For more than half of Audrey LeClair’s life, college baseball season — not football — has always meant homecoming.
It was a time she could come back to the place she grew up, where she started to school and learned to ride horses. Coming home meant a chance to reconnect with family friends and cheer for the Pirates. But more than anything, it was a way to revisit the place that holds her first and last memories of her dad, beloved East Carolina University baseball coach Keith LeClair, who died from ALS in 2006 at age 40.
Since moving to South Carolina 17 years ago, Audrey has made a pilgrimage of sorts to Greenville just before spring each year, driving six hours with her mother, Lynn, for the Keith LeClair Classic. The tournament, established in his honor, is played on a field that shares his name.
Just after this year’s classic at Clark-LeClair Stadium, Audrey received an invitation to return to Greenville to take her place in a different field. Dr. Audrey LeClair has joined the team of residents at ECU Health Medical Center.
“Coming into med school, I had this vision in my head of match day and being able to say I was going to get to be back in Greenville,” she said. “It was honestly a surreal moment when I opened it (the envelope) and found out. … It really is a dream come true for me.”
Audrey, who graduated in May from Tennessee’s Lincoln Memorial University-DeBusk College of Osteopathic Medicine, began work this month in the emergency department of ECU Health. She will spend the next three years completing her post-graduate training in the community that became her home when she was 3.
“We were so blessed with the physicians that Dad had, especially while he was in Greenville, just seeing how they treated patients,” she said. “That was my first glimpse of medicine and what it could be.”
From early childhood, Audrey, now 29, got a closer look at both sports and medicine than most other kids her age. Her dad had become a head coach at age 25, before Audrey was born. By the time his daughter was 6, LeClair had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
Commonly known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS is a neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord, causing loss of muscle control. During LeClair’s five-year battle, Audrey witnessed a host of caregivers who came to the family’s aid so LeClair could be kept at home with his wife and children.
Physical therapist Sherrie Odom was part of that group. Odom and her husband, Mike, who knew the LeClair family through Oakmont Baptist Church, made regular evening visits to the LeClair home. They sat with Keith, who required a ventilator and feeding tube, so that his wife could try to maintain a bedtime routine with their two young children.
“Their door was a revolving door because there was always somebody coming in and leaving up until midnight,” Odom recalled. “There were just so many people that showed up to help. She (Audrey) saw all that.
“Audrey is super curious,” Odom said, adding that Audrey’s decision to pursue medicine did not come as a surprise to her. “She was always in there wanting to understand. She was always a people person. She learned really quick not to be afraid of people, not to be afraid of medical equipment. … I have never seen a child more curious than her or more adaptable.”
Family friend Michele Mazey spent many hours with the LeClair children as part of the same group of volunteers. Mazey, who routinely accompanied Audrey to lessons so she could continue horseback riding, said that, even as a child, Audrey was a quick thinker who Mazey thought might grow up to be a veterinarian.
Audrey remembers that, around age 5, she announced to her mom and dad that she wanted to go to vet school at the University of Georgia. Her parents were somewhat confused that a kindergartner living in North Carolina would know anything about a college of veterinary medicine two states away.
“We always think that it’s because during college football we saw them on TV, and they had a bulldog as their mascot,” Audrey said, laughing.
Her interest in animals persisted; Audrey competed in equestrian jumping events through high school and college. But her goal of practicing veterinary medicine shifted. As Audrey grew older, she began considering a speech language pathology degree. ALS had caused her father to lose the ability to speak, and he used an Eyegaze communication device during the later stages of his illness.
After graduating from Pickens High School near Clemson, South Carolina, Audrey enrolled at Western Carolina University, her dad’s alma mater, where she had a pre-med focus and was a member of the equestrian team.
“I never played softball,” Audrey said. “I cheered and I rode horses. (But) I especially love college sports. I just think that there’s something neat about college athletics. I definitely love baseball. Kind of in our house we always keep something on, especially during college baseball season.”
Audrey attended baseball games at Western and even found time to take in a few when she was in medical school. In Knoxville, Tennessee, she usually tried to catch a game when a family friend or one of her dad’s former players was involved.
Although she moved from Greenville the summer following her sixth-grade year, Audrey has never missed a chance to return for the Keith LeClair Classic. She and her brother, J.D., were often invited back to throw the ceremonial first pitch.
She also has taken every opportunity to push forward in the fight against ALS, serving with the ALS Association and volunteering at a camp for children whose family members have ALS. She has been interviewed for numerous podcasts to tell her story and shed light on the disease that also took the life of her grandmother and aunt as well as family friend Nelson Cooper, who was one of Keith LeClair’s caregivers.
As a second-year medical student, Audrey advocated for the Accelerating Access to Critical Therapies for ALS Act, which changed how research for ALS is funded and who can access investigational therapies. In a 2021 letter to South Carolina Sens. Tim Scott and Lindsay Graham, she said the fight against the disease fueled her desire to become a physician.
She decided to pursue emergency medicine while working with physicians in the specialty after she completed her undergraduate degree.
“I had a mentor that kind of said it best: That no matter who is walking by the emergency room sign, no matter what they need, they know that somebody on the other side of that sign, of that door, is going to care for them,” she said. “That really stuck with me and resonated for me.
“I like the idea of kind of being that person that could be the first interaction a person has when they come into the hospital, being that person that can advocate for the patient … even if it’s as simple as they’re hungry; they need a sandwich. It’s cold outside; they need a blanket. Just giving them that time.”
Although Keith LeClair is remembered as having no great fondness for medicine, Audrey believes her father would be pleased by her accomplishment and would applaud her decision to return to Greenville.
“He loved that community as much as we do. He loved the people,” she said. “The people in Greenville are just so special, and that community really does just rally around everybody whenever they need it.
“I think he would be proud that I graduated medical school,” Audrey said. “He would probably try to tell me I shouldn’t have done it for him. But in the back of my mind I always did want to do it for him, just kind of carry his legacy on in that way.”
The reminders of that legacy are hard to miss in Greenville, where Audrey has bought a house near Clark-LeClair Stadium. As she drives past it on her commute to work, she can glance up to see pictures of her father that are imprinted on flags hoisted above Charles Boulevard.
“I feel like she feels close to her dad here,” Mazey said. “I’m glad she’s getting this chance to come back home where she grew up and kind of have a bookend to triumph over tragedy.”
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