It’s certainly fair to say that Riley Hayes comes from a family of athletes. Her father, Bill, played college football at Towson. Her mother, Meghan, played soccer at Iona. Her grandfather, Dennis Stuewe, played football at Nebraska and later in the NFL with the Vikings and Jets. Her younger brother, Will, just this week committed to play lacrosse at Rutgers. Her uncle played football at Virginia Tech, her aunt played basketball at Loyola, four cousins have all played college sports, and, well, you get the picture.
It's not hard to envision those competitive driveway basketball games and Thanksgiving Day football games in the Hayes household. As the only girl in the sibling/cousin group, and as an emerging young soccer standout, Riley was most often seen clad in tee shirts, shorts, and sneakers or cleats. So perhaps it’s come as a bit of a surprise that she is charting a career path in fashion marketing.
“Coming from an athletic family, when I was little I was always wearing sports gear or a soccer uniform,” Riley said. “And then as I started to get older, I really found an interest in fashion and expressing myself through that. I came to Bucknell undecided and really had no idea what I wanted to do, and as my interest in fashion grew, it hit me that this is where I think I want to go.”
Riley, who is now a junior and a starting midfielder on the Bison women’s soccer team, worked at the women’s clothing shop Anthropologie in her hometown of Princeton, New Jersey last summer, and then in July she was hired as a social media intern with The Stylish Bride.
Riley works remotely, about 10 hours per week during the school year, and is in charge of the The Stylish Bride’s social media marketing. She runs two Instagram accounts, creating posts related to their wedding day services that align with the vision of the company. She can often be spotted crafting posts on the team bus heading to a road game, and she’s even working on one now that features an NFL player.
“The company does wedding day service, where they will come to your wedding and basically make sure everything is perfect. They will see to it that your veil is on the correct way, making sure everything is buttoned up perfectly. They also do styling, where they can style your entire wedding from the gown to what the bridal party will wear, every intricate detail. They will have a staff of photographers at the wedding, and when the photos come back, we go over a plan on how to portray everything visually. It’s more about the fashion than the actual wedding itself.”
With school and soccer season in full force, Riley has not had the opportunity to go on location to one of the weddings, but next summer she hopes to get into New York City and see the company’s operations first-hand.
At Bucknell, Riley is majoring in psychology with a minor in marketing. While she is not receiving class credit for the paid internship, she says the opportunity aligns with much of what she’s learning in her marketing and psychology classes.
“The psych angle is about trying to get the Instagram feed and the media to embody the company’s clientele. When I first joined, they told me it’s going to be a really hard task, because it’s very high stakes with a lot of wealthy individuals. So you don’t want posts that skew too young or geared toward teens, you want to have them be mature and chic and appealing to their clients.”
Riley says she has found her lane, and she knows the world of fashion is something she wants to pursue after graduation. Even if it might be a surprise to those who knew her as a kid.
“At first a lot of my family members were like, ‘it’s so funny that you’re doing fashion marketing because we would never have expected that after you grew up in an athletic family, raised by almost all boys.’ But it is just a great outlet for me to show my creativity. My dad always said to me, ‘if you want to be successful, you’re going to have to really love what you do.’ I’ve been loving it so far, and being able to have the internship for the whole year, I’m really learning a lot from it.”
Her next step is a winter European study abroad program, where she will travel to London, Paris, Milan, and Florence to study fashion marketing.
“The program that I’m going with takes you to all these museums and fashion houses, and I’m excited to go there and still do the internship and really see how things tie in. Even with the styling aspect, I really love and enjoy that too, and not just the marketing side.”
In the meantime, soccer season is in full swing, and Riley is now a veteran on a Bison squad that is coming off the best four-year stretch in program history. The team won three straight Patriot League Tournament titles from 2021-23, and then last year Bucknell captured the PL regular-season crown but fell in the 10th round of penalty kicks in the tournament final.
As the daughter of a former college soccer player, Riley naturally had a ball at her feet not long after she learned how to walk. She never showed a serious interest in any other sports, and by the age of nine she was doing technical and agility training on their backyard field. By the seventh grade she knew she wanted to play in college, and she went on to star at The Hun School of Princeton, where she was part of a Prep A state championship team, and with her standout PDA club team, where she was teammates with future Bison classmate Caitlyn Scott.
Riley recalls her first introduction to Bucknell coming during the winter of her junior year, when she was researching Division I soccer programs at great academic schools. As she went through her checklist, Bucknell literally checked every box.
“When I first visited campus, I loved everything about it. I loved [coach] Kelly [Cook] and the way that she coaches. She’s competitive and wants to win but also cares about her players. And I love the team aspect as well. Getting on campus and seeing how everyone interacted was unique. I was just a junior in high school, but it already felt like the group had my back. It was just the perfect fit. I remember coming home from that trip and canceling the rest of my visits. It was the absolute best decision that I’ve ever made. This place has been nothing but amazing.”
Riley arrived at Bucknell in the midst of that championship stretch, and she and her first-year classmates quickly looked up to the veterans like Jenna Hall, Hannah Stuck, and Brooke Tracy. She began to see important playing time as a reserve during that freshman season, and she even scored one of the biggest goals of the season at Lehigh, a late match-winner that helped the Bison secure the No. 2 seed for the Patriot League Tournament.
Now as a junior, Riley is starting in the midfield and is trying to put many of those leadership lessons to practice herself. The squad was hit hard by graduation after last season, and already this year a dozen players have made their first career starts and five have scored their first collegiate goals.
The young-but-talented group learned some lessons in a handful of agonizing one-goal losses early in the season, but they made a breakthrough last week on a road trip that resulted in a one-sided win at Saint Francis and a well-earned 1-1 draw with Pittsburgh from the ACC. Last night's hard-fought 1-0 loss to No. 16 Georgetown, in which the Bison generated several great scoring chances and only conceded an 87th-minute penalty kick, upped the confidence level even more.
One more non-conference game remains on Sunday at home against Towson, and then the “real” season starts next week with the Patriot League opener at Lehigh.
“I feel like we always step up for the really tough games, and even though we’re reloading this year, our attack has scored 12 goals in the first seven games. We’re starting to gel and figuring out how to play with pretty much all new people. I think Pitt was a defining moment, because we have been talking about playing a full 90 minutes, and that was a perfect example of us playing the full 90. We talk about grit, and we’re really taking an example from the men’s soccer team. We love to watch their games and how hard they work for every single ball. They are relentless. And when we fell behind at Pitt, we were still down their throats. Now we need to carry that into the Patriot League and make sure we peak when we need to.”
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