Fostering a Legacy

This past fall, Brooke Foster made the regular 5 a.m. walk from her residence hall to Ganfield Gymnasium for basketball practice, strolling in the dark, past a warmly glowing Main Hall and under a canopy of whispering old trees.

“It looks so pretty,” she said. “My dad (Dave Foster '83) always said it was cool to go to a school with so much history. I totally get that now.”

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For Foster, a communication and Spanish major, the history is personal. When she entered Carroll in the fall of 2019, she followed in the footsteps of eight family members, running all the way back to her grandfather, Charles Foster ’53. A football and basketball athlete, he is enshrined in Carroll’s Athletic Hall of Fame.

Charles Foster passed away in 2018, but she still feels his presence on campus. “We practice in Ganfield, which is the court he played on,” she said. In the Van Male Field House, she frequently walks past a video monitor displaying hall of fame members. “I always search for his listing,” she laughed. “It never gets old.”

With such a legacy here, it might have felt pre-ordained that she come to Carroll, but a teen-aged Foster had other ideas. “Everyone thought it was obvious (I would attend Carroll), which just made me want to go elsewhere,” she said. So she checked out a few other universities, some much larger, before visiting Carroll.

“I realized that it was perfect for me here, with the history, the family feeling and the ability to play basketball.” So, in late August 2019, she moved into her room, in South Bergstrom, the building that had been home to other Fosters before her, and opened a new chapter in the Foster legacy at Carroll.