Title IX Spotlight: Maureen Schafer
8/16/2022 11:50:00 AM | Women's Rowing, Women's Soccer, My GW: Celebrating our Stories
Two-sport standout aims to help next generation of Buff & Blue
Maureen Schafer chuckles thinking about how much college athletics recruiting has changed.
As a senior at Indiana’s Penn High School back in 1987, Schafer scanned a nationwide listing of programs with roster spots left to fill in Soccer America magazine, mailed out a resume detailing her achievements on and off the pitch and waited.
It was mere weeks before her freshman fall that then-GW women’s soccer head coach Adrian Glover called to offer an opportunity.
“I’d never been to the East Coast,” said Schafer, who was raised in suburban Chicago before moving to northern Indiana as a teen. “Next thing I know I have a scholarship, with full tuition and room and board, to this incredible private school in Washington, D.C.”
Schafer feels forever fortunate at the seeming serendipity that brought her to Foggy Bottom.
While completing her undergraduate degree in Kinesiology and Human Kinetics, she was a key figure in a history-making run for the women’s soccer squad as well as a contributor to a nationally-ranked boat with the women’s rowing team.
That experience served as a terrific launching pad to a rewarding career blending the business and medical fields and forged a connection to her alma mater that remains strong today.
“I believe in supporting those people, places and things that supported you,” said Schafer, who serves as President and CEO of the Nevada Health & Bioscience Corporation. “A long time ago, that university showed up for unknown reasons in my life, and I’ll never forget it.
“The people there continually produced opportunities and connections that have made a difference in my life, and I want to be that on the other side now for student-athletes going forward.”
A decade or so after the passage of Title IX, Schafer took full advantage of the opportunity to play a wide variety of sports as a youngster in Illinois, and she credits her success on the field with providing the confidence she needed to find her voice.
“I was a kid who was paralyzingly shy,” Schafer remembered. “Growing up, my identity to the world was sports. When I couldn’t talk and when I had a hard time making friends, I knew I had instant friends who wore the same uniform. If I had a bad day, I knew I could kick a ball or run well and feel good about myself.”
Later on, Schafer’s college search, aided by Soccer America’s listing of programs seeking student-athletes, yielded a host of offers, but for the talented midfielder, none was more intriguing than Glover’s invitation to come to the nation’s capital.
Entering his second season at the helm, Glover fortified the Buff and Blue roster with a huge recruiting class, and Schafer joined an ambitious group of newcomers ready to make an instant impact.
“We were the new breed of players who had been playing since we were little,” Schafer said. “We had skills, we knew how to play a system and we were competitive. We just had a whole different mindset about the sport."
As a rookie in 1987, Schafer emerged as a starter for a group that cracked the Northeast Region poll for the first time with a 15-6-1 record, and the next year, she led the Buff and Blue in scoring when they went 14-4-4 and finished tied for fifth in the regional rankings.
Over her four seasons, the program totaled 50 wins and established itself among the top programs on the East Coast under the leadership of Glover and GW Athletics Hall of Famer Shannon Higgins-Cirovski.
“It was a really extraordinary time,” said Schafer, who finished with 32 career points via 12 goals and eight assists. “It was just so exciting to go into a program that was new and growing and setting expectations for what we wanted to be.”
Along the way, Schafer filled her offseasons by taking on a new sport.
A few friends convinced her to try out for the crew team in the spring of her sophomore year, and although it proved much more challenging than she initially expected, she’s glad that she made the leap and discovered the power of a peaceful morning on the Potomac River.
“There’s nothing that matches that feeling in the world,” said Schafer, who was part of a lightweight eight boat that claimed silver at the National Collegiate Rowing Championships. “Everybody’s in unison, and it’s this serene, quiet moment. No matter if it’s the beginning of the workout and you’ve got your full energy or you’re in complete pain and agony, it’s just utter majesty.”
Through that busy dual-sport schedule, Schafer built friendships with fellow student-athletes like Lisa (Mulligan) Sponaugle, Andrea Shreeman, Jen Morrison, Lisa (Cellura) Harkin, Lisa (Schoffel) Monaco, Kate (Steinhilber) Lunger and Lisa (Zifcak) Dunn that remain strong and learned myriad lessons that still prove useful on a daily basis in her career.
“You’re only as strong as the team around you,” Schafer said. “I’ve never accomplished anything by myself. It’s all been possible through the support of other people.”
These days, Schafer lives and works in Las Vegas, but her career traces its roots back to a life-changing internship at the then-new Four Seasons Hotel in Georgetown.
After graduation, she joined the hotel full-time, and connections there helped her get into real estate development on the way to a wide-ranging resume covering a variety of public and private sectors.
Aided by a GW MBA, Schafer has emerged as a leader in the growth of medical care in the state of Nevada. In late 2019, she helmed the launch of the non-profit Nevada Health & Bioscience Corporation, and its first project – a Medical Education Building for UNLV’s Kerkorian School of Medicine – is now nearing completion.
As NHBC's next projects take shape, Schafer is proud to be making a difference in her community utilizing skills and values familiar to GW alumni across the globe.
“I am a quintessential model of what that university is,” said Schafer, who jumped at the chance to represent the Buff and Blue earlier this summer on a panel at the National Association of Athletic Development Directors Convention in her hometown. “GW is in my DNA 24/7, and it’s because I went there to play soccer.”