Having faced career-altering injuries as a young man, Emory University student-athlete graduate Tommy Davis has leveraged personal knowledge and a passion for helping others into life-changing experiences in global health.
He spent six months in Las Terrenas on the peninsula of Samaná in the Dominican Republic starting in June, shortly after graduating in May, for the Peace Villages Foundation. The Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) focuses its work in the Dominican Republic on education and human rights, while promoting cultural exchange and sustainable, ecological tourism as a source of income for impoverished communities in the province located in the northeast part of the country.
“Going there was a very big switch for me. I was a newfound person, not Tommy from track. I enjoyed stepping into this new life and I have a lot more goals I want to achieve,” Davis shared. “I am writing a book about the experience, interviewing people and gathering oral history. I want to delve into why people feel so free there. I always try to be a good person, but that experience taught me about true freedom and that being compassionate is not rare. There are people who really care about you and share love. I learned about giving more of yourself on the trip, but also as part of the Emory track & field program. You can always give more to someone else and it can improve people’s lives in a more meaningful and quicker way.”
Track & Field and Injuries
In high school, Davis was a long jumper who had his sights set on competing at an NCAA Division I institution. “I dislocated my knee three times, which I still have emotional and mental affects from to this day. It is hard to be getting national recognition at age 17 and then have your plans come crumbling down,” he recalled. “My mother works at Emory, and my sister went there and was on the track team. I hadn’t considered going there to run track, but there I was, albeit half-broken physically. I knew I would have a sense of family. It would also give me a chance to get back on course athletically and academically.”
Just as his days leading up to making his college choice were tumultuous, the track and field program at Emory was experiencing its own upheaval. With a coaching change and major roster changes, Davis’ personal uncertainty matched the team he was joining. “About 30 people quit the team. Then Derek (Nelson) was elevated to interim head coach, and suddenly everything was brand new,” expressed Davis, who attended his first Association event at the 2020 UAA Indoor Track & Field Championships hosted by NYU. “We had three sprinters at UAAs. It was wild inserting myself into this new community. Derek is a great coach. Then (new head coach Linh (Nguyen) came in and was amazing. The two of them figured out a lot of moving pieces and rebuilt the program. I also benefitted from my older teammates Jacob Solomon, Hannah Lansberry, and Liam Fost, who helped me in my first two years before I became more of a leader.”
Though he was still hindered by injuries, Davis was already looking forward to the UAA outdoor meet. “I could barely practice with the left side of my body, battling knee, hip, and back pain. Then COVID hit in spring 2020 and everything shut down,” he recollected. There would be no more UAA track and field championships until the 2022 indoor championships meet. By then, Emory finished last in 2020, but moved up to fourth indoors in 2022 and came within eight points of the indoor title in 2023, as the changes were bringing success. “When I first got there, we didn’t have a well-rounded team, but we had some strong competitors. Then the last two years, people got really good, particularly Jackson (Price) and Kenya (Sei),” Davis explained. “Socially it was good from the time I got there. The first years and sophomores had a dynamic where we wanted to see each other win and that we all care for each other. Things completely turned over and there were a lot of great memories and moments.”
“Tommy is a great guy, one of those people who makes you excited to go to practice and get better. As throwers, we sometimes get separated from the rest of the team. Even though we didn’t compete in the same event and aren’t in the same event group, Tommy always made sure to check up on me,” Sei stated. “He asked real questions about how I threw, how I felt about the throw, what I was working on in practice, etc. Even though he might not have known what I was talking about, he cared about my progress and how I was doing as a student, an athlete, and generally as a person.”
“’Tommy D has always been a role model for me. He brought so much talent to the team, and he knew the ins and outs of the program and took me under his wing to show me the ropes. He’s an incredible friend and teammate and someone I look up to and strive to be like out on the track and as a person,” Price commented. “He’s been so giving and kind and he’s always there for you when you need to talk, a pick me up, or some positive encouragement during a workout. I remember being bummed I couldn’t run with him when I came into the program and he was hurt, but he was still there supporting me in any way he could.”
