Greg Barron was the inaugural winner of the Michael Breschi Memorial Scholarship in 2007, presented by US Lacrosse. The 2019 recipients were announced today. His inspirational story follows:

It’s not always easy being the coach’s son. A coach’s son can’t call attention to himself. He has to carve out his own role, and show the team he’s there for the right reasons. Practice never really ends. The lessons keep coming on the drive home, at the dinner table, and before bed.

But when life throws something that others might see as insurmountable, Leukemia for instance, a coach’s son realizes that some of those lessons his dad taught him just might help him overcome more than a defender.

Greg Barron is a doctor now. He’s also a cancer survivor. But before he was any of that, before he was chief resident at UConn Health, before he was the first winner of the Michael Breschi Memorial Scholarship, he was the son of a coach.

“Not only the son of a coach, but the son of a teacher,” Barron said, referring to his father, Frank Barron, who coached high school lacrosse in Connecticut for almost 40 years. “At times it’s hard for him to turn it off. But it’s also very motivating. He gave me a lot of self-discipline and motivated me to set a lot of goals.”

The coach’s son had always set ambitious goals. He decided he was going to be a doctor when he was seven. He'd also be a college athlete. Maybe Division III lacrosse. Maybe football. But in January 2006, Barron was diagnosed with Childhood Leukemia.

One would think, with chemotherapy and a long road to recovery ahead, those athletic goals might be the furthest thing from Barron’s mind. But he'd been taught to never give up.

“It was the only thing on my mind,” Barron said. “A few doctors thought I was insane. I wasn’t going to allow the disease to stop me from doing what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to be defined by it.”

Chemotherapy forced him to miss his junior year of lacrosse, but he was back by football season. He'd been a center before cancer, but came back as the backup kicker. It wasn’t all bad. There’s more glory in being the backup kicker.

When he connected on an extra point, the crowd went so wild that a referee went up to the old football coach, the backup kicker’s father, to find out what was going on.

“He asked me, ‘Did your kid break some sort of record?” Frank Barron said. “And I said, “No, he just got back from chemo.’”

Soon he was back on attack for the lacrosse team, serving his role as a finisher in front of the net. Then it was on to Bucknell, where he played for the club team. Sometime during it all, he heard about the Michael Breschi Scholarship, which current UNC coach Joe Breschi created in memory of his three-year-old son, who died in an auto accident. It was a scholarship for the kids of coaches.

“I don’t remember what I wrote,” Greg said, of his scholarship application. “But I remember feeling for him when I heard his story.”

The Barrons say the Breschi Scholarship helped Greg achieve his dream of beating cancer and becoming a doctor. So did being a lacrosse player. 

“Athletes set goals and find a way to accomplish them against all odds,” Greg Barron said. “That perseverance and determination, it gets ingrained in them. They’re probably some of the best patients because they’re used to following directions, but they also set extreme goals that might propel them to do things that others might not try to accomplish.”

Of course, Greg had extra motivation, from a coach who taught him to never give up.

“The strongest word in the English language is four letters long: W-I-L-L,” Frank Barron said. “He probably heard that from me a lot. 'What’s your will?' 'What will you do today?' 'How will you conduct yourself?'”

Before he was his father’s player, Greg was his first employee, dragging bags of balls to the field for rec league practices. There was a local kid with Autism who couldn’t find any sport to play. Frank said the fledgling lacrosse program would take him in. When time came to give him a partner, it was Greg who stepped up.

“He was probably the best assistant coach I ever had,” Frank Barron said. “I think that’s what has contributed to him being a caring and compassionate doctor. He’s been on the other side. He knows what it’s like."

A few years ago, Greg headed in for a checkup. A few things had changed. Greg, the patient, was also wearing a doctor’s lab coat. And the cancer was finally gone. But his parents were still there by side.

He was still the coach’s son.