By Eric Rynston-Lobel
Senior forward Lane Herbert has an interesting backstory: She grew up on a farm in Celina, Texas, helping raise cows, horses, goats, chickens, dogs and cats, and her mother drove her 5.5 hours each way to field hockey practice.
At Northwestern, she’s studying biology with plans of going to medical school and focusing on women’s sports medicine, a field she says is very understudied. She’s also been a major advocate among student-athletes for having conversations about mental health challenges and guiding teammates to the resources they have at their disposal.
Herbert joined NUFH Said this week to chat about all of that and more. Here’s an excerpt from that interview, edited and condensed for clarity. For the full interview, check out the latest episode of NUFH Said.
Eric Rynston-Lobel: You’re from Texas, and from what I understand, you grew up on a farm?
Lane Herbert: Yes, a family farm. Very small, but my parents were big into self-sustainability and teaching us from a young age how to work as a team and work really, really hard, so we would get up really early and take care of the animals before school and all that stuff, but nothing commercial. Just a family farm.
Rynston-Lobel: So how big is this?
Herbert: We have 25 acres in north Texas, in a small town called Celina, and when we moved there, there were like 5,000 people, and now it’s probably 25, 35,000 people, so it’s really grown. We have cows. We had horses; we don’t have them any more. Dogs, cats, goats, chickens, all that stuff. And then we have our own garden where we grow things and our own rainwater irrigation system, so everything is self-sustainable.
Rynston-Lobel: You said you’re interested in studying women’s sports medicine. What is it about that specifically that interests you?
Herbert: I think there’s a big discrepancy in the amount of research that we have that backs up women’s sports and women’s sports performance. I think men and women are often treated equally when it comes to recovery and performance needs, and that’s not true. We behave differently, we have different hormones and different bodies, musculoskeletal system-wise too, so I think there’s a big gender gap in sports medicine research, and I’m interested because it’s been my personal story and also a lot of my close friends on the team have had sports-related injuries that I’d like to see more research that backs up the care that we provide as health professionals in the future.
Rynston-Lobel: You’re also very involved with mental health advocacy around campus. Why is that something that’s meaningful to you to be involved with?
Herbert: If you are a student-athlete, you are typically a very high-achieving person, and you are under a lot of stress. Everybody’s under a lot of stress. But how do you cope with that stress? How do you manage that stress? How do you channel that stress into good energy? That has been something that I have struggled with in the past. I think my freshman and sophomore years were really hard to manage the rigorous schedule and the student-athlete life, and I think because I didn’t have a strong foundation in mental health, it kind of hit me harder than it ‘should have.’ So I have made it my personal mission, in the rest of the time that I am here, to advocate for mental health platforms so that younger and younger student-athletes are more aware of the resources that you have on campus and are equipped to use them.
Rynston-Lobel: The program has had a very successful run since the current fifth years and your senior class have arrived. How have you tried to approach things in a way that you think has helped elevate the program?
Herbert: I think what has, in the past, made Northwestern a great program and what will continue to make Northwestern a great program is our camaraderie and our team-first mentality. We constantly are reflecting and have introspective conversations about, how do we make our team chemistry better? Because we fully believe that if you are supporting each other on the field 100% then that is when you’re going to play your best hockey. You can have great skills, but if you can’t put the ball on each other’s sticks, then you’re not going anywhere.
