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Nobody would have blamed Lamar's Toni Sylvester if she never stepped on the track again following her May 21, 2006, car accident. In fact, most people would have been thankful simply to be alive and walking after flipping their car.

Six days later, Sylvester, ran the 400-meter dash in 55.74 seconds, finishing sixth in her heat at the NCAA Midwest regional in Austin, Texas.

For Sylvester, a senior star on the Lady Cardinals track team this season, overcoming obstacles is nothing new and something she excels at. In fact, a "little" car accident seems like a minor detail in Sylvester's story.

A foster child at the age of 6, Sylvester was adopted when she was 9 years old and moved to the Hardin-Jefferson school district. A natural athlete, she loved to run and play basketball, but when she started running track in the seventh-grade, she knew she had found her calling.

Her ability on the track caught the eye of Lamar head coach Trey Clark, and after winning the class 3A state championship in the 400 meter dash as a junior, she was offered a full scholarship to run for the Cardinals. After repeating as state champion her senior year in 2003 she made the move to Lamar.

"I didn't even know what a scholarship was," Sylvester said. "I knew it was something good but I didn't really know what it was. Coach Clark contacted me and offered me a full scholarship and I came to Lamar."

At the same time Sylvester was transitioning out of high school and into college, she was making a transition in her family life. She had found her birth family, which lived in Port Arthur, Texas, and decided to leave her adopted family, making the decision to choose Lamar even easier.

"When I signed with Lamar I was also meeting my real family at the time," she said. "I found out that they lived in Port Arthur and were really close. I had just found them and I wasn't going to lose them again. This was the perfect situation for me."

Fast forward three years and Sylvester seemed to have everything in order. She had found her family, was a successful college athlete and was looking forward to her senior season on the track after bouncing back from the near fatal car accident.

While attending summer classes at Lamar, Sylvester got the most shocking news of her life. She was pregnant.

She feared the worst when she told Clark the news, thinking he would not renew her scholarship for her senior year. To her surprise, Clark was very supportive.

"I told coach and I thought he'd be furious with me," she said. "He wasn't mad at all, and he still helped me out. That's when I realized that these people really love me. That was really cool."

"For years college athletics were a way to a better life for many young people because of the opportunity to get a college education and to provide them with open doors they would never receive under normal circumstances," Clark said. "Toni is a talented young lady who had performed well for our program for several years. When she ended up with some adversity, it was easy to help her out and be patient.

"She's had a lot of challenges in life and she's met every one of them head on. This was another challenge that was put in front of her and I felt she needed the opportunity to overcome it. I simply wanted to keep the door open for her as long as possible and let her choose whether or not she would tackle it. As much as it was about athletics, it was also about receiving a college education."

On February 27, 2007 she gave birth to Taveyian Thomas, a healthy baby boy. Now a mother, Sylvester had a plate full of questions. How was she going to finish school? How was she going to work to provide for her child? Would she ever run track again?

Once again Sylvester was in a situation where nobody would have questioned her if she decided to hang up her spikes for good. She had already overcome so much in her life, and now she was a mother.

After attending Lamar's home meet, the Ty Terrell Relays in late April 2007, she knew she still had a burning desire to run.

"I started to quit, I really started to," she said. "I thought it was going to be too hard. It was hard, but I told myself that I have one more year of eligibility, so I might as well go and do it."

The decision to return to the track made raising her infant son Taveyian an even greater adventure than she could have imagined. Now she was a full-time mom, a full-time student and a full-time athlete who was working a full-time job. Just one of those four tasks would wear out the average person.

Sylvester took 15 hours during the fall and spring semesters this school year in an effort to get closer to graduating. After class she would go to practice. After practice she would catch a few hours of sleep before picking up her son from the babysitter. She would take him from the sitter to her teammates, who took care of her son while she worked the night shift at Sam's Club from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. After returning home for a few hours of sleep she would start the routine again by taking Taveyian to the baby sitter.

"Some days it was very hard and I could hardly open my eyes," she said. "It was a lot, and I got overwhelmed a couple of times, but I didn't let the circumstances defeat me. I was off on weekends so that's when I would rest. There were times when he would get sick and I'd have to get up with him, I know there were times where I wouldn't sleep for a couple of days, but I still made As and Bs in my classes which I'm very proud of."

In addition to making the grade in the classroom, Sylvester began to get back to where she was at the end of her junior season on the track. She picked up the first gold medal of her career during the indoor season as a member of the distance medley relay team.

"At the conference indoor meet coach put me on the distance medley relay," she said. "He told me he wanted to get a gold medal because I deserved one. I ran so hard thinking to myself, `gold medal, gold medal,' and we were so far ahead that our last leg just looked at us and smiled as she ran by for the final lap. I loved it. I finally got a gold medal."

Individually Sylvester continued to show improvement on the track as this year's outdoor season played out, and she entered the Southland Conference championship meet as one of the top 400-meter runners in the conference.

She ran a regional qualifying time in the semifinals, and then bested that performance with a second-place finish in a time of 54.50 seconds. The second-place finish was the best individual finish of her career.

"I knew I had the ability to do better than I did as a junior," she said. "When I got pregnant and I thought I wasn't going to come back, I started to regret it because I never got to see how far I could go. I knew I could do better, but I didn't think I would finish.

"When coach Clark let me come back, I had my second chance. I decided that I was going to do my best and work my hardest. When my eligibility is done and I leave this place, I am going to know that I did my best and I didn't hold back anything."

Sylvester will run this weekend at the NCAA Midwest regional meet in Lincoln, Neb., in what could be her final college race. While her athletic career at Lamar is almost complete, Sylvester has just one semester left before she graduates, which in Clark's mind is her greatest accomplishment.

"There is satisfaction on multiple levels," he said. "To know that she's come back and run better than she's ever run before, there's satisfaction there. On the individual level I am extremely proud of her for overcoming the obstacles that were in front of her. She still has some more work left before she's finished, but the day she gets her degree will be the ultimate satisfaction. She has taken advantage of the opportunities she's been given, and that says a lot about her.

"I've never had an athlete with as much on their plate as Toni. She is a full-time student, a full-time athlete, a full-time mom and she works a full-time job to support her family. I am very proud of her."

Having never given up in the face of adversity, Sylvester is happy with her life. She's proud to be a mother and proud to be a student-athlete that has excelled on and off the track.

"With everything I've been though -- being a foster kid, getting adopted, the car accident and having a child --I'm very proud of myself," she said. "I never quit. I never let things get the best of me. When I walk off the track for the last time I'm going to have my head held high because I know that I'll have given it everything. I won't leave anything on the track and I'll be proud of myself at the end of the day."