because I grew up there. I didn’t really know anything else,” she admits.
Children never truly see their childhood home as special. There’s always a greener field, a bluer ocean.
That is, until they leave.
Stollar now openly acknowleges she made the same mistake.
“I definitely took it for granted, growing up there,” she explains, “because now I get kind of homesick. It’s definitely a special place.”
With the Honolulu Bulls, Stollar’s travel team during her time on Oahu, she traveled all over the world. She had the chance to visit California when she was young, and while she enjoyed it, she wasn’t floored by the Pacific Coast the way Northeasterners tend to be.
When I asked her where else she’s traveled, she wrings out a laundry list of popular vacation destinations: Morocco, England, France, Canada, Mexico, Denmark, Germany, Italy.
Some, like Morocco, were simply for pleasure, when she traveled to the northwestern tip of Africa last summer with a friend.
Others, like Germany and Denmark, were for competition. At 13 she traveled with the Bulls to play in a massive tournament, the Dana Cup, against a mess of budding international soccer players. She met other teenagers from all across Europe. She shook hands with German boys. She stood next to players from Denmark who were, as she remembers seven years later, much taller than she.
It didn’t matter where she went, who she met. Stollar smiled and shook her head once more when I asked her if anything held a candle to her home island.
“Nothing,” she said, “compares to Hawaii.
“It’s paradise.”
Stollar is an engaging participant in conversation. She constantly brandishes a disarming smile, and during our entire time together she remained fully focused on the topic at hand, not preoccupied with other thoughts.
Perhaps it stems from her time spent lapping the waves of southeastern Oahu. After all, Honolulu doesn’t just translate to “sheltered harbor.” It also means “calm port.”
Yet as calm and pleasant as she is at face, Stollar is equally busy inside, if not more so.
A large chunk of her time is spent playing soccer, the sport she came to Drexel to pursue, the one she loves to play. She’s always been a midfielder; distributing, directing, protecting. She said in her days in Honolulu she wasn’t a big goal scorer, more prone to holding back and focusing on the passing aspect of the midfield position.
That all changed when she arrived in University City. In her freshman year she scored two goals and one assist. In her sophomore year she tacked on a trio of markers and another assist as the number two scorer on the team. This year she has four goals and an assist, and is the third-highest scorer on the team.
Stollar has turned her once-defensive mindset in the middle of the field into a sturdy, prodding attack; while she’s third on the team in total points this year, she has by far the best shooting percentage on the team. Her four goals have come on just 19 shots; her two teammates ahead of her, seniors Megan Hammaker and Melissa Chapman, have scored a combined 10 goals on a combined 91 shots.
The sprightly midfielder laughs when she thinks about the way her game has changed since her adolescence.
“Coming to college I guess my mindset changed,” she says, like she had no control over the matter, “and I kind of wanted to step it up a little bit and be more attack-minded.”
Her coach, Ray Goon, has encouraged and empowered her budding scoring ability. He doesn’t want her to move up near the end of the game, when the team is focused on protecting its own end, but she takes her chances when she can.
When I point out that her two best scoring chances of the afternoon came in overtime, she laughs and offers an admitting, “I know!”
Coach’s orders be damned. Stollar wanted to score, and it was her favorite time of the game. She’s developed a knack for dramatic goals; in her three years, she has picked up four game-winners.
But at Drexel, students are never one-dimensional.
Stollar plays soccer, but she’s also majoring in health sciences, and wants to be a nurse practitioner when she graduates in 2017.
“I have to become [a registered nurse] first, which is just a regular level nurse, so I’m working towards that,” she interjects, explaining that she’s not as close to her goal as it sounds. There’s still plenty of work for her to do.
Because she didn’t have enough on her plate.
Stollar completed her first co-op experience this past spring and summer cycle, working at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. She says she had a great experience, but looks slightly miffed when she says that she wasn’t actually able to interact with patients since she’s just starting out.
“I definitely liked being on the hospital floor, getting to see things,” she says, with an uptick in her voice. She’s ready for more.
She’s balancing a hefty athletic schedule and an intensive, exhaustive major, but Stollar looks all the more chipper after playing nearly two hours of soccer. A healthy lifestyle and healthy eating helps, but surely, it can’t be this easy?
Actually, it can. At least for her.
She says it’s been pretty manageable so far, and allows herself a quick pause of relief. She probably doesn’t think about just how busy she is on a daily basis. She doesn’t have enough time to think about things like that.
A teammate of hers, she says, isn’t faring as well.Nursing majors have clinicals, which they have to attend at 6:30 a.m., but the team practices at roughly the same time in the morning. Some days she attends clinicals, some days she attends practice.
