Cassidy Brown — known in Herrin as Cassidy Ray — graduated from Herrin High School in 2017 and headed to Lincoln, Nebraska, on both bowling and academic scholarships with plans to become a pediatrician.

The motivation wasn't complicated. She's an empath by her own description — someone who feels other people's distress as her own, who wants to do something about it. Pediatrics seemed like the right container for that instinct.

The science curriculum had other ideas.

Within her first semester at Nebraska, Cassidy recognized that the pre-med track was straining her mental health and threatening her bowling eligibility. She made the kind of decision many students struggle to make: she changed course. She switched to criminology and criminal justice, added three minors — psychology, English, and business and law — and didn't look back.

"I'm a much better reader and writer than I am with the science classes," she said.

The desire to help people never disappeared. Only the method changed.

Her mother, an appellate prosecutor, was one example of what that could look like in practice. She remembers a conversation in which her mom explicitly told her: Don't choose law school just because I did. The fact that Cassidy chose it anyway — on her own terms, out of her own conviction — says something about the clarity of her purpose. Her father offered a different kind of shaping force: high expectations, tough love, the standard held firm. "I wouldn't be as tough as I am without my dad," she said.

Bowling gave her a third education.

She started around third grade, grew up in bowling alleys because both parents bowled, and eventually chose it as her primary sport over volleyball and softball — a three-sport high school athlete who made a strategic call about where her ceiling was highest. In her freshman year at Herrin, she placed seventh at the state tournament. The years that followed, she was typically in the 30s at state, which meant she spent those years grinding — learning lane geometry, hand position, how the ball reacts depending on where it crosses the arrows.

"The first couple of years I didn't know those meant anything," she said of the lane markers. "Later on, I found out they, in fact, do mean something."

By her junior year, she was reaching out to college programs. Nebraska was the top choice. She sent in videos, got an official visit in September of senior year, and then drove home from practice one afternoon and saw a 402 area code light up her phone.

"I knew exactly who this was," she said.

It was legendary Nebraska coach Bill Straub calling during the early signing period. He had more good news. She committed over the phone and signed two days later.

She bowled for Nebraska for four years — redshirting the first season — and graduated in 2022. Then she took a deliberate year off, established Florida residency, and enrolled at Florida A&M's College of Law in Orlando. The in-state tuition was the deciding factor over Barry University, the private alternative. But Florida A&M turned out to offer something she hadn't fully anticipated.

"I've learned things over the last couple of years that I would have never known had I not gone to Florida A&M," she said. "It's really opened my eyes to things that I know I would not have experienced had I gone to a different school."

As a 3L — a third year law student — she's completing her legal education with a clear sense of direction: public service, not big law. Every internship, every job she's held in Florida has been with the state. That's where she expects to land.

"Whatever I choose to do in the legal field, both sides are meant to help people," she said.

Her husband — also a bowler, whom she met through mutual friends in the bowling community — went to Wichita State. They've been together since late 2019 and have been married for a year and a half. Her older sister, born exactly two years to the day before Cassidy, works for an engineering company in Lubbock, Texas. The family runs toward achievement.

Would she change anything, looking back?

"I wouldn't do anything different," she said. "No matter how minor the experiences may be, they all play a role in where I ended up, how I did what I did, and where I am today."