Enjoy the next installment of her story from Erika Mueller, the D1 Softball player at Brown University… Know How A D1 Softball Player Deals With Repetitive Stress Injury. Just continue reading this article.
Playing with an injury is one of the most challenging experiences of my life. This has been topped by a few things, especially not being able to play at all due to injury. It is quite a downward spiral from the onset of a serious sports related injury to the recovery process.
First off, I have been so fortunate to lead a healthy life. Up until my time in college, I only suffered from the annual common cold or flu, but rarely experienced anything worse. I never broke any bones, pulled any muscles, or had to sit out from athletic competition due to injury. I was one of the lucky ones.
Then I entered my freshman year in college and things were just as good. I was able to keep up with my class work, perform at practice, and put extra time in to train each week. It wasn’t until the spring season of my freshman year when things started to truly test me.
A few weeks into our games, I began to experience shoulder problems on offense. When I would swing, often times at an outside pitch, my front arm – the left shoulder while batting right handed, would “sublex.” This is a term doctors used to describe its tendency to pop out of place and then pop back in. It is basically as fun as it sounds.
Looking back, it is hard to pinpoint when and why this began for me. I do remember a few occasions throughout high school, maybe once in a six month time period, when I did experience this. It would painful following the incident, but the soreness would often subside after a few minutes. Thus, I didn’t think it was a big deal.
So – I am in the spring softball season of my freshman year in college, where all I want to do is play softball, and help my team to the best of my abilities. We also only have a limited time together – our true season spans from about the beginning of March to the end of April. Therefore if you hit a hiccup within that two month window, it impacts your season severely.
I begin to experience these shoulder problems so I immediately speak with my team trainer. We put a plan in place to do rehab exercises before workouts and ice or heat afterward. It was pretty challenging for me to realize that I needed to ask for help. since this was not something that was going away. In that sense, the experience helped to teach me to advocate for myself and that sometimes it is not only helpful, but essential, to ask for help, especially when it related to how your body is feeling.
I was able to finish out the season contributing on offense and defense while battling my shoulder injuries each week. The sublexing began to occur at multiple times each day or during each at bat in games making me worry, but as long as I was still on the field then I didn’t think I needed any special attention.
By the end of the season, I realized that the rehab exercises were not making a difference and they were not minimizing my pain or the number of times my shoulder would pop out of place. At this point, it was kind of an injury that I kept hoping would just disappear at some point. My problems intensified when I learned that I had mono at the finish of the season. I speculate I had been battling the illness for at least the final weeks of the season but was not diagnosed until afterward. Due to this, I spent that following summer really just trying to get healthy. I was not strong enough to practice softball so at the start of my sophomore season, my trainer and I really had our fingers crossed that my shoulder issues might have just gone away…
Be sure to leave comments and questions for Erika below…what are some of your sport injury stories? We would love for you to share…