Medina County Sports Hall of Fame: On the pitch or in the studio, Mallory Mahar is artist at work

Olympic gold medal-winning boxer Pete Rademacher didn't accomplish the feat. Neither did Major League Baseball player Scott Fletcher or NFL All-Pro Jim Ritcher. Ditto for former Browns center Tom DeLeone, Yankees outfielder Gene Woodling and anyone else previously inducted into the Medina County Sports Hall of Fame, which was established in 1986. Former Medina and University of Maryland center midfielder Mallory Mahar will be in a group of one when she is added to the list of inductees during June 16 ceremonies at The Galaxy Conference Center in Wadsworth. No one else in the hall of fame has won an Oscar. Or a Golden Globe award. Or a BAFTA award, which stands for British Academy of Film and Television Arts and is that organization's equivalent of the Academy Awards. The 39-year-old Mahar, who earned a degree in studio art from Maryland and got her master's in animation at Savannah College of Art and Design, completed that triple crown — the Oscar came in the Best Animated Feature category — as part of a group that worked on the 2018 film "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse." "My dad (Skip) doubted my choice of a college major," Mahar said in a phone interview from her home in Vancouver. "Now his jaw drops. My dad was a dentist and he liked to say, 'You're never going to make any money doing artwork.' "Guess what? I'm making money doing artwork and he's quite proud. He goes and sees all the movies I'm involved with. Half of them he doesn't understand, but he likes them." Mahar, who is currently working 60 hours a week on "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse," which will be released in June, has been involved with approximately 15 movies, including "Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters," "Godzilla," "Sausage Party," "Angry Birds Movie 2" and several "Hotel Transylvania" films. Some Medina classmates saw this coming, as she was voted "Biggest Computer Nerd" in the class of 2002's senior awards. "I've always been weirdly computerly," she said. "This job I do is a perfect mix of being creative and artistic and being technical with computer science. I work on a computer all day, but they're very pretty pictures." ARTIST ON THE PITCH The 5-foot-9 Mahar was The Gazette's MVP for girls soccer as a junior and senior, when she also was first-team All-Ohio. She finished her career with 50 goals and 31 assists, helped the Bees win four straight Pioneer Conference championships and was a big part of Medina's 1998 Division I state semifinal team as a freshman. Mahar, though, was far from an immediate star when she began playing in the Medina Soccer Association's youth program as a 4-year-old. The same was true when she started playing for the Internationals Soccer Club and coach Zdravko Popovic. "My mom (Bev) tells the story of me being on the Internationals for years, since I was 9 or 10, and I still wasn't very good," Mahar said. "She went to the coach and said, 'I'm wasting my money.' Zdravko said, 'Just wait until she grows into her body.' Then overnight, I started getting really good at it." Once Mahar developed great coordination there was no stopping her, because she always knew how to compete. She learned that from her brother Matt, who was four years ahead of her in school and earned a scholarship to play soccer at West Virginia. "I grew up with him and his friends playing in the backyard," she said. "I was the tag-along little sister that wanted to be with them. I don't want to give him too much credit because it will go to his head, but he was a driving force. We were very competitive with each other, and he'd always make sure I knew I was younger." Because she went to all Matt's games, Mahar also was very familiar with the Medina soccer accomplishments of star players like Michelle Anderson, Kase McCoy, Leslie McCombs and Carrie Ollom in that era. "There was already an established legacy in the girls soccer program," she said. "Being the younger sister of Matt, who was friends with all those girls, I already had those role models. The team atmosphere and tradition stood out to me." The excellence continued when Mahar joined forces with players like Melissa Moeschl, Jackie Shirer, Beth McHugh, Caroline McHugh, K.C. Rosenfeld and Julie Trundle. "Me and Mallory called ourselves samurais," classmate and close friend Caroline (McHugh) Muttalib said. "That's a really good description of Mallory on the field. She was just a presence, flying around, heading the ball so fast. She wasn't known to foul people, but she was physical. You knew she was right behind you." The Bees were extremely successful in Mahar's four years, compiling a 53-16-11 record while playing some of the best teams in Ohio, but the only time they reached the state tournament was her freshman year, when they lost 2-1 to PC rival and eventual D-I champion Strongsville, which they had beaten 3-1 in the regular season. "I remember from Game 1 of her career to the last game, she was always the same," said Scott Simpson, Mahar's coach at Medina. "She was competitive, played with passion, played with heart and always played 100%. She did the same in practice, and that's where she stood out for me as a coach. "She played so hard and so well that she just raised the level of practice. She wasn't going to lose anything or any moment, so she