Completed Event: Women's Tennis at #1 Auburn on May 8, 2026 , Loss , 2, to, 4
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Final
Women's Tennis
2
at #1 Auburn
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Photo by: Duke Athletics
How Two Former Duke Athletes Built a Hollywood Partnership
6/15/2026 10:00:00 AM | Women's Soccer, Women's Tennis
DURHAM, N.C.-- Often you meet people, and you don't know how impactful they will be in your life. Rarely do you.
At a mall in Century City, California, two former Duke student-athletes sat down to talk, connected by a Duke Athletics employee who figured two young women chasing acting careers in Los Angeles ought to know each other. Both were still newly navigating life on the West Coast, 2,500 miles from Durham. Both were still figuring it out. Susie Abromeit, however, arrived late — a bundle of energy in a baseball cap, still riding the wave of her most recent role.
"She came in like 15 minutes late, no apology," Christie McDonald Campo recalled, laughing. "I was like, okay, that was a lot."
"I was going through my Miami phase!" Abromeit explained. "I had just played a female rapper."
They chatted at the mall. Then didn't speak again for a year.
What would eventually follow would become a friendship and working partnership, something closer to a creative marriage, that has now spanned more than a decade, carrying both women through the highs and lows of one of the world's most unforgiving industries. While they have left athletics far behind in miles and years, both carried with them from Durham to Hollywood something no acting class could teach: the mindset of a Blue Devil athlete.
A Foundation Built at Duke
Before they became collaborators and confidants, both women had carved out careers in Durham and carried more from Duke than either of them initially recognized.
A native of Boca Raton, Florida, Abromeit was ranked as high as No. 6 in the 16s and in the top 25 in the 18s prior to signing with Duke women's tennis in 2000. She was tabbed No. 2 in the state of Florida for girls 16s, while winning an International Tennis Federation (ITF) in Texas prior to attending Duke.
Abromeit registered five singles wins and five doubles victories during her freshman year in Durham, while helping lead Duke to the NCAA Tournament round of 16. Following her rookie season, Abromeit decided to move away from tennis and focus on acting.
Campo played four years for the Duke women's soccer team from 2005-08, earning All-ACC Freshman Team honors in her first season after registering five goals and two game-winning goals. She transitioned from playing forward to a defender in her sophomore season, a move that reflected her versatility and team-first mindset.
Campo, who is a native of Newnan, Georgia, was diagnosed with a brain tumor near the end of April 2006 and underwent surgery on May 12, 2006, to remove a 1.5-centimeter tumor from the left side of her brain. With the surgery, she lost some of her auditory and balance nerves, so she had to learn to walk again during her recovery. Campo also lost hearing in her left ear during the procedure.
She was determined to return to the soccer field, and only 106 days after her surgery, Campo returned to the pitch and ended up starting 18-of-21 matches that season. Following her remarkable comeback, Campo was awarded the Wilma Rudolph Student-Athlete Award in 2007. Over four seasons, she started 85-of-89 matches, scored six goals, had nine assists and totaled 21 points.
Campo's path to the screen wasn't straightforward. Her health crisis reshaped everything that came afterwards. She didn't find her way past athletics and to the arts until the other side of it. Looking back two decades later, she no longer sees those two pursuits as separate chapters.
"It really was a continuation of me exploring how to use and move and self-express with my body and my voice," Campo said. "Athletics gave me the ability to do that for a really long time, and then it shifted into the arts."
After college, both women moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting. Their athletic careers were behind them. Or at least the physical parts were.
"We never really talked about the fact that we came from Duke Athletics," Campo said. "But it 100 percent gave us a common ground."
The common ground wasn't just familiarity. It was discipline and resilience. It was the ability to keep going when things didn't go as planned. To absorb failure, reset and go again. On a film set, as on a field or court, things go wrong constantly. Actors get cut. Projects collapse without warning. The phone can stop ringing. What separates those who endure in the entertainment industry from those who don't, Abromeit and Campo believe, comes down to whether you were forced to develop that inner reservoir.
"I think in sports there's such a mental toughness that is developed," Campo said. "And I don't think it's possible to make it long-term in this industry without that."
