By Njeri Jackson

Spring sports are right around the corner for Tuscarora students. James Rollison is one of these students. For those that don’t know Rollison, he has been playing varsity soccer all four years of high school and has been playing soccer since he was four years old. Here’s what he had to say about his life with soccer.

“I got into soccer because my parents put me in a youth rec team once I was old enough to do something just because they wanted me to get active and stuff,”  Rollison says. “My mom played soccer when she was in school, so I think my parents thought it would be a good idea and a lot of kids I was friends with were going to be on the same team,” he added.

“It [soccer] has given me a lot of opportunities in life,” he goes on to say, “I’ve been able to make a lot of friends with my teammates, some of my best friends are my teammates. I’ve known them for years just because of soccer. They go to different schools, and I wouldn’t have known them if I didn’t play soccer.”

“My coaches and my teammates have helped me get to where I am, but it probably mostly  goes to my parents and my family,” he says when commenting about how he got to the place he is. 

“They [parents and family] were the ones that always drove me to practices and games even when they were hours away. They were the ones that were hard on me when they needed to be hard on me and always supported me when I needed to be important. They always show up to my games, so I think they are pretty much the main motivation for why I play.”

“Some people have role models like players, and I obviously have some of those but I don’t really want to be them, I want to be myself, and they’re the ones that help me be myself,” he says. 

With all this support Rollison has had from his family, coaches, and fellow teammates, he has decided to take the next step with soccer, and decided to commit to a school to play in college.

“I committed to Mary Washington. It’s a D3 (division 3) school in Fredericksburg, so I’m staying in Virginia,” he states. 

“Other than the cost, it’s not that expensive, it’s a public school in Virginia. I liked how it wasn’t too close, but it wasn’t too far away from home, so it’s only like an hour and forty-five minutes so I could easily drive up on the weekend and drive back down.”

“They have a really strong team. They’ve been in their conference championship for like the last six years and they’ve won in three years in a row in that time, and for a D3 team, they’re as good as D1 teams they play. They played against strong teams like George Mason, Longwood, or even UVA last year,” he adds.

“The coach really seems to know what he’s doing, and he really liked me and gave me a chance and I went down to campus and liked what I saw there.”

Rollison goes on to further explain the recruitment process and the difficulties he had due to the pandemic.

“It was a lot more difficult than previous recruiting classes because of Covid. Everything kind of got pushed back like a year and a half. So usually early recruiting starts late sophomore year or right at the beginning of junior year, but Covid kind of pushed things back” he remarks “there’s less spots for incoming freshmen, so it was a lot more difficult than I was expecting, ‘cause no one really expected Covid to happen of course.”

“ It takes a lot of time and effort, and my parents made me do everything by myself, so I had to write all my emails, make all my highlight videos, but I mean it all worked out in the end.” 

Now that senior year is coming to an end for Rollison and he preps for his next steps at Mary Washington, he reflects on his last season playing for Tuscarora, a team he’s been part of for years.

“I’m ready for it. I mean it’s going to be sad when it ends, and I’m not really looking forward to that now ‘cause I just want to enjoy myself in the moment, but I’m looking forward to representing the school one last time, and playing with all my friends,” he states.

“A bunch of these kids I’ve been playing with for four years and we lost a whole year in my sophomore year because of Covid and we had a shortened season last year, so I haven’t been able to play as much as I would have liked to, but I’m really just trying to have a whole season without any interruptions hopefully.”

Good luck to Rollison as continues his soccer success at the next level! Best wishes to him as he enters his last season here. It is definitely an understatement to sayTuscarora is proud to have had him represent their team these past four years.