To be completely honest, the things that I don’t miss about playing college ball far outnumber the ones that I do. I even wrote a song in the tune of “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music.  It goes: Wind sprints and bed checks and chin-ups and yelling.  Umpires and bus rides, my whole right arm swelling.  Tarping the field while  dumb freshmen sing.  These are NOT a few of my favorite things…

But, all musical maladies aside, and cliched sentiments to the forefront; being a part of that team made me the person I am today, and I know that is a better, stronger person than the one I was when I first set foot on Vidas Field.  It took me a full year to recognize and appreciate that, and another few months to be comfortable enough to share that insight with anyone.  So, to anyone who comes across this blog, the please read on knowing that there is no malice intended towards anyone mentioned in this blog.  There are only fond memories and genuine appreciation.

[As sort of a final attempt to keep softball in my life (and in perspective), I will continue to write about issues that I think are present in the game today and that could play roles in the future here on this blog.  Once I get up the nerve, I also plan on publishing two posts that wrote later on during my junior season and one I wrote during my senior season that are a little more personal (and maybe a little more self-indulgent than I'm comfortable with) than the other content on my blog.]

On a final note, To all you DUSB ballers-  if any of you happen to be one of those people who come across this, be grateful for what you have because no matter how much it sucks, it is making you a better person and it will all be worth it in the end.

Thank you.

Morgan, who wears a boot while not on the field, has been pitching, hitting, and playing first base with a stress fracture in her foot. They also have Lauren Parker who is in the same situation as several of my teammates have been in. She is playing with a torn labrum, awaiting the end of her season when she will have surgery.

Listening to that information being broadcast on ESPN really made me think of my own blog and the reactions I received after I created it. It also made me wonder where other coaches stood in terms dealing with injury and publicizing the impact it has on their teams.

Recently, I read an article by Michael Sokolove that was published in May 11, 2008 issue of the New York Times Magazine. It is entitled, The Uneven Playing Field, and it speaks to the escalating rate of injuries to young women in sports.

Many of the comments he received about his article deemed it very interesting and provacative, which illustrates how many people are not aware of this issue.  One mother of a collegiate athlete who suffered from a torn ACL said, “This was a long-overdue article on a subject that needs further study, exploration, and introspection from all of us involved in teen athletics… She [her daughter] was recently cleared to play after a 2007 ACL injury that resulted in physical and mental anguish for the entire family. I pray that years of club and school sports does not result in pain and grief for my daughter down the line.”

Another interesting point brought up by one of the readers, from Durham, NC, speaks a little as to the pressure put on athletes that I had alluded to in my previous posts. He or she commented, ” I think we need to speak to the pressure placed by coaches to play as well. I’ve had coaches at all levels press players to play… because playing injured is just something you do to stand out. Not playing can lead to lost playing time later on, or a belief that the player is not committed to the team.”

Sokolove’s article concentrates more specifically on female soccer players on high school and club teams. Because he focuses on soccer, Anterior Cruciate Ligament, or ACL injuries, also naturally become a focus of his piece.   All of the central girls in the article, playing with ACL injuries, express a determination to play through their pain. They want to dominate at the level they are at and make it on to the next- college. They feel that pressure to push through it from their coaches and parents, but they just as much put it on themselves.

While Sokolove’s article does bring attention to the fact that young women are being injured on the road to becoming college athletes, he does not mention any other women’s sports aside from soccer. The nature of injuries differs from sport to sport, and by focusing only on soccer, he dismisses some other issues.

One of the points that Sokolove makes is that, in soccer, girls are prone to injury when they are younger, before they reach college. That is due to the ways and the amount that they train for their high school and  club teams. Soccer is a contact sport, and so the greater the amount of games that they play, which lessens in college, the higher their chances of inducing injury.

I am not saying that I can speak about many other women’s sports, but I can say that I have not seen the same trends in softball.

My mission… sort of

When I was deciding upon a topic for my blog, one of the first ideas that jumped at me was to write about something relating to my team. Drexel softball is such a huge part of my life that I knew I would have much to share. Incidentally, injury affects us everyday, and my blog came to reflect and then focus upon the issue.