“Tommy was loved by his teammates; his gregarious personality gave him the ability to connect with everyone,” stated Nelson. “You could always catch Tommy hanging out in the student-athlete lounge or dining hall having a good time with his teammates.”
Panama and Shift in Focus
Davis’ vision for his future grew during his junior year, starting with becoming vice president of the Emory chapter of Médecins Sans Frontières, creating events on campus with representatives of Doctors Without Borders to help students gain a better understanding of the medical world. He changed his major from human health to anthropology and biology to focus on studying cultures and people. “Partnering my majors with health on a global level became my focus. With the injuries I have suffered, I understand what it means to feel free from that burden of being unhealthy,” he explained.
In January 2022 as part of UGA Global Brigades, he traveled to Panama, where he delivered medicines to different communities and gave presentations in Spanish about healthy eating habits. “I wanted to experience the world, but not separately from helping communities. I was not on vacation. That trip was amazing and made me want to replicate it and do it for a longer period,” he remarked. “I started searching for global opportunities when my mentor Hunter told me about different websites like Idealist.org, where I found out about the Dominican Republic.”
Davis noted that not only did the program in the Dominican Republic work well for his passion and interest, but also for his family. “My mother encouraged me to travel, but she was hoping it would be somewhere closer to home so she could visit. My sister attends medical school in the Caribbean, so we are familiar with it, and my family is from the Bahamas. For me, it was also far enough from Atlanta for me to be able to live on my own.”
In the summer between his junior and senior years, he continued to make an impact. He created a fundraiser for famine in Somalia, raising awareness in his community and with political representatives in Georgia. Davis also volunteered at Nicholas House Atlanta, a homeless shelter where he would cook on Sundays during the summer.
Finishing Track in Style
Injuries continued to plague Davis for much of his junior year. “It was frustrating after COVID to be injured. I couldn’t walk a month before UAA outdoors,” he recollected. After missing the 2022 UAA Indoor Track and Field Championships, he recovered for the outdoor championship, where he was named the Men’s Most Outstanding Performer for Running Events. Davis won the 100-meter dash, placed second in the 200-meter dash, and ran on the Eagles’ winning 4×100 and 4×400 relays.
He returned to the UAA indoor championship in his senior year in 2023, finishing third in the 200-meter dash and running on the Eagles’ winning 4×400 relay. Things were lining up for Davis to have another strong Association performance at the outdoor championship, but things didn’t go as planned. “Outdoors (at UAAs) was one of the worst meets of my career. I didn’t run the 4×4 because my legs were shot. By the time it hit April, I had been running a lot since August and it was catching up with my body,” stated Davis, who did run on the Eagles’ 4×100 relay that repeated as UAA champions. “I figured just running the 4×1 was my ticket. It gave me a chance to make sure my hamstrings were straight.”
Davis, sophomores Sam Ryba and Jackson Price, and freshman Henry Brandstadter made the most of a Last Chance Meet at Life University in Marietta, Georgia with a time of 40.91 seconds in the 4×100. The time broke the program record by .10 seconds and bettered their season-best time by .31 seconds. The time allowed the quartet to slide into the NCAA Division III Men’s Outdoor Track & Field Championships as the 15th seed in the 16-team field. “We were ecstatic with the time we ran, and it seemed like a full circle story to end my career. My team was there for me, knowing I wasn’t in the best shape,” recalled Davis, who admitted it was a longshot they would earn All-America honors. “I was thinking, ‘Let’s just not finish last.’ At the same time, we relished the idea of being the underdog team.”
The Eagles were competing well in the preliminaries when Price took over the anchor leg. “Jackson got the baton and just took off. Before we knew it, we were in seventh place (top eight receive All-America honors),” said Davis. “Derek was hugging us and picking us up! It showed that if you just believe in yourself and in your team, that anything can happen. We took that hype of being the underdog making the finals through the rest of the day and finishing seventh in the final was an amazing story in the last race of my career. I couldn’t have done anything without my team. I was able to believe in others because I had people believing in me even when I had low times. Not to mention, you literally can’t do anything without your teammates when you run a relay!”
