DOWAGIAC — Although Holly Lowe has been graduated from Adrian College and finished her collegiate softball stint years ago — her glove is not retired.

Lowe, who attended Dowagiac Union Schools from 2003 to 2007, is still giving back to the sport that made her.

Lowe’s time at Dowagiac left a mark on both its softball and basketball programs.

In 2007, at the Dowagiac Athletic Booster Club’s annual banquet, Lowe won the varsity softball award, a Dick Dorgan scholarship, a varsity club scholarship and a U.S. Army award. She earned four varsity letters in both basketball and softball. In basketball alone, she helped Dowagiac win its first conference championship since 1984. Lowe also made an impact on the softball program and earned all-state honors as a junior and set her own school records. Lowe was honored to have been able to play high school sports, receive scholarships and even go on to play at the collegiate level, but it was another opportunity that Lowe remembers most vividly from her days at Dowagiac.

“Being able to play both varsity basketball and varsity softball my senior year when my sister was a freshman,” Lowe said, is something she will never forget.

Lowe easily made the decision to continue her softball career at Adrian College.

“It was a sport that I loved, and it was an easy transition to move from the high school level into the college level,” she said.

While softball came easy to her, deciding on a career path proved to be more challenging.   

“I actually had no idea what I was going to do,” Lowe said. “I thought I was going into teaching actually. Even in undergrad, I did everything besides my student teaching, and then I switched over and decided to go to law school.”

Lowe graduated law school in 2014, passed the bar exam and started working for a company that owned and operated skilled nursing facilities, independent living, assisted living and senior condos. She worked on the company’s in-house counsel for two years and then got involved in higher education fundraising.

Now, Lowe is still surrounded by sports, just in a different capacity. She works at Penn State University as an assistant director of foundation relations and is still a licensed attorney in Michigan, but is not currently practicing law.

Lowe experiences first-hand how lessons in sports can be easily transferable to the workplace.

“You win as a team, you lose as a team,” Lowe said. “Each individual player’s efforts matter. At the end of the day, it’s how you perform together. I can exceed all of my metrics, but if my colleagues don’t, then how successful is our office as a whole?”

Lowe feels as a high school athlete she did not take things as serious as she does now, but contributes that to time, growth and learning that losing is okay, she said.

“You learn you can’t win all the time,” Lowe said. “You have to learn from your failures and embrace your failures. [You learn to] understand that when you do learn or fail at something, that is when you gain the most because you can learn from it.”

Lowe has never really retired from either basketball or softball. She still competes in a women’s basketball league and can be found coaching a 12U travel softball team. She is still learning how much patience coaching can require.

“It’s definitely a different dynamic,” Lowe said. “I think as a player, you are really capable of focusing on your skills and how you can get better individually. As a coach, I have to look at not only each player, but as a team and how we operate and can produce the best results.”