A few days after I posted my first major story that focused on the injuries my teammates were suffering from, I was met with some mixed reactions. My teammates all seemed to like what I was doing, but, understandably, administration and some of the training staff was a little worried by the information I included. In the end, I kept the story up but removed the names from my article.

Controversy, even in the least bit, was the last thing I thought my blog would generate. I had no intentions of causing problems with administration or the coaching staff. Just as the ESPN commentators and Sokolove had done, I only wanted was to illustrate the desire to play that we posses. However, now that an issue has been posed, I really feel like most people are not aware of what college athletes go through in order to compete.

Like the athletes in Sokolove’s article, my teammates and I all began playing at a very competitive level far before we made it to where we are today. That is part of the reason we have made it this far. Most of the girls that I played with and against had aspirations to have softball help them get into college (if they did not, their parents aspired for them).

Softball has been a year-round activity, especially growing up in Southern California, for the last seven years of my life. I played for my travel ball team, Irvine Sting, and for Northwood High School as well. We traveled all over the country to play in national tournaments in hopes of being recruited by college coaches.

For my travel team, we practiced and trained two to three times a week and would play anywhere from three to six games during the weekend, taking breaks only for high school season and Christmas. Then, during high school season, we practiced everyday, although not as intensely, and played about 3 games a week. With all of that, none of us ever incurred anything worse than a pulled muscle or sprained ankle.

It was not until college that injury became so prevalent in my life. Personally, I have not yet suffered from any major injuries like many of my current teammates have, but that is why this blog has focused more on them than me. Talking to some of my former teammates from home, I have realized that a lot of the issue that injury poses grows from coaches’ attitudes towards injury.

One of them is now an infielder at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and she feels that her coaches manage injury problems well. She said, “I think that our coaches understand that injuries are a very big deal because they never push us to come back too fast. Of course they want us to come back ASAP, but they want us to be fully recovered fist.”

However, she is aware that not all coaches share that outlook. She also shared that, “The coach that was at my school before my current coach pushed a pitcher to come back too fast after a broken wrist and now that girl can’t pitch anymore.”

Another former Irvine Sting teammate who now catches for Binghamton Uiversity did not have the same pleasant feelings towards her coaches and trainers. “My teammates and I do not like our trainers. They are always trying to tell is that our injuries are not as bad as they are. We have a pitcher on our team who they made pitch an entire year with a separated back, and now she has to have pins in it.”

She also wanted to add, “My coach never ask us if if we are hurting and she never makes a big deal out of it if we are. We had a girl on our team who had shoulder surgery and couldn’t throw, but our coaches made her come back too early and now it is messed up again.”

Like the soccer girls, we may not play as many games once we reach college, but we play in a different type of environment. We make ourselves feel, as do our coaches, that every little detail of our personal game it crucial. The intensity and nature of our training change, and that is the cause of many of the injuries in my sport.

Weight training is one major element of our training that is new to most incoming players. With how competitive as we are, most feel pressure to put up as much weight as possible. The problem with that is, since it is new to us coming in, we do not all have the best form. Those two factors put together result in injury.

I would say, and so would my teammates, that most are not aware of the training that we go through. People assume that since there is not as much running involved during out games that we do not have to be in great shape. As they are unaware of how difficult our training is, they also have no clue as to the injuries our training can cause. We train all year round and work on all different aspects of our game.

Bringing concern and awareness towards issues such as this one is a difficult task, very much because it is a complicated issue in itself. There are so many different factors that contribute to this issue that it is difficult to find a way to pinpoint a solution.

The cause of injury varies from person to person and so does the way they deal with it. I think many college athletes would agree with my old teammate when she said, “I think that most people do not understand the fact that college athletes train very hard for very long and by the time we get to college we have already been playing for 15 years. Because of that I do not think that people realize how much injury affects college teams. Even if they did know, however, I’m not too sure it would make much of a difference.”

Hopefully that will not be the case. If more awareness does not make a difference in how injuries are dealt with or prevented, younger generations of athletes are in for some difficult times.

