Is An Injury The End?
Story by Luca Crouch-Goodhue | Photos by Jakob Burnham | Design by Sandra Rivera
Anastacia Conely, a sophomore soccer player majoring in Law and Justice tore her MCL, sprained her PCL and chipped her femur all in one tackle.
“I was praying that it wasn’t like an ACL tear that would take me out for a year. The emotions of not really knowing what I did beat me up the most. I was sitting there praying that it was something like a tweak,” she says.
“It was eating me alive watching my team and not being able to do anything about it. That’s how I’ve felt every day at practice since then.”
Conely didn’t end up needing surgery since the worst part of her injury, the MCL tear, was only a partial tear and it heals naturally. The downside is that even though she’ll be healed enough to start practice, the season is over and won’t pick back up until the first week of January.
Conely’s story is not an unusual one.
Have you ever wondered what happens when a student-athlete gets injured and is out for some time?
Injuries are bound to happen when playing a sport, and many do not bat an eye when an athlete goes down because they think ‘it’s part of the game.’ But do you ever stop to wonder what is going through the mind of a player when their season is sidelined by a serious injury? What happens to their scholarships?
What about the coaches? Do fans of sports stop to think about what a coach feels when one of their players can’t finish out a season?
What Happens to Financial Aid?
When an athlete gets injured, many worry whether or not they are going to lose their scholarships. But at CWU, the only ways you can lose a scholarship is if you commit a felony, violate a team rule or withdraw from the team. Scholarships can’t be taken away during the school year.
Head football coach Chris Fisk could not think of an example of when or if he would have to pull a scholarship from a student. “Their scholarship is protected from being affected due to injury by the NCAA,” Fisk says. Even an athlete that has been out for over a year still has his scholarship after a devastating injury.
Fisk explains that the coaches and CWU are dedicated to keeping the athletes safe.
“Our athletic director would find a way to help them through school,” he says. “Our mission here is about the student-athlete and the development of them as a person.”
What Goes Through Athletes’ Minds?
Quincy Taylor, a sophomore Media and Journalism student on the men’s basketball team, tore his meniscus in his senior year of high school. It was a year ending injury for him that happened at the start of the school year, a few days before Thanksgiving.
It wasn’t a new injury for him, he says, “It’s happened to me before, but I’ve been able to maneuver my knee back into the position it should be. Most of the time, I'm able to unlock it, it would hurt for a few days but everything would be normal but this time around when it happened, it wasn't unlocking.”
Taylor had to get surgery to repair his injury. It was his first major surgery since childhood, which he does not remember. “A surgery I actually remember and something like this [that would] keep me away from basketball kinda took a toll on me for a little bit,” Taylor says.
He went into a depressive state thinking about not being able to play basketball, but with a support network of friends and family, he was able to get out of the headspace.
When he would play at his previous school in Wyoming, he said “There was certain days I would feel a little iffy about my knee because I hadn't played a full contact game or practice yet.” He felt nervous when going to practices, worrying about whether it would happen again or happen to his other knee. “Fast forward to now, I would say I’m 100% healthy,” Taylor said.
For Conely, one of the harder aspects of the injury was how dependent she ended up being on others.
“The first three weeks of recovery, I couldn’t walk. I was in crutches, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t get in the shower alone. I couldn’t do my everyday life at all,” says Conely.
Both Taylor and Conely worried that they wouldn’t be as good of players once they returned. Taylor didn’t fully trust his knee until he got back into training and still does some of the rehab exercises during practices.
“A huge part of my mentality was ‘I’m never going to come back and be the same player again,’” says Conely.
When a player gets injured, whether they are out for a day, a week, a season or forever, it can be easy for them to fall into their own headspace. Thinking that they’ll never be good enough. As long as they are able to keep communicating with coaches and peers, they should be able to keep playing.
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What Do The Coaches Think?
Kevin Adkisson, who is the head cross country and track and field coach, says on average, about 30-40% of athletes are injured throughout the year, but that ranges from mild injuries to season ending injuries.
“The cross-country distance people, they’ll wind up with what we call overuse injuries that start small and just snowball gradually,” says Adkisson. However, if they are able to catch the overuse injury soon enough, the athlete won’t have to miss any meets or intense practices.
Brandon Rinta, head coach for men’s basketball, says that about 75% of his athletes end up having an injury that can range from a minor one to being out for the season. And that is “depending on what the injury is,” some players could be out for a couple weeks, while others could see their season ending.
Both Adkisson and Rinta say the ways they keep players who are injured from feeling like they aren’t part of the team is having the athletes continue to come to practices and trainings. “If they can cross train, sometimes they’ll ride a bike when the team goes for a run,” says Adkisson.