Life After Lax: Wiemi Douoguih, Turning Missed Chances Into Motivation
Wiemi Douoguih was an All-American attackman at Washington and Lee University in the early 1990s. He scored 50 goals in just 15 games as a senior.
But it’s the one that got away — in a 1993 NCAA quarterfinal loss at Ohio Wesleyan — that consumed him for a decade after his playing career ended.
“I looked up and we were down 8-7. I thought, ‘We have an opportunity to go to the next game and really win this thing,’” Douoguih said. “I remember beating my man, going to the cage and in my mind, I started celebrating. Then all of the sudden, I heard this clink. The ball hit the butt end of [the goalie’s] stick and he made the save. I was heartbroken. There were like 30 seconds left and the ball got kicked out of bounds. It was crushing. This wonderful, magical season all comes down to the last moment — it’s all I remembered for about 10 years.”
Douoguih (pronounced doo-WOAH-gey) found something positive in that missed chance. “Missing that shot motivated me,” he said. “All that preparation, sometimes things go wrong and you just have to keep going. Thrill of victory, agony of defeat.”
He turned that motivation to another field — medicine. He’s now the medical director for sports medicine for the Washington D.C. region for MedStar. He’s spent his career operating on top professional athletes like Stephen Strasburg and John Wall as well as youth and high school athletes as an orthopedic surgeon.
WHY MEDICINE?
My mom was a science teacher and a botanist, so I’ve always been around science. She was also a Peace Corps volunteer, so there was always an emphasis on service in our house. It was kind of preordained that I’d be involved in something like medicine.
WHY SPORTS MEDICINE?
I had seen my friends get injured, come back the next season and be ready to go. I thought it was a cool way to stay involved in sports after I was no longer able to participate at that level. It was definitely a sacrifice playing college lacrosse and doing pre-med. It helped me with life and the challenges I face as a physician.