Sources:

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/acl-injury/AC99999/PAGE=AC00005

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/magazine/11Girls-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

http://www.rolltide.com/sports/w-softbl/alab-w-softbl-body.html

Athletic trainers work behind the scenes to take care of many athletes who would not be able to perform without them. They put in countless hours of sometimes-thankless work, which naturally lead to stress and “trainer burn-out” in many.

Studies have been done to test just how much stress is put on NCAA-Certified athletic trainers and on how much support they receive in return for their dedication. If you want to see the in-depth study, check out this link:

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1323409

Savannah Shanley and Renee Whiskey have been the trainers, respectively, for our team these past two seasons that I have been at Drexel. On top of their sometimes-thankless jobs, both of them are also full-time students, which often adds to the stress and “burn-out.”

One major issue is the time commitment their job requires. Many college teams practice more than once a day and play several games a week. For outdoor sports, like softball, the weather also plays a part in scheduling. It affects where and when we can practice, and our trainers have to be flexible to account for those changes.

On top of the home games and practices, away trips to other schools and others states pull them out of class and sticks them in planes, buses, and hotels- in our case with 17 girls.

Savannah, who worked with the Drexel Field Hockey team earlier this year can recall occasions when her social life was put on the backburner. One of those was during her cousin’s wedding. Because of an unpredictable practice and game schedule (coaches like to keep them that way) she could not even know for sure if she would be able to attend until two days before the big day.

“It’s like you sit there and want to cry but you have all these kids to take care of. So, you just have to sit there and wait for them to win or lose and then you can cry on the ride home” Savannah said of her experiences.

On top of the time they put in, their job is also not an easy one. Savannah and Renee always showed up at the training room and hour before practice to start out treatment, which, with our team, usually took up that entire time.

They ran around taping ankles, wrists, knees, and whatever else needed that extra support for that day. They wrapped shoulders, set up the stim and ultrasound machines. They stretched backs and shoulders, and hamstrings. They also dealt with little, random, ailments that popped up. Basically, they were just busy, and they stayed busy from preseason to post.

There is a lot of truth behind what she is saying if put in the right context. Renée’s comment speaks to the wear and tear on the bodies of athletes. We constantly push our bodies, or “Bentleys,” beyond what they are naturally designed to do. Because of that, the perfection that we strive for is impossible to maintain, and wear and tear are inevitable.

Renée is also the first person we go to once we are worn and torn. And when I say torn, I mean that literally. Superior Labrum from Anterior to Posterior, or SLAP tears, have been the most common. Three girls on the team right now who have suffered, and really are still suffering, from SLAP tears. The following is a YouTube video of a surgery performed to repair a SLAP tear:

One of the girls is a  junior this year who tore her left labrum diving for a ball in center field during a game last season. She had off-season surgery in May last year, but when she dives it still comes out of the socket. However, she is still out there in centerfield playing hard and diving away every day.

A senior catcher, did not find out that her right labrum was torn until last August. It had been bothering her, along with her adhesive capsulitis, for the latter half of her junior season and through her summer season that she plays with the British national team.

She was initially told by our trainer at the time that her labrum was strained was treated for that as she continued to play. Treatment did help, but 15 years of throwing eventually caught up to her. The MRI with a dye injection that she had before the 2007 fall season showed that she had torn her labrum.

Because of a projected six-month recovery time, she decided to wait until after her senior season to have the surgery. “I feel like it’s getting more torn as I keep playing with it,” she does admit.

Another senior  outfielder and one of the most afflicted team members, tore her right labrum right before her sophomore season. She said, “ it was from overusing it throughout [her] life and possibly from lifting improperly and may or may have not been preventable, it’s hard to say.”

She played her sophomore season as a designated hitter because she could not throw the ball. She continued to have treatment on her shoulder and had it surgically repaired at the end of the season. Since then she has rehabilitated it and gained enough strength to regularly play right field again.

Her last two seasons have not been much easier.

During double-header against Towson University on April 6, 2007, she joked about never having hit a home run. She said that if she ever did she would retire. Almost ironically, she hit her first blast the very next game. Elated, she jumped on home plate and fell to the ground. When she did not instantly get up, we knew something was wrong.

