Anteaters have found success in many different ways through UC Irvine Athletics and men's soccer getting them there. Our alumni spotlight dives into the life and career of Jef Pene, a four-year student-athlete from the very first decade of UCI men's soccer whose career path was made possible by the opportunity of Anteater soccer.

Pene and his mates were playing soccer early on in Irvine helping form one of the institutions of the soccer community in the area.

"The Irvine Strikers was formed and founded by a man named Roger Roberts back in the early '80s. We actually picked the name and played all the way from under-10 to under-21s." The initial Irvine Strikers would go on to win international tournaments before the group went off to their respective colleges, but the Strikers still live on today on the youth club level.

Pene had a rather good showing in high school, enough to catch the eye of head coach Derek Lawther and bring him into the school. Pene had a goal all along and once he got to campus, he was playing soccer full-time. "I was all about playing soccer. It was an extension of my club team. I had decent grades coming out of high school. It was always my intention to get a higher education because I wanted to be a doctor."

With these lofty intentions, Pene started out in a competitive field of biomedical engineering and eventually biology. His full-time soccer life made it hard for Pene to apply himself early on. His soccer career flourished contributing eight goals and six assists as an Anteater including an impressive sophomore season where he buried six of his goals.

The four years went by quickly and by the end of his soccer career he needed to join the workforce leaving UCI with a little over a year left toward getting his degree. At a transitional time in his life, he made ends meet in Irvine. While working selling safety equipment with his father, he realized he wanted to get back to his degree and reapply himself.

"The soccer program did teach me about all the effort, dedication, and things you put into training, running, and all the things you do when no one is looking; the ball skills and handling that goes into the game made me really competitive on and off the soccer field. When it came time to apply myself to school, I took from that and did all the things necessary to be successful in the classroom. The commitment and dedication as an athlete, I was able to transition that to being a student and being competitive in the classroom."

Pene was still on his way to medical school without a specific avenue in mind. It was a conversation with his grandfather and a long-time friend that turned him toward dentistry.

"Dentistry seemed like a good career and probably the reason most people choose it as a career. Turns out I actually had an affinity for it and took to it."

Pene then got hooked up with a club on campus called the Flying Samaritans; a group that administers primary health care to people that don't have access to it with several clinics around Mexico.

"They would fly down there every year and ran the clinic for a weekend or two a month for many years. It would evolve to multiple clinics and UCI's chapter ran one in El Testerazo."

It was a pre-med club that would go down once a month during the schoolyear, a group of students driving down to the clinic and staff it for physicians that treat the local population. With a line out the door that treated every single patient, and a group of 20 or so pre-med students, the Flying Samaritans would get to work.

"There were two sides of the clinic: the medical side and there's a dentist who had a very profound influence on my life, but nobody wanted to work with him because everyone thought they wanted to be a doctor. They all would do triage and talk with the patients and if they're lucky they would get to do physician tasks. On the dentist side, it was all me, and by the end of the day, I was covered in blood, pulling teeth, giving anesthetic, he was showing me everything."

The whole thing was eye-opening for Pene, and for the whole 18 months he did that before going back to school and was more prepared for the next step than he could have imagined. All while still doing jobs on the side - growing cells for amniocentesis samples as a genetic tech, waiting tables at Fashion Island, gaining critical life experience.

"Some of the students had never had any hands-on work. I was going down with the Flying Samaritans, and by the time I went to dental school, none of my classmates had any of that, and it helped me graduate summa cum laude and catapult me into a residency."

Plainly put, Jef Pene credits UCI soccer for changing his life and the dedication and commitment needed to be a student-athlete, especially at UC Irvine. Specifically, UC Irvine as it also helped Pene with the single most important thing that happened to him - meeting his wife, Tracy.

"I'm pretty sure dating a soccer player was appealing to her because it certainly wasn't my looks!"

From UC Irvine to dental school at UCLA to his residency at the University of Washington, it was a long circuitous route that led Jef through his soccer career.

From there, his dentistry background led him to endodontics which Pene admitted before getting into the field, all he knew about it was his dad needing to have a root canal. He always knew he would do something in the surgical field.

"Dentistry is surgery, something people don't realize. A lot of the things that are done in medicine are cerebral, but everything in dentistry is surgical as is everything I do in endodontics. That suited my personality and the experience I had at UC Irvine and in Mexico brought that to light."

Pene is still in Southern California as part of the Newport Endodontic Group in Newport Beach. He hasn't lost that competitive desire either; still the same soccer player as he always was on the inside. His kids are the ones living the athletics dream now. His oldest, Declan, was a baseball and football star Corona del Mar High School and is now studying business at Cal in Berkeley. His youngest, Colin, is also a two-sport star playing football and soccer at CDMHS looking to jump to the next level just like his dad