It’s awfully hard to find a hole in Nikki Segovia’s resumé, athletic or otherwise.
On the soccer pitch, the 18-year-old Abbotsford native has succeeded at every level. She won a trio of provincial titles during her early teenage years with her club team, Surrey Pegasus. She helped Team B.C. to a national U14 championship. She’s been identified as a national pool player by the Canadian Soccer Association at the U16 level.
Most recently, she’s trained with the prestigious Vancouver Whitecaps residency program, and landed a soccer scholarship from UBC.
How Segovia managed to accomplish all of that while maintaining honour roll marks throughout her four years at Yale Secondary is somewhat mind-boggling.
Consider her senior-year schedule.
After classes during the day at Yale, Segovia hops in the car and drives to Burnaby for a two-hour training session with the Whitecaps at Simon Fraser University. Then it’s back home to Abbotsford to attack a mountain of homework, and perhaps maintain relationships with her friends if she has some spare time.
“No one really understands, when you play at this kind of level, what your lifestyle’s like,” Segovia noted with a wry grin. “When I come home I’m pretty exhausted.”
The scholarship from UBC is the payoff for all that hard work, but oddly enough, Segovia never pictured herself playing CIS soccer. Her goal, until recently, was to take her talents south of the border.
“Initially when the head coach, Mark Rogers, asked me to play for UBC, I was like, ‘No way. I’m getting out of Vancouver, I’m getting out of Canada,’” Segovia said with a chuckle. “I’m pretty adventurous, I like to travel, and I felt the soccer level would be better in the NCAA.”
Segovia had NCAA suitors, but she reconsidered when four of her Whitecaps residency teammates committed to the T-Birds. She feels the level of education in Canada will be higher, without sacrificing much in terms of soccer quality.
The versatile Segovia is capable of playing any of the four spots on the back line, but she’ll likely play on the wing at UBC.