The plastic bag of ice resting on freshman Nicole Matcharadze’s swollen and bruised ankle slides off onto the bright green turf of St. Andrews’ field, as she watches her JV Lacrosse teammates pass the ball between one and another, before sophomore Captain Gabi Estrada runs past an opposing defender and scores a goal. Macharadze repositions the ice bag on her ankle, flicking the water off of her fingertips, then wipes her hands on her lacrosse pinnie. As goalie, she imagines herself catching the ball in the net of her stick, unlike the opposing team’s fumble. Her teammates cheer and the opposing schools team sighs in defeat.
Every athlete who has ever experienced even a minor injury knows the annoyance of having to watch your team play without you, and having to sit out the scrimmages and matches that teams spend days of practice preparing for. Athletes like sophomore JV lacrosse player Jasmine Wang miss long parts of the sport’s season, due to injuries obtained after several games. “I sprained my ankle during our match against Churchill,” Wang said. “Because it happened during our first several games, I can’t play for two weeks. Unfortunately, two weeks is about half of the girls’ lacrosse season, so I’m missing a lot of games and a large part of the season. It’s really annoying because I didn’t expect to be out for so long, and now I have to miss out on part of the season.”
Injuries that occur at the beginning of the sport’s season are the hardest to deal with because of the games that athletes miss out on. Sophomore basketball player Edlawit Abebe is familiar with the annoyance of an early-on injury, and the recovery time that feels like years and years. “I sprained my knee and had to walk around in crutches for a couple weeks,” Abebe said. “It was really annoying because the whole year I was super excited for basketball season to start because I played last year and had a lot of fun being on a team and playing against other schools. So the whole year I was looking forward to it, and then during one of our first practices I injured myself. I missed almost the whole basketball season, and by the time I was off of my crutches and fully healed, the season was done.”
Similarly to Abebe, sophomore varsity lacrosse goalie Benedict Santos relates to the hardships that come with sports-induced injuries. “A couple years ago, I tore my meniscus, which is in the knee area,” Santos said. “I was on crutches for a month, but I kind of exasperated it because I kept playing on it without letting it fully heal. It took about a year to fully recover.”
Even though injuries during seasons, games, and matches are annoying and keep athletes from enjoying their sport’s seasons, playing sports requires strength, skill, and physical exertions, and injuries are just the byproduct of hard work.