always gave 100%. That made everyone around her better." OFF TO COLLEGE PARK Tall, fast, strong, competitive and technically sound, Mahar had scholarship offers from Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State and Florida, but she chose Maryland because she wanted to play in the Atlantic Coast Conference against the likes of North Carolina, Virginia and Duke. "The ACC had huge schools I grew up knowing about," she said. "That was very appealing to me." Mahar's career at Maryland included some tremendous individual and team accomplishments but also its share of heartbreak, including two ACL tears. In the fall of 2002 she moved to center back and was a SoccerBuzz finalist for National Freshman of the Year after earning second-team All-ACC honors and finishing with five goals and two assists. That spring Mahar tore the ACL in her right knee, but she battled back to start Maryland's last 13 games as a sophomore and again earned second-team All-ACC honors after returning to her natural center mid position. At that point in her career, Mahar had nine goals, all on headers. "She's insane on those," Caroline McHugh said. "That was my favorite thing at outside mid. I was pretty good at crossing the ball, and I got a lot of my assists that way because there was no doubt she was going to get her head on it." Mahar's career really took off in her junior year, when she earned third-team All-America and first-team All-ACC honors after finishing with nine goals and four assists, including four game-winning goals. She led Maryland to NCAA Tournament wins over Loyola (Md.) and Penn State, which had beaten the Terrapins 6-0 a few weeks earlier, with a combined two goals and two assists in those games. That earned the Terrapins a spot in the Sweet 16, where they fell 1-0 to Washington. "It was amazing," Mahar said of winning on the road against the Nittany Lions. "It was one of the highlights of my career. We came ready to go and didn't have anything to lose." Having also spent time playing semi-pro soccer for the Washington (D.C.) Freedom in the college offseason, Mahar was considered a Hermann Trophy candidate — her sport's equivalent of the Heisman Trophy — going into her senior year. That dream came to a heartbreaking end when she tore the ACL in her left knee five games into the season. Just like that, after playing 67 games (54 starts), scoring 18 goals and adding 11 assists, Mahar's college career was over. "That was pretty devastating," she said. "I was on the watch list for the best player in college soccer and I was feeling so good and so fit and so ready. We were playing at home in College Park and there was no contact. I was just changing directions. "On the first one (which came while playing a semi-pro game against the Philly Charge), people said it was the loudest scream they'd ever heard come out of a human body. The second one I just knew." LIFE AFTER SOCCER After graduating from Maryland in 2007, Mahar spent 2008-11 earning her master's degree at Savannah College of Art and Design. At that point she knew she had to move to Los Angeles or New York City in order to put her education to use, and it just so happened that good friend Sarah Huffman, a teammate on the Washington Freedom, was sharing a condo with international soccer star Abby Wambach in L.A. Hoffman and Wambach told Mahar she could stay with them until she got settled, and she wound up staying a year. In that time Mahar got an internship and worked small jobs to make money before landing an apprenticeship with Sony Pictures Imageworks. The company was opening a branch in Vancouver and in 2012 needed someone to move to Vancouver. Mahar ended up being that someone. "I got here and I was like, 'Oh my God, this is totally for me,'" she said. "I didn't like L.A. because there were no seasons and I was used to changes. In Vancouver there are seasons but they're not as harsh. I can get to a mountain in 25 minutes or walk seven blocks to the beach." Mahar likes Vancouver so much that in August she obtained Canadian citizenship. She also maintains U.S. citizenship while continuing her animation work on films. That work requires 24 frames to make one second of film. That means 1,440 frames are needed to make one minute and 86,400 are required for an hour. "The average moviegoer is not going to notice anything wrong and it's very tedious," Mahar said, "but we take pride in it being as close to perfect as possible because there are people who might look at every single frame." It's an approach she learned from parents Skip and Bev, stepmother Peggy and older brother Matt. The discipline, dedication and drive required to excel at soccer also helped. "Soccer was my life in those years," Mahar said. "As a working professional now, I'm seeing the value of it all. For a long time it was hard because I had to quit soccer and go into a regular job, but so many of the skills I learned as an athlete — being a part of a team and being a leader — really translate perfectly. "Soccer was one of the pillars of my foundation. I can't express how important it was to me. All the people I got to meet and all the places I got to go and the experiences I had, I feel sorry for people that don't have something they feel that way about when they're younger. Soccer was my ticket out into the world, basically." Contact Rick Noland at (330) 721-4046 or rnoland@medina-gazette.com. Follow him @RickNoland on Twitter.