How Nora Achieved Her Dream of Playing Overseas
When chronic Lyme disease sidelined the former NCAA athlete and coach, TeamGLEAS student-athlete Nora Campbell's life instantly changed. After years of recovery, she decided to move her life abroad and choose a year of adventure.
After a terrifying battle with Lyme disease early in her coaching career, Nora fought to regain her strength and walk again. "I was playing and then followed up coaching at a school I played at. I was a younger coach playing with the team; you have the boundaries of where you can participate and practice in a more physical way. A year and a day after I stopped playing fully, I woke up with my knees the size of my head and was diagnosed with chronic Lyme disease. I felt like I was no longer an athlete. [I] couldn't walk, I had a permanent IV line in, but having that team around me being supportive friends and the determination and resilience drilled into us being athletes sets you up to move past things like this. I was not accepting this, them saying I wouldn't walk anymore."
Nora says she knew then that basketball would not be in her life in that manner anymore. Her hard work and dedication would prove that theory wrong. "Now I have such a beautiful experience getting to be in a foreign country, getting my master's really focusing on school, and I get to play basketball in a healthier, relaxed sense on top of that, it's like a DREAM. Is this where I live? Is this what I'm doing?" Nora's schedule is much more relaxed than that of an NCAA school in the US. Practice two times a week, no preseason, one game a week. She says the first game of the season, they were still learning plays.
TikTok made her sign up; she thought competing and studying again felt like a luxury, but it also felt like something that was probably fake. Seven years after Nora learned about her diagnosis, she says she had already built a whole career she was ready to change. "I don't remember signing up for TG," she says, laughing. She remembers thinking, "Wouldn't that be the dream!" But when she started getting replies from coaches, she realized TeamGLEAS was a reality. "It felt like perfect timing because it was in a transition period in my life. I wasn't interested in what I was doing and felt pigeonholed for opportunities. Two birds, one stone." So, in September, she packed her bags and flew across the Atlantic to the UK for the year.
A Marketing Communications major, Nora says the balance between academic and athletic postgraduate work differs from that of her undergraduate days. "I really enjoyed the academic aspect the first time around, but there was definitely more socializing…. now, having more life experience and perspective, it has been such a wonderful experience."
Her current program has a mix of 100-person lecture halls and small 20-person seminars. "It's a huge time commitment difference of what we experienced in America in undergrad," she says, "I have the time to have that experience with my teammates, and I also have the time to have that experience with my classmates. "This is just a different culture surrounding basketball where I do have those commitments, but I do get to go study with my friends, or I get to have lunch and discuss what we did in class today, making it a more balanced experience."
When TG asked Nora if she had any advice for any student-athletes out there wondering if this experience is for them, she said (we'll save you the all-caps level of excitement, even though we absolutely loved it), "Do it. Do it now or forever wish you had! Start doing the process; it is once in a lifetime. You have one year to go live. Start saving up and just do it now. I'm so grateful that I saw TeamGLEAS on TikTok. I just keep thinking, how cool am I? I just feel like the coolest. I'm proof." We agree, but we're also a little biased.
When Nora explained, "I will say I am not a very brave person in real life," we obviously didn't believe her after everything she had been through to get to this moment. She meant that she wasn't necessarily an adventurer, and this wasn't in her comfort zone. She is also very close to her family, making it hard to leave home. So close, in fact, she refers to her nephews as "besties that her sister made." Still, Nora has taken this experience and made it one for a lifetime. She has taken trips all over the world, played basketball for another year, and will return to the US at the end of the summer with a master's degree in hand. We made a bet that she won't ever come back stateside, but the jury is still out on that! For now, we are endlessly proud of Nora and her incredible comeback story. After all, life ought to be lived.
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