As more than 4,000 graduates prepare to take the stage at the Viking Pavilion, we're highlighting a few of the students who make the PSU community so special. You may recognize these faces from their athletic careers as Vikings, but they are much more than the numbers on their jerseys.
Both were told, at one point or another, that what they wanted wasn't possible — and both found their way to Portland State and proved otherwise. Here is a look at who they are off the field, what they've accomplished in the classroom and where they're heading next.
Ocean Rideout — Soccer and Track & Field
When Ocean Rideout walked up to Portland State's coaching staff at a recruitment camp for athletes, she was so nervous that a future teammate had to nudge her forward — go talk to them, go get your spot on this team. So she did. The coaches called her a diamond in the rough and couldn't understand how she hadn't been picked up yet. Rideout couldn't either, but from that moment on, she stopped wondering. She was a Viking.
What followed was four years of refusing to be put in a box.
Rideout is graduating Summa Cum Laude with a 3.96 GPA, having competed in two Division I sports, pursued a pre-law track and completed a senior capstone that changed how she sees the world. Growing up, she was told again and again to pick a lane — one sport, one path. She never did.
That instinct is exactly how she ended up competing in track. In high school, she'd been told more than once that no one makes it in two sports at the college level, so when she first joined the team her sophomore year, it was only as a favor — they needed bodies, there was free food and a free trip. She was in. For a couple of seasons she ran a meet here and there without much training behind it. Then new coaches arrived this year with a different offer: a spot on the team, but only if she committed to training with them. She took it. It was then Rideout was introduced to the long jump, a brand new event for her. But one event was never going to be enough for her. She set her sights on the heptathlon — seven events across two days, four of which she had never attempted in her life. Within weeks she was learning the high jump, the shot put, the javelin and the 800 meter alongside teammates who had spent years perfecting them. They coached her through every rep anyway.
"I live by this philosophy that anybody can do anything," she says. "Maybe I'll be buns, but at least I'll do it. I'm just thankful people let me on the team."
That same willingness to step into the unknown carried into her senior capstone, which placed her at Donald E. Long juvenile facility, sitting with young people the system had already labeled and largely written off. One of the youth members told her plainly that she and her classmates were only there to benefit themselves, and that once they left, they would forget all about them.
"It just says so much about the mindset of others," she says. "There are people — children — who have been discarded from society to the point where that's just what they expect from everyone who comes into their life. That really made me passionate about the juvenile justice system, and about learning to see people for people — not off a label, not off a paper, not based off what they've done. At the end of the day, a person is a person."
Law school, with a focus on the juvenile justice system, had already been taking shape as a direction. That room at Donald E. Long turned it into a purpose. Today she mentors a younger athlete one-on-one, working on confidence and the mental game and offering the kind of guidance she wishes someone had offered her.
For Rideout, that mentorship is inseparable from identity. As a Black, mixed-race woman and athlete, she is intentional about how she shows up. She does hair — braids, twists and historical styles rooted in Black cultural tradition — and steps onto the field each season with a new color. Green this year. When her hair is done, she says, she feels like no one can touch her, and she wants the young athletes of color who come after her to feel that same way when they see her.
"I carry Black identity everywhere I go," she says. "You are who you are. Everybody should be memorable."
That conviction is what Rideout carries into law school and whatever comes after it. Portland State gave her the room to discover who she wanted to be. She did the rest.
Allison Harris — Softball
Allison Harris was in elementary school when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. She watched her mom fight through treatment and exhaustion, push to make it to games and keep going when her body wouldn't cooperate. And she watched the doctors — the way they cared for her mom and, just as deliberately, for the family around her. They knew which sports Harris played. They asked about her sisters. They made something terrible a little more bearable, and she has wanted to be one of them ever since.
Getting to Portland State wasn't simple. School after school told her she'd have to choose — pre-med or Division I softball, but not both. Some said outright that she'd need to go somewhere smaller if she wanted medicine, and at one point she nearly gave up the sport entirely just to keep her path open. Portland State said yes to all of it.
"I'm just proud that I did it," she says. "I was told so many times it wasn't going to be possible. And now I'm going to have the degree in my hand to prove it."
Harris plays catcher, the one position on the field that faces every teammate on every pitch and touches the ball on every play. When things get tight, eight sets of eyes turn to her. The role suited her. Her leadership has never been the loud kind, but it has always been present — in her body language, in the way she steadies the people around her, in a philosophy she took to heart from the start.
"Lead with love," Harris says. "If someone used that to describe how I was as a teammate, that would be my ideal wording."
She has long believed that how you do one thing is how you do everything, and she built her years at PSU on exactly that kind of consistency. Softball, she'll tell you, is a sport built on failure: a .300 batting average means you came up short seven times out of ten. So she learned to trust the process, to separate a hard day at practice from a hard week in life, and to believe that steady effort matters more than any single result. That belief carried her through a demanding pre-med biology degree, through early-morning weights and long afternoon practices, through the late nights before big exams when everything felt like too much. On those nights, her parents were on the other end of the phone, reminding her that she had done hard things before and could do them again.
Harris also spent four years building something bigger than her own résumé. As Cohesion Executive on the Student Athlete Advisory Committee, she created programming to bring athletes together across PSU's different teams. The idea was sparked by a freshman-year roommate assignment that paired her with a track runner and showed her how much was possible when athletes looked beyond their own rosters. Along the way, she paid close attention to the women leading around her, across the athletic department, across campus and throughout Portland's growing women's sports community and let their example shape her own sense of what she could become.
Harris is returning for a fifth year as she works toward medical school and, eventually, radiation oncology. She wants to be the kind of doctor her mother had, the kind who shows up for the whole family and not just the patient. Four years at Portland State brought her one step closer.
They were each told, in their own way, that what they wanted wasn't possible and they leave Portland State having proved that the only limits worth believing are the ones you choose for yourself.
Read part one of our outstanding student athlete series, featuring basketball's Isaac Brice and cross country and track’s Emma Stolte.