Campo also points to subtler parallels, the way different sports shape different performers. She has worked with other athletes on set and says she can always spot the background. "I can usually tell what type of sport they played, too," she said. Campo notes that Abromeit's solo-sport background shows in how she operates. She's quick on her feet, highly individual in her instincts, while Campo's soccer career instilled a more team-first orientation. "I can tell Susie's a tennis player, not a soccer player," Campo said with a laugh.
Duke, both women say, also impressed something harder to quantify. The university's commitment to the whole athlete: academic excellence, mental health support and a life beyond the sport. This created a kind of template for balance that served them long into the entertainment industry.
"Duke was so good about making sure the athletes were academically sound," Campo said. "Understanding that as a container was helpful going into an even more unstructured environment."
As any athlete knows, you don't wait for your moment to prepare. You stay warmed up and ready so that when your number is called off the bench, you don't hesitate. Hollywood operates the same way. The audition, the callback, the last-minute offer; opportunities rarely announce themselves on the way in.
A Leap of Faith
A year after that first mall food court encounter, Abromeit reached out. What prompted her, she says, was instinct. The kind of instinct she had learned to trust.
"I was like, this makes absolutely no sense," Abromeit said. "I had met her once. But I reached out anyway."
At the time, Abromeit was working on an idea for a show: a female-driven take on the phenomenon of "Entourage," loosely drawn from the surreal, only-in-Hollywood experiences she had been accumulating. Stories of tumbling down stairs at a director's New Year's Eve party, trading awkward moments with stars and navigating a life that felt, as she put it, insane all the time. She needed someone to help her shape it. Something pointed her toward Campo.
When they met again, this time, the dynamic was entirely different. They started creating together. What began as a collaboration on a short project quickly revealed a deeper creative connection. Campo's director instincts stood out immediately.
"She was immediately one of the best directors I had ever worked with," Abromeit said. "I was so surprised."
They began writing together, building what would eventually become Famous Adjacent, and building their friendship at the same time. Abromeit was navigating a turbulent personal relationship she needed help with. Campo helped with that too, in the way that only someone who works with you daily, reads your characters and asks the hard questions really can. The creative and the personal became impossible to separate from the beginning.
"I introduced her to her husband," Abromeit added, grinning. "So, there's that too."
Friendship Through Fire
Campo has a word for what they have and it isn't simply friendship. It's a creative marriage.
"When you work creatively with somebody, it can end up being much more like a marriage than a normal friendship," Campo said. "We've had these unbelievable highs together and these unbelievable lows together."
Part of what makes the partnership work is that they are genuinely different people. Where Abromeit charges forward on instinct and energy, Campo provides the edit — the reel-in. They've learned to play into the dynamic, even in meetings, using the push-and-pull as a kind of performance unto itself.
Their relationship has included moments of tension, disagreement and doubt. But it has also been defined by the resilience of teammates.
"She got on a plane," Abromeit said quietly. "She was there when my mom passed away."
That simple admission, said without any elaboration, says more about the nature of their bond than any recounting of credits or collaborative projects could. They have been, across more than a decade, there for each other in all the ways that matter.
Translating Athletics to Hollywood
For both Abromeit and Campo, the transition from athletics to entertainment never felt like a departure from the competition, but a continuation. The same principles that once guided them on the court and the pitch now guide them on set.
"It feels exactly like you've got five minutes left in the game," Campo said. "You've got to figure it out. Are you going to do it or not?"
Film sets, like games, can be unpredictable. Plans change. Locations fall through. Actors drop out. Projects get canceled without explanation. There isn't time for hesitation.
"We know when it's game time," Abromeit said. "We have that athlete mentality."
For Abromeit, the feeling before a major shoot mirrors something she remembers from her years on the tennis circuit.
"Have I done all the work that I need to do? Have I prepared?" she said. "Sometimes I didn't want to play a tournament because I didn't feel prepared. That is the worst feeling in the world. It's exactly the same in acting."
The lead actor operates much like a quarterback — holding the team together, setting the tone, carrying the weight of a production on his or her shoulders with the director playing the role of coach. The physical demands are real. Shooting a feature in 14 days, on her feet for 12 to 16 hours, requires the same kind of body management and preparation any serious athlete understands.
