Author: Gabe Bernadett-Shapiro
My wrestling coach always said that there is a difference between pain and injury. Between our routine starvation, push-ups and his bouts of maniacal laughter, the realization of what those words meant manifested itself. Pain is something you can work through, injury is like wading through tar.
When asked about injuries sustained while playing at Oxy, current football Defensive Back Trace Wallace (senior) succinctly outlined the timeline of his injuries: in 2007, a knee injury in the third game of the season at Claremont; in 2008, a high-ankle sprain during the first game of the season at Colorado College; in 2009, a fractured Glenoid Fossa (or shoulder cap) during a team event one week into pre-season football training. With luck like that, the next time Wallace steps on the field he’s likely to be struck by lightening . . . twice.
Like Wallace, no sports player anticipates injury on the field. “There’s no room for that type of negative reinforcement in the psyche of a student-athlete. That’s why players train so hard in the off-season, to prevent injury,” Wallace said in an e-mail interview. “No one ever expects them to happen [. . .] they just do.”
When asked to walk through his worst injury, Wallace cites the one he sustained in 2007. While trying to cover the opponent’s wide receiver, he landed on his knee. “When I tried to get up and walk back to the sideline, I felt this gushy popping feeling with my left knee,” Wallace said. “Immediately I dropped to the ground and the trainer ran on the field.”
Wallace didn’t think much of the injury, and was more concerned with returning to the field to play. However, when the trainer cut his pants to expose the injury, Wallace soon came to realize it was more than a minor bruise. “There was blood everywhere and I could see with my own eyes the white of my bone,” Wallace said. “The first thought in my mind was that I will never play football again.”
More often than not, support from teammates is what gets an athlete through the healing process. “It helped that I received tremendous support from the guys on the team, friends, family,” Wallace said. In three weeks Wallace was back on the field. His doctor said it was one of the fastest recoveries he had ever seen.
Unfortunately, any injury takes its toll on an athlete’s body. When doctors speak of making a full recovery, it never means going back to the original state before the sustained injury. “I was excited about playing, but frustrated about my limited mobility and hesitation when cutting and running,” Wallace said. “I just wasn’t the same player by any means and that’s what affected me the most.”
Unlike Wallace, there are athletes who are not able to come back, who sustain injuries from which recovery was more of a challenge. Chelsey Brack (senior) has played soccer for Occidental for three years. Like Wallace, she has played sports all her life, and has also sustained a serious injury during play.
Brack injured the Sacroiliac Joint, located on either side of that triangle- shaped piece of bone where the spine connects to the pelvis (the sacrum and the ilium). It is not a joint with a lot of movement, but it is critical to the transfer of weight from the upper to lower body. Injuries to this area have been described as excruciatingly painful and debilitating.”Since the joint was inflamed, it was pressing on my sciatic nerve that was sending shooting pains down my leg and causing general pain in my lower back,” Brack said. “I thought I sort of tweaked and it would go away, like other small injuries, but it just got worse.”
Brack did not think it was an injury that could put her out for the season. Unfortunately, it was. “When I found out it was that serious, that it would take a month or more to completely heal, I was devastated,” she said. “I was depressed, but my teammates were really supportive and pushed me to stay positive.”
Even with team support, feelings of disability and neglect haunt any athlete who feels unable to perform. “Your team always tells you that you’re still part of the team, that nothing has changed, but you as the injured player know that things are different, because you’re not out there on the practice field everyday and you’re not playing in the games,” Brack said. “It’s heartbreaking having to watch your team play without you, one of the hardest parts of the game.”
The emotional strain on an athlete of being torn from what they love is a difficult one to cope with. “It was stressful and felt unfair,” Brack said. “It was definitely a growing experience [that] made me realize that there are many things that you can’t control as a an athlete, and that you have to focus only on what you can control.”
After surgery or physical therapy, there is a stretch of time where an athlete must ease into his or her sport despite pressure from teammates and coaches as well as the player’s own drive. This tenacity makes an already precarious situation extremely hazardous. Athletes will convince themselves that if they don’t compete rigorously they won’t recover. “When I was first able to play again, I had no hesitation or doubt,” Brack said. “I threw myself into practice and actually over-estimated the strength of my body, thinking I could just pick up where I left off.”
It was in an aggressive return to a free kick drill that Brack sustained her second injury, this time to her right quad. “That was devastating,” she adds. “After all the hard work I had put in, just to be injured again.”
At times, injury can force athletes to re-examine other aspects of their lives. This is not an easy process, for many sports have served as a reliable escape and a defining characteristic for many players. “It [the injury] made me realize that it will be my grades and extracurriculars at Oxy that get me into graduate school or whatever program I might do after Oxy, not soccer,” Brack said. “I came to grips with the fact that I wasn’t going pro after college, so I saw more clearly that I needed to balance everything else in life and not just put soccer first.”
This necessary and dissociative process begins when the injured athlete recognizes that success isn’t tied up to his or her endeavors on the field. “I think growing up as athletes, people tend to couple their sport with their identity, even making the sport their identity,” Brack said. “I feel like my injury showed me that soccer is not who I am, that I can function without it.”
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