At the conclusion of her best semester of soccer, Haley Hopkins was crying in her car.
The Newport Beach, California, native was a key cog in a Vanderbilt team that went 16-4-1 and won the SEC regular season under head coach Darren Ambrose. She was named SEC Freshman of the Year and All-Southeast Region First Team. But she couldn’t pass chemistry.
“I was back home in Cali and just freaking out. I wasn’t used to that sort of individual failure,” she recalled. “I still vividly remember being on the phone with Darren and having to be talked down. He said, ‘Nobody’s path to success is the same, and it’s never linear.’ It was exactly what I needed to hear, and I felt the support of everyone in the program.”
That support starts at the top and stretches throughout every pillar of the Vanderbilt soccer program. Hopkins still name-drops long-time trainer Sara Melby, who helped her rehab a season-long injury that forced her to redshirt. And she mentions her alumnae mentor, Molly Burgdorf, whom she still connects with from time to time.
“It was a super casual relationship at first, just learning about each other,” Hopkins said. “She was a Nashville native, and she and her family would have me over for dinner. It was just nice to have somebody else that wasn’t too close to the program but understood what it takes.”
The mentorship program, dubbed “Pitch to Profession,” or just “P2P,” began in 2006 at Penn, where Ambrose coached for 15 years. It started with the wrestling program and grew to be a department-wide initiative, where they would purchase a software subscription and use questionnaires to help generate connections between student-athletes and alumni.
When he came to Vanderbilt in 2015, Ambrose found it much easier to implement and run the program in house, on the back of alumnae who relished involvement.
“Instead of having to pay for a service and kind of organize the whole thing ourselves, I just took it to our alumnae and tried to gauge interest,” Ambrose explained. “It took off very quickly because everyone was so eager to give back.”
Student-athletes are paired with alumnae based on educational interests or career aspirations, making the program’s value multi-dimensional. Players can learn from current professionals in their desired industries and grow their network, but as Hopkins found in Burgdorf, they also have a sounding board about the Vanderbilt student-athlete experience beyond just their teammates and coaches.
Having lived to tell the story of her first failed class, Hopkins, 27, serves as a full-circle example of the impact of P2P. She retook chemistry and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in medicine, health & society in 2021 before receiving a master’s degree at the University of Virginia. After scoring 56 goals in college, she was drafted 11th overall in the 2023 NWSL Draft and currently serves as the president of the Players’ Association.
Now, she pays it back to the program in a mentor role of her own, first with Maci Teater and currently with sophomore Reagan Pentz.
“Maci was essentially a buttoned-up pro by the time I began mentoring her. I was mostly just advising on different leagues, agencies, workout plans, stuff like that,” said Hopkins, who currently plays for the Kansas City Current. “With Reagan, it’s much more of a true mentorship where she has an entire collegiate career ahead of her, and I can kind of help mold her into a great professional.”
It’s that transition in mindset, from student-athlete to young professional, that Ambrose is always looking to streamline. Vanderbilt has quickly become a major pipeline to professional soccer, with 13 alumnae spanning leagues in seven countries. Among many changes in the collegiate landscape, players are thinking like professionals progressively earlier, and Ambrose’s squad remains at the forefront of the new era.
One aspect of a student-athlete's journey to the pros, for example, is when they actually begin their career. In a worldwide sport without a typical collegiate player draft, a soccer player’s graduation date is a more important factor than for many of her peers.
“It’s much harder to find a team that’s looking to sign players in May, when the season is halfway over,” Hopkins explained of the NWSL. “The December graduation date aligns much cleaner with the professional cycle.”
It’s a massive detail that can easily be overlooked, or at least not considered until it’s too late to act on. Pentz credits Hopkins for bringing particulars like that to her attention, much earlier than most student-athletes even think of going pro.
“It’s something that you’d never really come up with yourself. You’re focused on just getting through each semester of classes,” Pentz said. “Haley’s been so honest about the pros and cons of all the different decisions you make in college.”
The professional development that the mentorship drives extends far beyond the pitch. When fifth-year goalkeeper and captain Alexa Gianoplus gained an interest in the business of medicine, she was “re-paired” with Lauren Demarchi (‘20), who is a payor partnerships manager at Equip, a mental health treatment provider.
The tandem is a perfect pairing, both being goalkeepers in addition to their shared professional interests. Unlike the early days of Commodore mentors, Demarchi also played under Ambrose.
“Her being a recent graduate and not that much older than me, she has been great to connect with and just bounce things off of,” Gianoplus said. “She’s really good at the little things: helping clean up a resume, improving interview skills and just leveraging all the advantages of being a student-athlete. As someone who is still trying to figure it all out, she is always a great phone call.”
On the precipice of a new season, the Commodores’ outlook is promising as ever. Their No. 5 ranking in both national polls is the highest ever to open a season, and the number of alumni in the pros only continues to rise. On the field, the future extends only as far as the next opponent. But off the field, the program’s success is equally driven by the path to come.
Part of the intrigue of sports is its transience. Student-athletes from across the world cross paths at one place, for one timeframe, with one shared mission. No path is linear, and each is unique. But when it comes through West End, it widens. And you don’t walk it alone.