Blue Valley North’s Lexy Farrington is The Star’s Female Scholar-Athlete of the Year
One morning a few weeks ago, Lexy Farrington walked downstairs in her house and peeled off the lid of a storage bin. Inside, she removed all the fabric she could find — materials her mom had saved mostly for curtains and quilts.
Days earlier, Farrington, a Blue Valley North 2020 graduate, had contacted local hospitals and requested to volunteer during the coronavirus pandemic. Her parents were quietly relieved when they turned her down.
Undeterred, Farrington sat at a sewing machine, same as she has done nearly every day since, to embark on a project with her younger sister.
Homemade masks.
They’ve made nearly 200 of them with the extra fabric.
“I needed to do something. I needed a purpose,” Farrington said. “I wasn’t just going to sit at home and do nothing.”
Few stories have better represented one of the area’s top student-athletes. Farrington doesn’t simply complete the tasks she’s provided — she invents her own tasks and then completes those, too.
After hearing she was too skinny to play college sports, for example, she researched and designed strength training workouts, and now she’s headed to Kansas on a soccer scholarship. In high school, she created a volunteer project, and now 600 Guatemalans in need of shoes have a pair on their feet.
She’s a go-getter by nature, reflected in academic and athletic resumes that stretch pages long and require weekly family meetings to track.
Farrington is The Kansas City Star’s Female Scholar-Athlete of the Year.
“I always tell kids you’ve got to find that balance,” said Cory Cox, a counselor at Blue Valley North during Farrington’s time there. “But with Lexy, she has all these things going on, and she’s never flustered. She has this belief that she can do anything.”
‘Lexy did everything’
In elementary school, as her best friends played jump rope or hopscotch, Farrington hung out with the boys.
She wanted to play football.
After a few days, she came home and asked her parents to sign her up for a league. And so they did. Farrington was the only girl on the flag football team. They put her at running back, ensuring she’d get the ball more often.
“We had a philosophy growing up — try everything,” her mother, Dana said. “If you’re interested in doing something, go for it. Lexy did everything.”
And just never stopped. In an era of sports specialization, Farrington played three varsity sports (soccer, basketball, track), participated in another for a club team (volleyball) and tried too many of them to count. Her parents once thought she’d have a future in swimming.
She picked up her last one on something of a whim. A family friend suggested she try throwing the javelin — at 6-foot tall with long limbs, she’d have the perfect build for it, he thought.
“Why not?” she said.
A little more than a year later, she won the Kansas Class 6A state championship in the event. She graduated as the school’s record holder — despite the pandemic robbing of her senior season.
And with seemingly such little time to practice her new craft. You see, Farrington isn’t a multi-sport athlete in the traditional sense, in which she might move from one sport in the summer to another in the fall and another in the winter. She participates in multiple sports simultaneously.
The track season coincided with soccer — the sport that has landed her a scholarship at Kansas. On some days after school, she would ride the team bus to a track meet, then have her parents pick her up in the car, where she could quickly eat and change into her soccer uniform as they drove to the next stop. She’d play the full game there, then ride back to school with her soccer team.
One bus for departure.
Another for the return.
“So many people told her she had to focus on one thing — she had to battle that all the time,” her dad, Sean, said. “That’s where I think a lot of people doubted her. They thought she wasn’t committed or that she’s trying to do too much.”
For the first time, Farrington is preparing for a life in which she concentrates on just one sport. She isn’t sure she’s emotionally ready but can’t wait to see the results of it.
She’s perhaps more dominant on the soccer field than anywhere else, a tall, physical center back with speed.
“In all my years of coaching, I’ve never seen someone as good in the air as she is,” said Vasil Ristov, her club coach at the KC Athletics. “If there is a set piece and the ball is in the air, everyone knows Lexy is winning that ball.”
Ristov recalled one tournament in which dozens of college scouts were asking about his center back. Farrington turned down an offer from Notre Dame, among others.
As she toured several colleges, they pitched her on their program. Told her how they were lined up for success. How she might fit in to the team.
Her response remained consistent.
“What about academics?”
No days off
By 6:30 a.m., Farrington was inside the Blue Valley North building, preparing for band practice. (Did we forget to mention she was the percussion section leader for the marching band, too?) She took a full day’s course-load that included 10 Advanced Placement courses during high school. Her grade-point averaged hovered around 4.5, but she’s shy about sharing those things.
It’s difficult to find her idle. At lunch, as classmates eat and talk, she sits with friends and does her homework. Every day. She studies on plane trips to soccer tournaments and car rides to the games.
At KU, she will study pre-med. She plans to be a doctor.
“I’m a nerd, and I’m proud of that,” she said.
In the spring semester, she attended soccer practice after school, then drove to the track field to work on her javelin throws.
By 8 or 9 p.m., she was headed to a country club’s gym to work out. Alone. On more than one occasion, she had heard she wouldn’t be able to handlethe physical nature of college sports. So she researched training exercises on Instagram, YouTube and Google.
“I wanted to make it my own,” she said.
On some days, she does four workouts. On her off days, she does just one or two.
Let’s repeat that: On days she marked in the calendar as a day off, she was in the gym.
“She treats her academics and sports the same — she wants to do everything she can to be her very best,” her mother, Dana, said. “She’s always been that way.”
She’s the oldest of three kids, and even when she was a newborn, her parents couldn’t help but notice just how active she seemed.
By the time she was in middle school, they needed help to keep track of all her activities. School, sports, band, volunteer work. Every Sunday at the kitchen table, the family would get together and roll through an Apple calendar, a tradition that continues today.
So, what’s on the schedule this week?
“Well...,” she will begin.
This story was originally published June 7, 2020 at 5:00 AM.