An athlete’s worst nightmare is to face an injury that could potentially end their career for good. However, when they can recover from the injury, the lessons learned are monumental. Idalia Alarcon, Union softball shortstop and catcher and a junior athletic training major, understands this feeling. She recovered from a traumatic injury and now plays every game like it is her last.
“I have played softball since I was five, and this is the first time I have been seriously injured,” Alarcon said.
It was the first inning in the third game of the 2021 season. The field was muddy. Alarcon was playing shortstop, and a player on the opposing team slid into second base. Her knee and cleat hit Alarcon’s leg, and it instantly broke, leaving her tibia sticking out of the skin.
“I was not standing where I was trained to stand. The accident was my fault. I knew as soon as it happened, it was my fault,” Alarcon said.
I remember sitting in the lab last year when one of the baseball players showed me the video of the play. It was disturbing, painful to watch and honestly broke my heart for her. I remember thinking about how that one accident might have just ended her career.
“The perspective I have is not the pictures or video shown. It is not what happened,” Alarcon said.
Alarcon was so positive about the whole situation. She missed her entire sophomore season. She had every right to be angry, but she was filled with stories, memories and lessons from this painful experience. It was admirable.
Immediately after the accident, the ambulance was called, and Alarcon was rushed to the nearest hospital in Huntsville, Alabama. Just hours later, she had emergency surgery; they placed a metal rod and multiple screws in her leg to put it back in place and secure the tibia. Alarcon stayed at the hospital until that Monday.
“The crazy thing is that we had just talked about the surgery I had, in class the Thursday before,” Alarcon said. “I remember lying on the field, looking at my leg, and I knew exactly what surgery they were going to perform. It calmed my nerves.”
Alarcon knew immediately what was going on. She was conscious but in immense pain. She continuously reminded herself to stay calm. Her teammates, however, were in the dugout freaking out, anxiously awaiting the ambulance to arrive and help her.
“It felt like it took the ambulance thirty minutes to get to her. She was just lying on the field. The whole team was panicking. We were in total shock,” MacKenzi David, outfielder and junior criminal justice major, said.
“As I was lying on the field, I tried to sit up. I wanted to sit up. They wouldn’t let me. They made me lie there and wait,” Alarcon said. “I was fully conscious, I remember. I remember as I was leaving the field, I told Kayla [her best friend] to stay in the game, to win.”
The team pulled together and won the first game that morning. Unfortunately, they lost the second game because, mentally, they were not fully there. They were worried about their teammate.
“Everyone took care of me. Kayla, one of my teammates last year, and Coach Mack really cared for me the most,” Alarcon said. “Coach Mack stayed with me at the hospital and brought me back to Union that Monday after surgery. Kayla did everything. She gave me showers. She slept right beside me for nights on end. She set alarms and gave me all my medication on time.”
The recovery process began once Alarcon was back at Union. It was long and grueling, but Alarcon expressed a tremendous amount of gratitude towards her teammates and support system and continued to explain that with all their help she was able to recover and still be a part of the team
“I was still going to practices. I would do my rehab outside with the team, and sometimes if they were not traveling too far, I got to go with them,” Alarcon said.
Two or three weeks after surgery, the doctor took Alarcon out of the cast and put her in a boot with crutches. They started weaning her off the crutches, making her use just one crutch for another two to three weeks. Finally, Alarcon was cleared to go without the crutches and wobble with the boot on. In late March, she took her first walk in front of her teammates, and by May she was learning to walk again on her own.
“My team was there all the time. They got to see me take my first step again, that was a special moment,” Alarcon said.
Learning to walk again, having to sit out a season of softball, taking classes, Alarcon conquered it all and consistently had a positive attitude about it.
“I learned a lot while I was out. I mean softball was my stress reliever. I had to do a lot of soul-searching last year,” Alarcon said. “I have a completely different perspective to the game now. I leave it all on the field. I look at it as something I do for fun rather than a job.”
Alarcon knew her biggest obstacle for the upcoming season was going to be reliving her accident on the field and allowing it to become a mental block for her while playing. Alarcon saw a sports psychologist while she was off to make sure that when she was cleared to play again, nothing could hold her back.
“The mental side was the hardest part,” Alarcon said. “It was my fault; I was not supposed to be there. Everything wrong that could have happened, happened.”
Alarcon came back this summer and had pain in her shin and leg. After thirty minutes of running or playing, her leg hurt. She expressed to Coach Mack that she was not going to play in the fall, but she was released to play just two weeks after that conversation.
Alarcon was fully released by late September, and by mid-October she no longer felt any pain.
“I broke my leg a year ago and you can’t tell. I have come so far from that; I am back on the field like nothing happened,” Alarcon said. “But I am known as the girl that broke her leg, everyone knows about it and umpires and everyone ask me about it.”