She deeply bruised a bone in her knee and ended up missing a couple weeks of play. And, when she did return, it was not for long. On April 28, she went down hard after charging in on a ball in right field.

She came out of the game and we later found out she had broken her ankle. That is an injury that has not since completely healed, and she has been playing through it for her entire senior season with the help of a couple cortisone shots. All she has to say about her current injury is that it keeps her more focused. This is a picture of her ankle taken last year a few days after she broke it. Since then the bruising has subsided, but not all the pain has (especially when the cortisone shots start wearing off).

This is what our shortstop has to say about her own injury:“Most of the time I say that I am “building character.” This is what I have been told my entire life, “playing when you are hurt builds character.” I just keep saying this to myself, it is always running through my mind.”

The only flaw in her thinking is that her injury is rather serious. Like the above-mentioned seniors, the only way it is going to heal is with surgery. Our shortstop has a torn Ulnar Collateral Ligament (UCL) along with Ulnar Neuritis- a crushed nerve in her elbow. The surgery she needs is more commonly known as “Tommy John” surgery.

Doctors told her that recovery takes from 9-10 months, but she has also received many mixed signals from doctors and from our coach, that have impeded her ability to decide when the right time to have the surgery is.

Every time she throws the ball, which is a lot since she is our only true shortstop, we all know that she is in pain. But, with the help of only some athletic tape, she continues to push through it.

Another junior infielder has also been pushing herself to play through some adverse conditions these past two years. Since her freshman year she has had dealt with a stress fracture in her left tibia that had begun as shin splints. The shin splints worsened to such a degree due to overuse and the stress fracture has never fully healed for the same reason.

It would be expected that catchers would have knee problems, but you would not be able to tell watching ours play. Our sophomore catcher’s no-excuses, no-bullshit attitude is what helps her play through her injury. She is a sophomore with a Baker’s cyst in her knee that causes it to swell. The swelling, in turn, has caused hyperextension tears in the back of her knee.

On top of her knee problems, she suffered one of the most visually graphic injuries of the season. In a tournament game against Georgia Southern, she fouled a ball straight back into her mouth while batting. You would not have been able to tell from her reaction, but from this following picture, it was obviously painful- and so were the two root canals and braces she needed afterward.

As for the pitchers, stereotypically the most “delicate” players on any team, I would have to say that ours break that stereotype.

We have a freshman on our team from Canada (she would want that mentioned) who is scheduled for exploratory surgery on her knee following the end of this season. She also suffers from tendinitis in her throwing elbow and soft-tissue impingement in her left ankle.

Our lone junior pitcher also could use surgery, but hers would be for her ankles. Despite the preventative precautions she takes (hi-top cleats, tape, and braces on both ankles), she has still suffered from four sprains in the three years she has been at Drexel.

With no help from an MRI, the training staff and doctors have told her that she merely has loose-jointed ankles. There is a surgical procedure available that would also be able to put back a bone chip that is floating in her ankle, but she has yet to even schedule it and just continues to practice and play.

Of the four pitchers,  one has actually had surgery. She had it on her wrist last year, which was her freshman season. A few weeks in, she was diagnosed with Keinbock’s- a disease where blood supply to part of the hand is cut off, threatening the life of the muscle tissue. The surgery took her out at a very inopportune time, as she had been having a great year, but it did not take away all the pain she had been experiencing. However, she continues to pitch and never complains.

Every day I sit in the training room with my right shoulder, elbow, and wrist hooked up to the stim machine (just for tendinitis) and watch Renée running from table to table taping elbows, shins, wrists, knees, and ankles. Although I look like a total mess of ice bags and wires, I know that I am not in even half as bad of a situation as many of my teammates.

Whether they are serious or minor, we all deal with some sort of injury over the course of our collegiate careers, but we learn to deal. We do it for ourselves, each other, our coaches, our education, and everyone who supports us.

When the time arrives, we, as college athletes, put our games faces on because we all feel the same way. Our catcher put it best when she said, “ We go through so much during the year an through to the season. This is what we work out butts off for- I want to play.”

