The latest Scholar Athlete of the Week didn't let spinal surgery stop her from reaching her goals, both athletically and academically. NY1's Anthony Pascale filed the following report.

Emily Campos was always a gifted athlete. But she thought spinal surgery might prevent her from ever playing sports again.

"It was a challenge," she says. "Sometimes I would cry, and I'd think that, I'm like, 'They can't take the sports away from me! This can't be a setback.' So I thought of it as an obstacle that I had to overcome."

The surgery weakened her upper body strength and limited her flexibility. Playing basketball or softball was out of the question, so the High School for Environmental Studies senior decided to try out for soccer her sophomore year. Though she had never played before, Campos quickly became a role model for her teammates.

"She is extremely generous," says Maximillian Sugiura, Campos' soccer coach. "And she was also really, really good at encouragement. So if there were other areas that other players needed to work on, areas of focus - usually shooting, but generally, it's passing as well, because that's her strength - she would take extra time, and often outside of practice, to work with that individual."

Outside of school, Campos is a volunteer coach for children and a member of a club team.

Though soccer is a huge part of Campos' life, she says academics comes first. She has a nearly perfect GPA with intense advanced placement calculus, English and economics classes all filling her schedule.

"I have really high standards for myself, so whenever I felt myself slipping, I would bring myself back up," Campos says. "Because I want to be a good role model for the girls on my team."

Campos proved to lead by example in the classroom, too.

"Our class started at 8:15 in the morning. She would be there 8 o'clock before anybody else, and we would have discussions about the homework. And she always wanted to get better," says Jose Ferrer, Campos' Spanish teacher.

Campos is off to Fordham University next year, where she will study political science. She hopes to then go to law school.

"I'm just prepared to see what's going to come for the future," she says. "That's what I'm hoping. That's my dream, to become a criminal justice lawyer."

So, for proving that no goal is ever too far out of reach, Emily Campos is the latest Ford Lincoln of Queens NY1 Scholar Athlete of the Week.