Campo sees the film set and the athletic team as near-identical ecosystems: players, coaches, an entire supporting infrastructure all working toward a single performance.
"It's like an entire empire has to happen," Campo said. And like athletics, life is nomadic. Living out of a suitcase, moving from project to project in city to city.
"I still have yet to decorate a home I've lived in," Campo said. "My stories are where I'm focused."
That competitive drive had to be managed and redirected in the creative world. The outward benchmarks are murkier and success can't be measured on a scoreboard. The underlying engine is the same and that has remained constant throughout their friendship.
"The main thing that keeps us going is that we just don't stop. We just keep going," Campo said.
Creating Something From Nothing
That spirit of constant creation formalized into a production company. Triad ™?, named for the trio of women at its center, came together in 2016 when Abromeit and Campo joined forces with their third producing partner, actress Alona Tal, whom Abromeit had first met years earlier when both were testing for "Glee." Two former athletes and a dancer-turned-actress, each bring a different kind of discipline to the work.
"She's very helpful if we're about to go attack something that doesn't need to be attacked," Campo said of Tal, laughing. "She draws us in."
When all three converge on an idea, they know they have something real. Their current flagship project, "Death and Friends," is a short film described as personal, heart-wrenching, and true to their congeniality, very funny. The project will make the festival circuit, and the women hope it serves as a launchpad for the larger features and series they have spent years developing.
"We've built sets from nothing. Written, produced, acted, served as location scouts…we've done everything," Campo said.
The process demands the utmost organization as much as creativity.
"You have 10 minutes to figure out how you're going to get the shot," Campo said. "Or it's done."
Those moments feel like déjà vu from the final minutes of a match when preparation meets pressure and execution becomes everything.
The Myth of Making It
In an industry built on perception, one of the most important lessons Abromeit and Campo have learned is that success is rarely what it looks like from the outside.
"No one ever feels like they've arrived," Abromeit said.
She watched a Marvel series she starred in hit No. 1 one on Netflix, then waited for the phone to ring with the next big thing. It didn't, not in the way she expected. She has sat across the table from Oscar-winning directors with a show in development, certain that this time, the pieces would hold. Each moment felt like the launch pad. None of them "were" it.
"So many times I've thought, this was the jump-off," Abromeit said. "And then nothing really happened."
Campo struggles with the concept of "making it" at all.
"I literally don't think there's a single person, even if there was a time when somebody might have felt they'd made it, who feels that way right now? I don't think anybody could," Campo said.
There is no finish line in the entertainment industry. The career is, rather, an ongoing process.
Resilience
That mindset was tested most severely when Abromeit lost her home in the California wildfires in 2025.
In the aftermath, she moved into Campo's old apartment, in a strange full-circle moment. She has since relocated to New York.
Campo's response to the fire, Abromeit says, became one of the most formative pieces of guidance she has ever received.
"You can choose to cry or you can use this. You can paint with this," Campo told her.
Abromeit mourned her home and then used it as a source of creative fuel. She describes the period that followed as one of intense personal sorting: working through old things and clearing space.
"And then," Abromeit said, "I booked a four-picture deal."
Both women are drawn to stories about greatness — its costs, its contradictions and the ultimate question of how to pursue it without losing yourself in the process.
"We're very interested in greatness, and the price of it," Campo said.
Their stories are an exploration of how people can be extraordinary in the midst of chaos, failure and everything in the middle.
"Hero's journey wrapped in the mundane," said Campo.
Today
Both of their careers span acting, producing and storytelling. Campo recently starred in the Lifetime film "Picture Perfect Sister-in-Law" and appears in an upcoming Tyler Perry Netflix series.
Abromeit has channeled her curiosity about peak performance into "Great Ones," a podcast in which she sits down with remarkable guests. From Olympic medalists to Grammy Award winners, Abromeit attempts to excavate the psychology beneath the need for extraordinary achievement. The throughline of the journey is always the same: what does it actually cost to be great, and is there a way to get there without losing yourself? Abromeit is also currently in one of the top movies on Netflix Australia called "Love in Bloom," which debuted June 12.
Susie Abromeit and Christie McDonald Campo have been working together, in one form or another, since 2011. Fourteen years of highs, lows, near-misses and genuine breakthroughs. Fourteen years of a creative marriage.
