A little background info about me if you don't personally know me. I play for the University of Illinois' Men's Ultimate Frisbee Team. I'm a junior, and i started playing competitive ultimate my freshman year. I started out as a long with a limited amount of success. That whole season I wasn't very dedicated to ultimate and I spent some of my time with the Illini Wrestling club as I had wrestled in high school. This ultimately led to me getting cut to our C team my freshman year (we were a very deep program that year). We had only 1 or 2 handlers who had gotten cut to that C team so I decided to switch and it was probably the greatest idea I've made since coming to ultimate.
At the 1 and only C team tournament, D2 sectionals I also discovered that hucking it is awesome although we only won 2 games on the weekend. The summer following my freshman year I decided to play in 3 summer leagues with no real aspirations of getting better, but it kind of just happened naturally. My love of hucking continued into the summer and my forehand continued to get better and better. This eventually resulted in me playing club in the fall of my sophomore year with the local club team FC champaign. This provided me with the valuable experience that let me roll through the fall college tournaments with my new found position and new found throws.
Tryouts rolled around, Kinda boring to talk about, but myself and one other teammate from the C team the previous made the A team. To my knowledge its the first time in history its happened, but obviously we don't have a C team every year. I spent most of my sophomore year on the bench with some limited play time over the course of the year. Following that years nationals we were graduating 2 of our d-line handlers (I'm d-line fo lyfe).
So this year (my junior year) I was in a good spot to be our #2 d-line handler behind Ryan "Kennedy" Smith, (Former FOTY and 2nd team all region). We we're getting excited along with the rest of the class of 2012 (9 of us were on A team last year) for the promise of a strong team that would only improve from then on. We had a good showing this fall playing together as FC champaign and coming within 1 intense DGP with Beachfront Property from advancing the the Great Lakes Open Regionals. After the club season ended we had some impressive fall tournaments with 1 of our split squads winning whitesmoke, both split squads performing admirably at No wisco. Following No Wisco we had a preliminary split between Rivalry Reheat (@ michigan) and Glory Days. I would end up suffering my injury in the first game at Rivalry Reheat, but that will be outlined in the next post. In November we headed to MLC and had some good games, as well as some close ones that didn't go our way. I would like to think that with my presence that those close games would've gone our way instead.
Now I'm faced with the hard time of trying to come back from a huge injury that too many ultimate players have to go through. Lots of players end up tearing their ACL's but I couldn't find any specific information about their surgery, recovery, and rehabilitation and how it affected their play. I plan to post as much as I can about the process as I go through it and I'll probably end up talking about current ultimate news and other random stuff that seems to be the current topic on RSD.
I'm doing this all kind of last minute as my surgery is tomorrow at 3pm and the date has been looming for a while and I'm feeling a little anxious as to how its going to feel once I have an ACL again. As my knee is right now I sometimes forget that I'm injured until i twist it one way or another and it reminds me that I am not ok.
Basically I'm going to post a bunch of rehab updates and how fast I'm getting back to ultimate practice and games. Hopefully this will be helpful to some one in the future that has to face the same thing. If anyone who's gone through this surgery has any words of wisdom, feel free to tell me as all help is appreciated.
You should talk to Xi Xia. I think he played at Illinois and he talks about an ACL injury here: http://www.the-huddle.org/features/crossfit-an-offseason-option/part-i/
ReplyDeleteHe can probably give you some good advice. (Hint: he likes Crossfit)
Xi Xia did play at Illinois. He's probably the reason (besides Stupca, of course) that we still do crossfits to this day.
ReplyDeleteHey. After I tore mine back in september I did a ton of research on it. From what ive been told/learned....Crutches/brace for 2 weeks, brace for another 2 weeks or so. No physical activities/sports 6 months minimum, 8 months to be safe post op. Apparently its something like an increased 75% chance of re-tearing the ACL if you start before 6 months.
ReplyDeleteI Had surgery Dec 16th on ACL and lateral meniscus and the day after I was at physical therapy doing exercises and working on weight bearing exercises. I was told that for being one day out my range of motion was good enough to be on one crutch in 1 week (8 days after surgery). I was told by the surgeon, "your best bet is you'll be back into things by July, I wouldnt push it any sooner". Keep us updated, ill do the same posting what Im goin though on here also.