Cugini didn’t let competition deter her. She did what she always did and still does – she put in the work. The results weren’t immediate, and there were setbacks along the way, but in the end, everything was worth more than what she put in.
“So my freshman year, I didn’t play much,” said Cugini. “It was a hard freshman year. The whole hard reality of ‘Holy crap, I did so well in high school and on my club team, and now I’m at Maryland, and I’m not seeing the field.’
“My sophomore year, I redshirted, and it just so happened that that season, unfortunately, all of those other defenders except for Givens went out with knee injuries.
“When I entered my junior year, there was a spot, and that’s when the scholarship came. I don’t remember the exact amount, but it was definitely not an easy road to get to a scholarship.
But when I earned the scholarship, obviously, it felt more like I had to work for it.”
Cugini would start 17 of the 31 matches during the 2002 and 2003 seasons, but her redshirt senior season in 2004 stands out for multiple reasons.
“I had a couple of tears in my knee before the big one in the preseason of my fifth year,” recalled Cugini. “We were in preseason, scrimmaging each other, and I slid into Anna Sheveland, and my PCL tore off of my shin. It was disgusting. It was an awful injury.
“And then when they did the MRI, they confirmed it was a torn PCL, which was not that common for soccer like the ACLs they see all the time. Doctor Bennett was the team doctor at the time, and he told me this isn’t something that we fix, and you go back, and you play.
“The PCL just keeps your knee from hyper-extending. So he said I can wear a brace that stopped my knee from hyper-extending. But, he also said, if I do that, I was most likely going to tear **** up by playing with the brace. But, if I want to play, it was an option.”
After coming so far, Cugini wasn’t about to let anything stand in her way, including advice from her head coach.
“I remember going to the Cirovski house for a preseason BBQ they used to have, and Shannon said to me, ‘You know, J-Lo, you still have a life to live after soccer. And you can still serve as captain and just stay on our bench, and you don’t have to do this.’
“And of course, I’m 21, going to be 22, and say ‘No. I can do this.’ So I played with it, and I knew when the season was over that Dr. Bennett was going to fix it all. Whatever I damaged, he was going to fix.”
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