“I feel like the injury helped me mentally because it made me stronger,” said Weedsport student Colleen O’Neil
Many Weedsport students like O’Neil have had injuries due to school sports. The risk of injury with sports is, unfortunately, a common occurrence in America today. A study came out last year by the Washington Post that reported over 5.2 million high school sports injuries were recorded in 4 years. These injuries are most common in sports like football, soccer, ice hockey, lacrosse, basketball, and gymnastics but of course can happen in any sport.
O’Neil tore her ACL during her basketball season. She could not continue playing basketball for that season and was unable to participate in track and field the following season. Colleen said she had to find new ways to entertain herself during this difficult time.
After surgery and a long year of recovery, O’Neil is back and able to do sports again. “I still get nervous with new movements, and still experience pain sometimes,” said O’Neil. This challenges her today still while she does basketball and track and field.
Overall she said the injury helped her a lot mentally. In the beginning, she had to learn how to accept the injury as it was and try to get better. It got tricky when it came to recovery and O’Neil even had some mental blocks along the way that slowed her down.
O’Neil isn’t the only athlete at school who has dealt with the issue of injuries lately. Sophomore Ivy Miller is no stranger when it comes to injuries. Ivy Miller has had many injuries, but most of them are due to gymnastics. Her worst injuries have been sprained and almost to the tendons in her wrist and strained muscles in her back. Miller hurt her wrist on a beam at gymnastics, and she hurt her back on vault. She explained how many of these injuries hurt in the moment but they hurt the most when she tried to push through them.
Ivy sadly has had so many recurring injuries that she had to quit gymnastics and even had to stop competing before the end of one of her seasons. Her injuries gave her a lot of stress considering most of them were before in the middle of a competition season.
She realized it is important to distract her mind and to keep the rest of the body healthy during an injury. Ivy found working out areas of her body that are not affected by her injury helped her the most to get her mind off things.
Megan House was the last athlete I talked to who has had an injury. Out of these three injuries, Houses was the most recent. She was playing volleyball for Weedsport as a setter but she was also playing on a club team at the same time. She was playing in a tournament for the club team and overused a muscle in her back. She was not able to play volleyball for either team for 2 weeks or participate in any gym. Megan said she struggled a lot for those two weeks and was very sad she couldn’t play and was having lots of depressive thoughts.
In those two weeks, House said talking with her friends and watching movies helped distract her the most from her injury.
Although this was a challenge, getting through this all had made them amazingly strong athletes both physically and mentally.