“The men’s 4×1 was an incredibly cohesive group. They battled to earn a berth to the NCAA championship, barely making it in, having tied for the last qualifying time. Despite not having the fastest mark, I knew their consistency and trust in each other could help them make finals,” Nelson recalled. “I was overjoyed when I saw that we had advanced outright, to the 4×1 finals. It took the timers splitting the results out to the .001 with three teams tied at 41.00. I was so proud of their performance I couldn’t help but pick them up and throw them around.”
“He just bounced back (from injuries) and crushed it and just amazed me. I was so happy for him — his perseverance is like no other. For the 4×1, he was the upperclassman on the team at the time with us other three being younger, and he was our captain for that. He kept us calm and prepped and led us to be an All-American relay,” Price expressed. “Just overall he’s been an incredible teammate, athlete, mentor, and most importantly, friend and he’s helped me a ton mentally and physically as an athlete, and just an overall great guy,” Price commented.
“I really enjoyed having Tommy on the team and felt like we were always able to connect. He definitely dealt with some adversity through his years with the COVID shutdown and some injuries,” Nguyen commented. “It was great to see him be able to make NCAAs as a senior and work with his teammates to bring home an All-America honor in the 4x100m relay. As a coach, it’s nice to see somebody end their career on such a high note.”
“Tommy always brings positive and productive energy. You couldn’t ask for a better teammate,” Sei added. “He is an amazing athlete. In addition to encouraging people to do great, seeing him perform also pushed other people to maximize their limits. He was genuinely a 10/10 teammate.”
Dominican Republic
Shortly after finishing his track career in late May, he headed to the Dominican Republic for six months. “I think about it every day. My time in the Dominican Republic was such a unique period in my life, going to a place completely unknown. I knew Emory and Atlanta well, but now I was somewhere where the main language was Spanish, and I didn’t know the people around me. It was life-changing in terms of the people I met and how they immediately brought me into their community. It was an important experience that I will always talk about and share with others,” recalled Davis.
He spent his mornings working in the hospital before getting to know the country and its people through various activities. “Showing up every day and being a helping hand in the hospital was a great experience. At night, I ventured out to unfamiliar streets to see something new each time,” he described. “It was a mixture of work, fun, filling out applications for graduate school, writing my book, and doing different things to take advantage of having time to be forward thinking without having to work eight hours every day. Everything was new, even seeing trees and birds I have never seen before, houses shaped differently than anything I was used to. My mouth was open just taking it all in.”
Knowing that he wanted to write a book about his experience, Davis conducted between 50 and 60 interviews. “I developed a love for the mind and understanding how it works, and how it serves as the control center for everything we do. I injected this love of neurology into my questions, gaining a greater understanding of the people I was interviewing. Learning about people has been a great experience.”
Though he is in the process of writing a book for the first time, he jokes that it may have been destiny. “I used to write a lot was I was younger. I found something in my room from when I was three years old that said I wanted to become a writer,” Davis remembered. “I have found this love again. Writing is so important, and it frees part of your mind to be able to put emotion and thoughts onto a page. It is also a good form of therapy and relaxation. The process has also taught me a lot about myself, about having courage while taking a risk in doing something you haven’t done before. You must champion yourself and be your biggest supporter. It’s not like I started writing and wrote the whole book. I would write something, delete it, and repeat that. I have learned to keep what I write and see what it develops into.”
Next Steps
Davis is currently working at a neurological rehabilitation center in California before starting graduate school in the fall. “Neurology is my route, specifically as it relates to the combination of medicine and psychology. The mind is a beautiful thing. I have worked with people here who have fallen from a tree, who have been hit in the head by a metal pole, but their brains are able to function and adapt,” he explained. “Treating people with compassion and making a career of that is something I have been searching for. Life is so fast paced (in the U.S.). Being in the Dominican Republic and working at the rehab center have taught me to settle down and be patient while learning more about the brain, myself, and others.”
His time at Emory and as part of the Eagles’ track and field program impacted his chosen field. “A big motivator for me wanting to pursue neurology was seeing how my teammates responded to positive thinking,” he explained. “In the Dominican Republic, my mentality changed a ton because of the people who were extremely positive with me. With such positive thinking and compassion, you can do so much good for people neurologically.”