“It’s really hard,” she admits, but she doesn’t look dejected. She just smiles. She always smiles, because to her, there are always positives. Stollar said Goon has been extremely understanding, helping her find a balance that works. She points out that this season, at least up until early October, hasn’t involved too much travel yet, which makes striking that balance much easier.
But no matter the positives she can find, there’s no denying it. Stollar is busy. We were halfway through our conversation when I realized just how lucky I should feel to have snared 30 minutes of her time. I had a feeling that scheduling a follow-up interview wouldn’t be nearly as easy.
If she’s not studying, she’s playing, and it’s probably best that way. As long as she keeps busy, she doesn’t have time to remember that she misses home.
Michael Stollar was the captain of the 1980 Tufts University soccer team, and he put the ball in motion for Lauren from a young age. He would take her and her little sister, Dani, outside when they were children and kick the ball around with the two of them.
“He definitely started me and my sisters out young,” Stollar explains, reminiscing. “He would go out and kick around with us, and then we started playing for these smaller-league teams and stuff, and then we just grew a love for the game. It was really nice having him — he knows the game, too, so it was nice to kind of have him coach us along the way and give us pointers.”
Back then, it was just simple ball in the yard. Soccer is one of the more popular sports in Honolulu, but the entire state doesn’t have a single major professional sports team.
When Lauren and Dani began playing in the smaller leagues, the two were separated by age because Lauren was two years older. But Dani showed such a knack for the game that she would often play up with the next age group, Lauren’s. The two played on the Bulls together, and played for the Punahou School women’s soccer team. They were both midfielders. On an island so reminiscent of paradise, playing soccer with her younger sister improved on perfection.
“It was really fun playing with her,” Stollar says. She’s still smiling, but she’s not looking at me now. She’s gazing at an indiscriminate speck on the metallic blue table. This isn’t like talking about her time with Drexel, or her major, or anything trivial like that. Her time playing with her sister as a child, and as a teenager, mattered more to her than she can explain. When she talks about it now, she’s home.
“We would just click,” she says. She’s drifting back to the island, back home.
Dani is at Harvard University now, playing soccer for the Crimson. She followed her sister to the East Coast, and compared to the distance between Philadelphia and Hawaii, the two siblings are practically next-door neighbors.
Stollar’s eyes light up again, the same shade of aquamarine I suspect Honolulu’s pristine waters shine, when I asked how her sister likes Harvard.
“She loves it,” Lauren says. “She says it’s pretty hard with school and everything, obviously, but soccer-wise she loves the team.”
Like sister, like sister.
When the Crimson paid a visit to the University of Pennsylvania for a good, old-fashioned Ivy League rubdown in late September, Lauren watched her sister help Harvard top the Quakers, 3-0.
Lauren’s parents were able to visit Philadelphia at the beginning of the season, watching one of the Dragons’ scrimmages and a 2-1 win over Villanova University in late August. She didn’t attempt a single shot, but her team won. It was her day to play the defensive midfielder, her game from home as her parents sat in the stands and cheered her on, a slice of Honolulu in eastern Pennsylvania.
“It was really nice to have them here,” Stollar says. “It’s a pretty far plane ride. I think it’s 12 hours if you go direct.”
Now she’s thinking about the distance again, and we change the subject.
It’s still cold and gray and windy and completely the opposite of Hawaii as our sit down draws to a close. I know I’ve already taken up too much of her time; a woman as busy as she can’t spare 30 minutes for every writer interested in Hawaii. That’s what the Internet is for.
Still, I can’t help but ask the one question that’s begging to be asked, the one that must be asked.
When she graduates, will she go back home?
She pauses. Expectedly, it’s the longest pause of the afternoon.
Finally she breaks the silence. “That’s a tough one,” she says. “I’ve definitely been considering it.”
She says she doesn’t know.
“I definitely like the big city here, and I like how there’s a lot of job opportunities with CHOP and stuff like that.”
She says she doesn’t know again.
“But Hawaii is just Hawaii. It’s paradise.”
She says she doesn’t know for a third time.
“You can’t really trade that for anything.”
This time she doesn’t say it.
I think she knows.
Colophon
Photographs Courtesy
- to-hawaii.com
- Jolie Whitten-Hannah
- Kyle Nishioka
- Ken Chaney, The Triangle
Special thanks to Lauren Stollar for agreeing to be interviewed for this article.
Article Design and Layout by Noel Forté
Reported and Authored by Adam Hermann