{"id":752,"date":"2026-09-14T17:08:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T21:08:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn449-f26\/?p=752"},"modified":"2026-09-14T17:08:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T21:08:09","slug":"never-sit-still-profile-on-carina-fucich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commons.princeton.edu\/jrn449-f26\/never-sit-still-profile-on-carina-fucich\/","title":{"rendered":"Never Sit Still, Profile on Carina Fucich"},"content":{"rendered":"

A profile on Carina Fucich by Leila Leibert<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

When you have the opportunity to sit next to Carina Fucich, you can\u2019t help notice her calm and attentive nature. Once you listen to her, you begin to better understand the history of restlessness and recovery that has shaped her.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shifting her weight, crossing one leg, then uncrossing it the next minute, she maintained full attention throughout our interview. This was despite, her body negotiating a comfortable seating position with the park chair. Post-interview, when the lecture ended and we said our goodbyes, she didn’t linger. She grabbed her bike, secured her helmet, and was gone within seconds, pedaling off smiling and waving a friendly goodbye.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It was a small moment, but it captured something her friend Rachel had told me. Fucich physically cannot sit still, “Her mental health and wellness fully depends on her ability to do some sort of active sport every single day.”It’s a rule Fucich has lived by for years. One that outlasted the sport that defined her very childhood and adolescence: soccer.<\/span><\/p>\n

Watching her that afternoon, that claim didn’t feel like an exaggeration. If anything, it felt like a doctor\u2019s diagnosis.<\/span><\/p>\n

Soccer was less a hobby but more of an organizing principle throughout her childhood. It was something deeply rooted in Fucich, something that she thought about constantly, trained relentlessly for, and built her identity around. Another friend, Kyle, who met her only after she’d arrived at Princeton, remarked how “She would talk about how her practices went and stuff… how she wouldn’t have the chance to become as good as her soccer idols.”<\/span><\/p>\n

A knee injury ended her dreams of going pro her senior year of high school. For a person who had built her sense of self around motion, the sudden stillness was its own kind of injury she had to battle. Her ambitions of becoming a D1 athlete naturally faded away and her focus became honed in on her immigrant parents objectives of academics over athletics. The daughter of a Maltanese immigrant mother and Croatian father, she described her upbringing was largely shaped by the \u201cAmerican Dream\u201d, where academics were viewed as the surer path forward.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Even that reinvention came with its own cost. Fucich tried to keep soccer alive in her life at Princeton by joining the club team as a freshman and got injured again. “It would have been easy for her to put soccer and the complexity of her injuries behind her,” her friend Sophia said, “but she put her passion and enthusiasm first.” The second injury arrived at a particularly hard moment being her first time living far from home, facing a recovery process she’d already been through once and had hoped never to repeat. “Not only was she a freshman at Princeton, but she also had to confront a daunting recovery process and the reality that she would lose her sport,” Sophia said. “However, her strength and humility triumphed once more.” This strength to bounce back was something that every friend of hers I interviewed brought to light. What stands out in the accounts of people who know her well is the fact that she still managed to shrink passions to a scale that her knees could tolerate.<\/span><\/p>\n

What she rebuilt after the injury was the very infrastructure of a life that was never meant to be static or still. Her vision for her life is designed around being organized, deliberate, and constantly, staying in motion. <\/span><\/p>\n

Whilst soccer gave her the structure to become a stellar athlete. Losing soccer taught her the habit of being dynamic.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A profile on Carina Fucich by Leila Leibert When you have the opportunity to sit next to Carina Fucich, you can\u2019t help notice her calm and attentive nature. Once you listen to her, you begin to better understand the history of restlessness and recovery that has shaped her. Shifting her weight, crossing one leg, then<\/p>\n

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