Kerry Abello has built a reputation in Orlando as the Pride’s “do-it-all” defender, a role she perfected long before turning pro, not on the pitch but in the lab.
Over the past three years, Abello has become one of the Pride’s most versatile players, appearing in nearly every position on the field except goalkeeper. She’s scored goals, shut down some of the world’s top attackers and adapted to every challenge with the same steady excellence.
That adaptability, though, didn’t just develop under the bright lights of the NWSL. It started years earlier at Penn State University, where Abello balanced Division I soccer with another demanding pursuit: a degree in Biological Life Sciences.
During the fall, she was one of the top defenders in college soccer. When spring came, she traded her cleats for a lab coat, spending hours surrounded by petri dishes, protein-binding tests and research that demanded as much focus and discipline as any match on the field.
"This is work that I'm so proud of, and it took so much mental and physical energy to do this,” Abello told Orlando-Pride.com. “Besides my soccer achievements, this is probably the thing I'm most proud of."
For Abello, the journey started before she even enrolled in college.
"I always knew I wanted to prioritize academia,” she said. “I knew that even then, that med school was probably my future goal. I wanted to do something in medicine, and so I knew I wanted to be in the College of Science."
Penn State was the perfect fit for Abello. The Schreyer Honors College offered her the academic challenge she craved while, simultaneously, the soccer program offered the chance to compete in one of the top conferences in the country for women’s soccer. During her recruiting trip, the coaching staff leaned into that, taking her on a tour of the Honors College to emphasize how much they valued her academic goals.
"The Honors College was a huge pull for me, and it was kind of a risk, because I didn't know if I would get into the Honors College at the time," she said. "It's super competitive and challenging. But it's funny, during my visit to Penn State, my future coaches had me do a whole tour of the Honors College because they knew that the academia piece was really important to me."
Abello would enroll at Penn State in the fall of 2017, choosing Biological Life Sciences as her major. By the time she graduated, she also double majored in Spanish, serving as the student marshal for the College of Liberal Arts in the fall of 2021.
However, as she began her journey to balance school and athletics, she encountered a bit of a roadblock. No one had ever attempted to be a student-athlete while also balancing life in the lab. It took a bit of convincing before Abello finally garnered support from Dr. Justin Pritchard, the head of one of the labs on campus.
"Honestly, I'm so grateful so many labs turned me down,” Abello joked. "They all told me, 'You're a student-athlete. We’re not going to take you on. That's insane.’
It wasn’t until I found the Pritchard Lab, and Justin, who was the head of the lab. He was so awesome. He's said to me, ‘We're going to work with you. You seem really into it. We want to help you and make this happen, to teach you and take you under our wing.’"
From that point on, the work began.
For three straight years, including summers, Abello put in the hours on nights and weekends, staying on campus in Happy Valley when her teammates would have gone home. From the summer after her sophomore year to the fall of her final season, she grinded.
"I would work our soccer camps in the early morning until noon," she said, "then I would go to class for an hour and a half, and then I would go straight to the lab, and I would be there, honestly, from 3 to 8 p.m. every single day."
A look at Kerry's lab station at Penn State's Prichard Lab
She trained on pipette technique, learned basic cell culture and took late-night shifts splitting cells in full protective gear, all while working her way through her college soccer career.
"I would literally have to go into the lab at 11 p.m. to split my cells and keep experiments going and stuff," she said. "It was a pretty insane time. Full transparency, I thought about quitting multiple times. It's the only thing in my life that I've ever genuinely thought about quitting."
During the fall season, she had to pause her “wet lab” work, which involved chemicals and other liquid samples, and focus instead on remote research. And when it came time to write her thesis in her final season, she did it the only time she could, on away days.
"I wrote my thesis on bus rides during my last fall season, because I did the bulk of my research the summer before my last semester and that spring," she joked. "But then my last semester, which was a fall semester, I had to do the actual writing of my thesis. So my whole thesis was written on bus rides and on planes that season. Every time we traveled, my teammates were like, 'Don't bother Kerry. She's writing her thesis.' My headphones are on, I’m in my zone. Don't talk to me."
Part of that thesis, which ended up being part of a published medical journal in the National Library of Medicine, centered around the treatment of cancer cells and the repurposing of other medicines to treat infected cells.
"Ultimately, it's a huge umbrella, but this falls under the umbrella of cancer cell research and cancer drug research, she said. "A big issue is that a lot of the drugs that we've come up with, called TKIs, or Tyrosine Kinase Inhibitors, are really commonly repurposed for other diseases. So the ones I studied were first manufactured to treat CML, chronic myeloid leukemia, but they've also been known to be effective for other types of cancers, even other diseases, because dysfunction in kinases, which are a kind of protein, is a really prevalent cause of human diseases because they're basically in charge of cell-to-cell communication."
"It's this concept of the repurposing of drugs that is what we're after. And through meta-analysis, we found that concentrations of the drug that are used in vitro, or in an experiment in a petri dish, are unrealistic concentrations that would actually be reached in a human patient.
"My part of the study was the meta-analysis part to track all of those studies. This is what I did during COVID, to find how many of those studies that made claims saying this should work in clinic, actually used a proper concentration of that drug. And then my lab, and what most of the paper is, is they created a computer model to determine what the appropriate dosage of these TKIs would be to use in vitro. Kind of like, how much should you actually be giving to a cell in a petri dish that would be realistic to give to a patient."
For the amount of time and effort that Abello put into her studies off the field, she was equally passionate about her play on it. So when COVID suspended athletics and gave her an extra year of eligibility, she was able to complete her research and play an extra year of college soccer.
Meanwhile, in 2021, she was being drafted by the Orlando Pride with the 24th overall pick to play professional soccer, which led to a crossroads for Abello: pursue med school or go pro in the NWSL.
"My plan coming out of college was always to play pro for a couple years to live out my glory days and then go to med school," Abello said, "Academics were always the priority over soccer. It wasn't until towards the end of my college career that I realized, I think I'm gonna get drafted, and that's a pretty big deal. Then in my rookie year, I wasn't playing right when I got here, but then I started playing, and that went better than expected.
"I think throughout my rookie year, and the year after that, I had this shift in mentality: med school is always going to be there. I can always go back to school, but I love soccer. I love it so much, and I want to give it my all. I've always had big goals in soccer, but they've always been rivaled by my passions academically in medicine too. So it definitely took me by surprise a little bit that I've shifted."
Since officially becoming a pro in 2022, Abello has thrived in her professional career, including more than 100 appearances for the Pride, NWSL Best XI Second Team in 2024 honors, two NWSL trophies and a U.S. Women's National Team call-up and appearance, with plenty more still to come.
Even with all of her soccer dreams coming to fruition, her academic dream of going to medical school is still in the back of her mind.
"The med school vision is still there, but now I'm totally in the mindset that I want to play as long as I still love it, and I'm still healthy enough to play. I always say, knock on wood, if I stopped playing soccer right now for whatever reason, I would totally go to med school. That's still a big passion of mine. But again, I hope and pray that I'll be playing for another 10 or so years. For now, you'll have to rip me off the soccer field."
As Abello’s life has shown, the disciplines of the lab and her play on the pitch have been able to go hand in hand. Whether she’s defending her thesis or defending the ball on the pitch, the same focus, strategy and belief in herself drives her towards her goals.
"That pressure, whether it’s precise, executing what you learned, all alone, it reminds me of soccer," she said. "Different stakes, but the same mindset. I can do hard things. Whether that's academically hard, physically hard, mentally hard, I always remind myself, I can do hard things."
