CARROLLTON, Ga. - The week leading up to Aug. 28, 2016, was seemingly a regular week in the city of Oxford, Mississippi.
In the Shinall household, Ally was just beginning her junior year at Oxford High School. Older brother, Callan, had just begun his freshman year at Meridian Community College. Their 7-year-old brother, Trevor, was playing on a travel soccer team and preparing for his birthday party on Saturday.
It was a house full of athletes. Callan was a tennis player at MCC, and Ally was a state championship-winning soccer player. Trevor followed in his sister's cleats as a soccer player.
This weekend, Trevor will captain the UWG Soccer team in their West Florida match, which will be called "Trevor's Game" in his honor.
During one soccer practice in 2016, Trevor complained of soreness in his knee to his mother (who's also a physical therapist), Kelly Shinall. She thought nothing of it and gave him a pep talk, chalking the pains up to minor growing pains. The next day, a new pain emerged, followed by more the following day, becoming increasingly acute. Concerned, Kelly took Trevor to see their family physician, who attributed the pain to a potential soccer injury.
Kelly insisted on a blood test, which led the physician to send the family to Memphis, Tennessee. After several more conversations and another round of blood tests, the news came through that Trevor had low-risk acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a type of blood cancer.
The treatment for this form of leukemia was six weeks of chemotherapy at St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, followed by three months of inpatient chemo treatments.
"He went into remission fairly quickly, but because leukemia can quickly return, we continued the chemo process for two-and-a-half years," Kelly said. "By December, we were driving an hour-and-a-half from Oxford to Memphis once a week for 120 weeks."
As those 120 weeks went by, Ally won two high school soccer state championships with Oxford, graduated high school, signed and then began playing soccer for Itawamba Community College. While at Itawamba, she played for two years with 12 assists and five goals, including two game-winning goals. That earned the eye of UWG head soccer coach Stacey Balaam, who offered a scholarship to Ally, who joined the Wolves on Dec. 4, 2019.
For most early-career college students, that would be enough to keep busy for quite some time. But while that was all important to Ally, it was more important for her to be a part of Trevor's forward progression against the cancer.
"Ally was Trevor's biggest supporter through all of this," Kelly said. "She did things like organize her cross-country team to come to St. Jude and see Trevor during one his treatments, and she always made an effort to be part of his journey through this."
It was Trevor's journey that paved the way for Ally's academic aspirations at the collegiate level.
"I started as a biology major and I was pre-med, but now I am looking to become a physical therapist," Ally said. "The physical therapist who worked with Trevor was so calming for him and it really made me want to be able to help others who are in pain and in need in the same way that they helped Trevor."
The weekly trips and the chemo paid off, as Trevor was declared free of the cancer at age 9.
Since then, Ally, Mom and the Shinall family have been champions for the cause of childhood cancer, raising more than $34,000 for the benefit of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in the last three years.
This weekend, UWG Soccer Coach Stacey Balaam and the Wolves will wear T-shirts in Trevor's honor, and he will be an official member of the team and captain for the game.
The Wolves and Argos will play at 1 p.m. on Sunday at University Field. Admission is free for all guests.
