MARY TAUSSIG OF COLORADO COLLEGE, a senior on the Tigers' women's lacrosse team, has been named the Southern Collegiate Athletic Conference Female Character and Community Award Winner for the week beginning May 8, 2017.
The SCAC honors the efforts of student-athletes who excel in the field of athletics, and also serve their campus and community.
Throughout her career at CC, Taussig has proven to be one of the most valuable players in the program’s 23-season varsity history. A four-year starter in the midfield, she has secured a place among the school’s all-time leaders in virtually every statistic.
Defensively, Taussig ranks first with 155 caused turnovers and 246 ground balls, and is second with 173 draw controls. The two-way standout also is fourth with 146 goals, sixth with 195 points and 14th with 49 assists.
Taussig possessed the rare ability to dominate and influence the outcome of a game from almost any spot on the field. A perfect example of her versatility occurred during the 2016 season when a pair of road victories vaulted the Tigers to the No. 1 ranking in the West Region.
During an 8-7 victory at Occidental College on April 2, the versatile Taussig recorded nine ground balls and seven caused turnovers, and almost single-handedly shut down the Oxy attack.
The following day, she struck for five goals, grabbed six ground balls and forced a pair of turnovers in a 16-8 win at Pomona-Pitzer Colleges.
In recognition of that performance, Taussig was named the Division III National Player of the Week by the Intercollegiate Women’s Lacrosse Coaches Association.
Many times Taussig would sacrifice her own offensive statistics by doing the little things that would make the difference between a win and a loss, especially when she focused her energy on playing aggressive defense.
With the three-time IWLCA first-team all-region selection leading the way, the Tigers posted a 51-20 record, good for a .718 winning percentage and earned back-to-back NCAA tournament appearances during her junior and senior seasons.
While Taussig knew that she would play lacrosse for Colorado College, she was unsure about her academic future. That all changed near the end of her second semester when she enrolled in a course taught by Kris Stanec, the assistant chair and lecturer in the Education Department. That experience led to Taussig choosing education as her major.
Since then, Taussig applied that same relentless determination to the pursuit of her tong-term goal of becoming an international education administrator as she did while becoming one of the most accomplished two-way midfielders in the nation.
Taussig, who owns a 3.60 grade-point average, earned her first teaching experience as part of the education department’s community-based learning classes, working as a student-teacher aide and classroom-teacher aide in several grade levels in local schools.
Making the most of the opportunities afforded by CC’s Block Plan, Taussig studied abroad during the 2016 Fall Semester in Copenhagen, Denmark, where she focused on multicultural education. Taussig also travelled Istanbul, Turkey, as part of the program at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad.
Most recently, Taussig received one of the college’s Keller Family Venture Grants and travelled to Cairo, Egypt, to explore and analyze refugee education with the nonprofit organization, Save the Children. She then used that research as the foundation for her senior thesis that investigated the challenges and successes of refugee education, specifically in Cairo and Colorado Springs, Colo.
Taussig’s history of community service includes summer internships with Save the Children's Get Ready Get Safe program in 2015 and Lutheran Family Services Refugee and Asylee Resettlement Agency in 2016.
On campus, Taussig served as women’s lacrosse representative on the Student-Athlete Advisory Council and as one of the organizers of the 2017 Quony Cup, an all-campus 6v6 soccer tournament that commemorates former men's soccer and lacrosse player Chris Quon, who died unexpectedly in 2009. The event also pays tribute to one of Quon's lacrosse teammates, Evan Spirito, who lost his battle against cancer in 2011. The annual event raises funds for the American Cancer Society, the Christopher Quon Foundation and the Evan Spirito Memorial Foundation.
After graduating on May 22 with a bachelor’s degree in education, Taussig will teach at The New England Center for Children, a school for children with autism. The services provided by the NECC includes academic, speech and language therapy, social and life skills, occupational therapy, physical education, health care, and family services.