Sources:

http://orthopedics.about.com/cs/generalshoulder/a/slap.htm

http://www.aafp.org/afp/990401ap/1843.html

http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?pg=bodymr&bhcp=1

http://orthopedics.about.com/od/elbowconditions/g/tommyjohn.htm

http://orthopedics.about.com/cs/otherfractures/a/stressfracture.htm

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/bakers-cyst/DS00448

http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/tendinitis/DS00153/DSECTION=1

http://orthoinfo.aaos.org/topic.cfm?topic=A00017

http://www.youtube.com/v/Xyd5MCbj774&hl=e

I know this blog is eventually going to focus more on the issue of injuries in college sports, but I feel like anyone reading this should know a little about the individuals who inspired it into being.

Drexel Softball consists of 17 girls, 3 coaches, and one dedicated athletic trainer, all of whom spend far too much time together over the course of the year. We are one team, but we are also individuals in every sense of the word. We are dedicated, driven, focused, and hardworking. But, we can also be goofy, funny, crazy, and flat-out weird. On top of that, 17 girls together are going to naturally rouse up a good deal of cattiness and drama.

Our dedication and focus stem from a deep-down feeling that, no matter how many times we deny it, we really love what we do- we’re competitors and we want to win. It’s the reason we wake up at the crack of dawn 5 months of the season to lift weights and run suicides in the rain and snow. It’s also the reason we get back on that shuttle after class to go back to practice, why we stay after for extra reps, and then hit the gym for cardio workouts on top of that.

I mean…sure, there would be dire consequences from coach if we didn’t, but we could always quit all together if we really wanted.

Going through all of that together, along with our little quirks, is what gives this team its personality. From Whitney Houston sing-a-longs on bus rides to obnoxious cheers from the dugout to the countless nicknames we give each other (Paste, Champy Champ, Pants, Croddy, Master, Junior, Goose… like I said, countless), we really just are Drexel Softball- there’s no other way to describe us.

There are a few people who get to experience that firsthand every day as well. They definitely deserve a lot of credit for putting up with us and for all of their hard work. We would be nothing without our coaches and trainers who put in just as many, and often more, hours of work than we do.

Together, we all feel the pressure to win (for coach it’s technically her job). If we’re going to put in all that time and effort we want something to show for it- wins. In reality, the numbers and statistics are all that everyone else sees from the outside.

They don’t know everything that I mentioned before, nor do they have the chance to realize the impact that injury has on us. It only adds to the pressure to win and makes it that much more difficult to accomplish.

We constantly have to consider health and weigh if it’s worth risking. We’re constantly torn- players want to play, trainers want us to play, coach definitely wants us to play, but situations have to be assessed and decisions (favorable and not) have to be made.

In the end, we pretty much just have to deal with whatever is decided. Along with that, we deal with it together-whether or not that is a good thing is a different story for another time…

…To end on a lighter note, here’s an example of how weird we are- this is what we created while awaiting our red-eye flight back from California earlier this season:

Sandi, pissed off and trying to look tough, chucked her bat, stared Megan down with a nasty look, and proceeded to run down to first base. Halfway there was when the pain really hit her.  When she reached first base, eyes welled with tears; she was greeted by a curt “Don’t rub it” from our base coach.

A week later, after a trip to the emergency room that told her she had been hit directly on the nerve and had a deep bone bruise followed by lots of rehab, we all realized she could have and should have “rubbed it.”

Since then, “Don’t rub it” has become somewhat of an inside joke on our team. However, it does tell some truths of how we think and sort of epitomizes the attitude of our team towards injury. We all, for some reason, feel like we need to be tough and not show when we are in pain and prove that we can play through it.

What results from that mind-set is a very pressure-filled playing environment. We often forget that pain is a physical response and feel the need, again for some reason, to push ourselves past our limits. That is when we get hurt and how injuries worsen.

That pressure comes from teamates, coaches, and we also place it upon ourselves. We all want to succeed and we all want to win. But, is risking health worth a few extra W’s? It really feels like many college athletes and coaches would say yes.