"We're just getting started," Campo said.
To stay up to date with Blue Devils women's soccer and women's tennis, follow the team on X, Instagram and Facebook by searching "DukeWSOC" and "DukeWTEN.".
#GoDuke
At a mall in Century City, California, two former Duke student-athletes sat down to talk, connected by a Duke Athletics employee who figured two young women chasing acting careers in Los Angeles ought to know each other. Both were still newly navigating life on the West Coast, 2,500 miles from Durham. Both were still figuring it out. Susie Abromeit, however, arrived late — a bundle of energy in a baseball cap, still riding the wave of her most recent role.
"She came in like 15 minutes late, no apology," Christie McDonald Campo recalled, laughing. "I was like, okay, that was a lot."
"I was going through my Miami phase!" Abromeit explained. "I had just played a female rapper."
They chatted at the mall. Then didn't speak again for a year.
What would eventually follow would become a friendship and working partnership, something closer to a creative marriage, that has now spanned more than a decade, carrying both women through the highs and lows of one of the world's most unforgiving industries. While they have left athletics far behind in miles and years, both carried with them from Durham to Hollywood something no acting class could teach: the mindset of a Blue Devil athlete.
A Foundation Built at Duke
Before they became collaborators and confidants, both women had carved out careers in Durham and carried more from Duke than either of them initially recognized.
A native of Boca Raton, Florida, Abromeit was ranked as high as No. 6 in the 16s and in the top 25 in the 18s prior to signing with Duke women's tennis in 2000. She was tabbed No. 2 in the state of Florida for girls 16s, while winning an International Tennis Federation (ITF) in Texas prior to attending Duke.
Abromeit registered five singles wins and five doubles victories during her freshman year in Durham, while helping lead Duke to the NCAA Tournament round of 16. Following her rookie season, Abromeit decided to move away from tennis and focus on acting.
Campo played four years for the Duke women's soccer team from 2005-08, earning All-ACC Freshman Team honors in her first season after registering five goals and two game-winning goals. She transitioned from playing forward to a defender in her sophomore season, a move that reflected her versatility and team-first mindset.
Campo, who is a native of Newnan, Georgia, was diagnosed with a brain tumor near the end of April 2006 and underwent surgery on May 12, 2006, to remove a 1.5-centimeter tumor from the left side of her brain. With the surgery, she lost some of her auditory and balance nerves, so she had to learn to walk again during her recovery. Campo also lost hearing in her left ear during the procedure.
She was determined to return to the soccer field, and only 106 days after her surgery, Campo returned to the pitch and ended up starting 18-of-21 matches that season. Following her remarkable comeback, Campo was awarded the Wilma Rudolph Student-Athlete Award in 2007. Over four seasons, she started 85-of-89 matches, scored six goals, had nine assists and totaled 21 points.
Campo's path to the screen wasn't straightforward. Her health crisis reshaped everything that came afterwards. She didn't find her way past athletics and to the arts until the other side of it. Looking back two decades later, she no longer sees those two pursuits as separate chapters.
"It really was a continuation of me exploring how to use and move and self-express with my body and my voice," Campo said. "Athletics gave me the ability to do that for a really long time, and then it shifted into the arts."
After college, both women moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting. Their athletic careers were behind them. Or at least the physical parts were.
"We never really talked about the fact that we came from Duke Athletics," Campo said. "But it 100 percent gave us a common ground."
The common ground wasn't just familiarity. It was discipline and resilience. It was the ability to keep going when things didn't go as planned. To absorb failure, reset and go again. On a film set, as on a field or court, things go wrong constantly. Actors get cut. Projects collapse without warning. The phone can stop ringing. What separates those who endure in the entertainment industry from those who don't, Abromeit and Campo believe, comes down to whether you were forced to develop that inner reservoir.
"I think in sports there's such a mental toughness that is developed," Campo said. "And I don't think it's possible to make it long-term in this industry without that."
Campo also points to subtler parallels, the way different sports shape different performers. She has worked with other athletes on set and says she can always spot the background. "I can usually tell what type of sport they played, too," she said. Campo notes that Abromeit's solo-sport background shows in how she operates. She's quick on her feet, highly individual in her instincts, while Campo's soccer career instilled a more team-first orientation. "I can tell Susie's a tennis player, not a soccer player," Campo said with a laugh.
