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A championship pedigree prepared TCOM student for medical school

August 22, 2024 • Our People, TCOM

It was practice two times a day, six days a week, totaling more than 20 hours a week, while also balancing a full-time load of pre-med classes and studying, that was the level of preparation and commitment it took Savannah Foster to be a part of the powerhouse rowing team at The University of Texas at Austin.

Her commitment level as a Division I athlete at the highest level has prepared Foster for her lifelong dream of becoming a physician as a first-year student at The University of North Texas Health Science Center at Fort Worth’s Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine. She, along with 240 other medical students, will receive their first White Coat at a celebration at Will Rogers Memorial Coliseum on Friday.

“It’s a culmination of everything that I have worked for my whole life, knowing that I have wanted to do this forever,” said Foster. “It’s very exciting, I’ve put in a lot of work to get into medical school. I can do it again and just keep getting better at it.”

Foster has always had two constants in her life, sports and medicine. Her father, Shane Foster, ran track and spent a year as a walk-on wide receiver at Texas in 1990, and her mom Mirelle, is a physical medicine & rehabilitation physician in Kerrville. Texas. It’s no surprise that Foster grew up playing basketball, was a four-year letter winner in high school in tennis and track and field,
What was a surprise was after high school continuing with her athletic career. Foster had settled in her freshman year at Texas to ramp up for medical school when she saw a social media post about walk-on tryouts for the rowing team.

“I didn’t even know it was a sport,” Foster said with a chuckle. “I missed the competitive nature of sports, so I tried out, made the team and the rest was history.”

It was quite a history. In the spring of 2021, during her freshman year, Texas won the national championship. They followed that up with another national title in 2022 and then again in 2024.
Foster was hungry to compete, so after gaining 10 pounds of muscle over the summer after her freshman year, she was thrown into the competition in the fall of 2021.

“I wanted to contribute physically, but it’s an uphill battle and very competitive,” said Foster. “But my sophomore year they threw us into everything.”

Foster and her teammates competed in sweeping which consists of four rowers and a coxswain. Rowers in sweeping have only a single oar. Sculling is the other category for rowing, and rowers use an oar on both sides of their boat. There are also divisions where a boat can contain eight rowers plus the coxswain.

Her most productive year was in 2023 when she helped Texas to the Big 12 championship and what would eventually become another national title. Foster suffered a stress fracture in her rib her senior year which kept her out of competition, but the injury did confirm something in her mind.

“It confirmed that I wanted to do osteopathic medicine,” she said.

When Foster wasn’t playing sports in her youth, she was with her mom in the clinic or shadowing her as she made rounds with her patients, it was where she knew she wanted to be.

“I want to be the one who’s taking care of someone and getting them back to being healthy and independent,” Foster said. “Every life lesson through sports carried me into medicine. Learning how to balance your time, not comparing yourself to your teammates at practice and working under pressure.”

As she looked at medical schools, she admittedly didn’t know the difference between osteopathic and allopathic. Her mother was an MD, but the more research she did, the more osteopathic medicine aligned with her approach to medicine.

“The more I learned about holistic care, the mind and body, I thought about my experiences at Texas and how much I would have benefitted from this a lot,” Foster said. “I want to be a DO and learn the manipulation techniques so that I can treat my patients with a more hands-on approach and fewer prescriptions. Learning from an osteopathic perspective, I will have better knowledge of what is going on, allowing me to relieve muscular tension instead of prescribing medications and not fixing the root problem.”

Foster won’t be the only doctor in her family, but her mother is already very supportive and excited about the opportunities she has to learn as well.

“She was really excited that I was going to be learning more techniques that she wants me to teach her about,” Foster said.

Being a fiercely competitive person, Foster is keenly aware of how competitive medical school students are themselves and careful not to put too much pressure on herself. She plans to keep active as much as possible, going back to her track and field roots as she trains to potentially run in one of the Cowtown Marathons in February, but for now, there is humility and pride as she puts on her own White Coat for the first time.

“I’m very proud that I was able to get things done and come to medical school,” said Foster. “I put in a whole lot of work, and coming into medical school, I knew that it would be a challenge to juggle classes, exams and learning a lot of new information. But I feel prepared, and I am excited to keep building my skills so that I can be successful.”