Bri Cagle remembers making a few B's in high school, mostly in math. She hasn't made one since.
The Georgia State soccer player will be one of 46 student-athletes in a class of 4,000 graduate candidates on Sunday. Cagle will make history, though, because she will graduate with the highest GPA in the university, a feat never before accomplished by an athlete at GSU. Her GPA is 4.14, pending the finals of her last three classes, which she modestly said should all be A’s. She’s a history major, minoring in religious studies and hopes to become a teacher, like her mother, back home in Houston.
She doesn’t have any study tricks. She wasn’t valedictorian at Clear Lake High School. She just works.
“I’m not super smart,” she said. “There’s something in me that wants to succeed. That has a lot to do with the way I was raised. I grew up playing soccer and grew up competing. That transferred over into academics.”
Cagle’s mother, Jeane, is a math teacher and her dad, Al, is a chemical engineer. Both will be at GSU's ceremony on Sunday. But math isn’t Bri’s thing. She thinks she made a B in geometry back in high school and another in calculus.
While she may not have understood math enough to earn As, she did learn the importance of education. Helping her mother tutor students led her to teaching. She learned from Susan Heep, who taught her world history and European history at Clear Lake, that any student can be properly motivated if the subject matter can be made interesting.
“I saw this and saw how she impacted her student’s lives. She found a way to inspire her students, people who would never be interested in history," Cagle said. "It inspired me to instill that passion in my potential students.”
When Cagle arrived at Georgia State she was told, like most student-athletes, that it’s hard to strike a balance between sports, studies and social life. She set out to prove that she could enjoy the rich experience of college.
She started all four years for the Panthers, captaining the team the last two, evidence of her athletic and leadership ability. She made the President’s List six times and the Dean’s List once, evidence of her academic ability. She has been co-president of the university’s chapter of the Fellowship of the Christian Athletes, evidence of her ability to lead a social life.
"When you are a coach you want certain types of student-athletes on our roster," former GSU coach Dom Martelli said. "Do you want 25 Bri Cagles? No, you want 28 Bri Cagles. Coaching is about more than wins losses. We had a lot more wins in different aspects because of Bri."
It hasn’t all been easy. She pulled out an A in a History of the South class that she said was the hardest class she has ever taken. She burned through two notebooks filled with lecture notes and had a sleepless night before a test.
The soccer team has also had its issues. She said there were differing opinions within the team over playing time, among other minor matters that she said she inadvertently contributed to as captain. She learned from that experience as well.
“I don’t think I did all that I could to fix it. That upset me,” she said. “[I realized] this isn’t going to fly, this can’t work.
"I think that we as leaders, the senior class, had to step up. When we did, that’s when we had the most success.”
It taught her a life lesson that she hopes to teach her high school history students when she starts her first job.
“Just the idea of empowerment,” she said. “When someone knows and accepts that they can control themselves, it strengthens their reactions and will only allow them to go further in life.”
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