Duke, both women say, also impressed something harder to quantify. The university's commitment to the whole athlete: academic excellence, mental health support and a life beyond the sport. This created a kind of template for balance that served them long into the entertainment industry.
"Duke was so good about making sure the athletes were academically sound," Campo said. "Understanding that as a container was helpful going into an even more unstructured environment."
As any athlete knows, you don't wait for your moment to prepare. You stay warmed up and ready so that when your number is called off the bench, you don't hesitate. Hollywood operates the same way. The audition, the callback, the last-minute offer; opportunities rarely announce themselves on the way in.
A Leap of Faith
A year after that first mall food court encounter, Abromeit reached out. What prompted her, she says, was instinct. The kind of instinct she had learned to trust.
"I was like, this makes absolutely no sense," Abromeit said. "I had met her once. But I reached out anyway."
At the time, Abromeit was working on an idea for a show: a female-driven take on the phenomenon of "Entourage," loosely drawn from the surreal, only-in-Hollywood experiences she had been accumulating. Stories of tumbling down stairs at a director's New Year's Eve party, trading awkward moments with stars and navigating a life that felt, as she put it, insane all the time. She needed someone to help her shape it. Something pointed her toward Campo.
When they met again, this time, the dynamic was entirely different. They started creating together. What began as a collaboration on a short project quickly revealed a deeper creative connection. Campo's director instincts stood out immediately.
"She was immediately one of the best directors I had ever worked with," Abromeit said. "I was so surprised."
They began writing together, building what would eventually become Famous Adjacent, and building their friendship at the same time. Abromeit was navigating a turbulent personal relationship she needed help with. Campo helped with that too, in the way that only someone who works with you daily, reads your characters and asks the hard questions really can. The creative and the personal became impossible to separate from the beginning.
"I introduced her to her husband," Abromeit added, grinning. "So, there's that too."
Friendship Through Fire
Campo has a word for what they have and it isn't simply friendship. It's a creative marriage.
"When you work creatively with somebody, it can end up being much more like a marriage than a normal friendship," Campo said. "We've had these unbelievable highs together and these unbelievable lows together."
Part of what makes the partnership work is that they are genuinely different people. Where Abromeit charges forward on instinct and energy, Campo provides the edit — the reel-in. They've learned to play into the dynamic, even in meetings, using the push-and-pull as a kind of performance unto itself.
Their relationship has included moments of tension, disagreement and doubt. But it has also been defined by the resilience of teammates.
"She got on a plane," Abromeit said quietly. "She was there when my mom passed away."
That simple admission, said without any elaboration, says more about the nature of their bond than any recounting of credits or collaborative projects could. They have been, across more than a decade, there for each other in all the ways that matter.
Translating Athletics to Hollywood
For both Abromeit and Campo, the transition from athletics to entertainment never felt like a departure from the competition, but a continuation. The same principles that once guided them on the court and the pitch now guide them on set.
"It feels exactly like you've got five minutes left in the game," Campo said. "You've got to figure it out. Are you going to do it or not?"
Film sets, like games, can be unpredictable. Plans change. Locations fall through. Actors drop out. Projects get canceled without explanation. There isn't time for hesitation.
"We know when it's game time," Abromeit said. "We have that athlete mentality."
For Abromeit, the feeling before a major shoot mirrors something she remembers from her years on the tennis circuit.
"Have I done all the work that I need to do? Have I prepared?" she said. "Sometimes I didn't want to play a tournament because I didn't feel prepared. That is the worst feeling in the world. It's exactly the same in acting."
The lead actor operates much like a quarterback — holding the team together, setting the tone, carrying the weight of a production on his or her shoulders with the director playing the role of coach. The physical demands are real. Shooting a feature in 14 days, on her feet for 12 to 16 hours, requires the same kind of body management and preparation any serious athlete understands.
Campo sees the film set and the athletic team as near-identical ecosystems: players, coaches, an entire supporting infrastructure all working toward a single performance.
"It's like an entire empire has to happen," Campo said. And like athletics, life is nomadic. Living out of a suitcase, moving from project to project in city to city.
"I still have yet to decorate a home I've lived in," Campo said. "My stories are where I'm focused."
That competitive drive had to be managed and redirected in the creative world. The outward benchmarks are murkier and success can't be measured on a scoreboard. The underlying engine is the same and that has remained constant throughout their friendship.
"The main thing that keeps us going is that we just don't stop. We just keep going," Campo said.
Creating Something From Nothing
That spirit of constant creation formalized into a production company. Triad ™?, named for the trio of women at its center, came together in 2016 when Abromeit and Campo joined forces with their third producing partner, actress Alona Tal, whom Abromeit had first met years earlier when both were testing for "Glee." Two former athletes and a dancer-turned-actress, each bring a different kind of discipline to the work.
"She's very helpful if we're about to go attack something that doesn't need to be attacked," Campo said of Tal, laughing. "She draws us in."
When all three converge on an idea, they know they have something real. Their current flagship project, "Death and Friends," is a short film described as personal, heart-wrenching, and true to their congeniality, very funny. The project will make the festival circuit, and the women hope it serves as a launchpad for the larger features and series they have spent years developing.
"We've built sets from nothing. Written, produced, acted, served as location scouts…we've done everything," Campo said.
The process demands the utmost organization as much as creativity.
"You have 10 minutes to figure out how you're going to get the shot," Campo said. "Or it's done."
Those moments feel like déjà vu from the final minutes of a match when preparation meets pressure and execution becomes everything.
The Myth of Making It
In an industry built on perception, one of the most important lessons Abromeit and Campo have learned is that success is rarely what it looks like from the outside.
"No one ever feels like they've arrived," Abromeit said.
She watched a Marvel series she starred in hit No. 1 one on Netflix, then waited for the phone to ring with the next big thing. It didn't, not in the way she expected. She has sat across the table from Oscar-winning directors with a show in development, certain that this time, the pieces would hold. Each moment felt like the launch pad. None of them "were" it.
"So many times I've thought, this was the jump-off," Abromeit said. "And then nothing really happened."
Campo struggles with the concept of "making it" at all.
"I literally don't think there's a single person, even if there was a time when somebody might have felt they'd made it, who feels that way right now? I don't think anybody could," Campo said.
There is no finish line in the entertainment industry. The career is, rather, an ongoing process.
Resilience
That mindset was tested most severely when Abromeit lost her home in the California wildfires in 2025.
In the aftermath, she moved into Campo's old apartment, in a strange full-circle moment. She has since relocated to New York.
Campo's response to the fire, Abromeit says, became one of the most formative pieces of guidance she has ever received.
"You can choose to cry or you can use this. You can paint with this," Campo told her.
Abromeit mourned her home and then used it as a source of creative fuel. She describes the period that followed as one of intense personal sorting: working through old things and clearing space.
"And then," Abromeit said, "I booked a four-picture deal."
Both women are drawn to stories about greatness — its costs, its contradictions and the ultimate question of how to pursue it without losing yourself in the process.
"We're very interested in greatness, and the price of it," Campo said.
Their stories are an exploration of how people can be extraordinary in the midst of chaos, failure and everything in the middle.
"Hero's journey wrapped in the mundane," said Campo.
Today
Both of their careers span acting, producing and storytelling. Campo recently starred in the Lifetime film "Picture Perfect Sister-in-Law" and appears in an upcoming Tyler Perry Netflix series.
Abromeit has channeled her curiosity about peak performance into "Great Ones," a podcast in which she sits down with remarkable guests. From Olympic medalists to Grammy Award winners, Abromeit attempts to excavate the psychology beneath the need for extraordinary achievement. The throughline of the journey is always the same: what does it actually cost to be great, and is there a way to get there without losing yourself? Abromeit is also currently in one of the top movies on Netflix Australia called "Love in Bloom," which debuted June 12.
Susie Abromeit and Christie McDonald Campo have been working together, in one form or another, since 2011. Fourteen years of highs, lows, near-misses and genuine breakthroughs. Fourteen years of a creative marriage.
"We're just getting started," Campo said.
To stay up to date with Blue Devils women's soccer and women's tennis, follow the team on X, Instagram and Facebook by searching "DukeWSOC" and "DukeWTEN.".
#GoDuke
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