Two-sport star battles dreaded injury
Parker Simson still determined to play both football and basketball in same season
Today, with U Sports set to resume play after its month-long winter hiatus, we present a UBC Stars of the Week special edition, looking at the progress of three freshmen Thunderbirds, all of whom were honoured last spring as member of The Province’s 2016 Head of the Class.
Parker Simson has played through enough bangs and bruises that when he nicked his foot during a dry-land workout last April Fool’s Day, his initial reaction was to put the pain aside and just keep going.
The injury, however, turned out to be no joke.
Simson was trying to become one of only a small handful of student-athletes in the last 100 years to play both football and basketball at UBC in the same season, and while the goal is still a very real possibility, it’s one that will have to wait until the 2017-18 campaign.
“Normally, it would have been something that I would have just walked off, like rolling an ankle,” Simson said of his injury that occurred during a plyometrics drill in which he was leaping over a series of hurdles a few months before his high school graduation at Kelowna Secondary. “But right away I knew this one was worst. I was in tears.” The final diagnosis? None other than the dreaded Jones Fracture, a breaking of the bone in the fifth metatarsal region, on the baby-toe side, of his right foot. Cursed to reside in an area of the foot with poor blood flow, its recovery is slow. Kevin Durant was forced to miss 55 games with the same injury during the 201415 season with the NBA’s Oklahoma City.
Simson could only wish his recovery had gone half as smooth.
His original medical advice led him to believe that once his cast had been removed, he would be able to slowly resume his athletic activities. However, he experienced the same agonizing pain after taking part in a throwing drill in early summer, and this time, surgery was required.
Over his senior year of high school at Kelowna, Simson was chosen B.C. triple-A Offensive Player of the Year after totalling 1,863 all-purpose-yards and 23 touchdowns in nine games with the football team, then was selected to the B.C. first all-star team in leading the undefeated basketball team to a B.C. quad-A title.
Yet at no stage of his recovery has Simson lowered his goals of trying to play both sports in the same season at UBC.
“Right now, my whole attitude is 100 per cent that I want to do it,” he says, looking forward to the start of spring football workouts. “I haven’t done it yet and I don’t want it to be all talk.”
He’s back to a near-normal routine, no longer having to get around campus on the four-wheeled scooter that earned him the nickname of ‘Wheels’ from his football teammates.
The watching hasn’t been fun, but it’s given Simson a new outlook on the bigger picture.
“If this is the worst thing I ever have to go through then it’s not that bad,” Simson says. “Me and the guys will be walking along the paths at school and we often cross paths with a girl in an electric wheelchair. There are others who have it so much tougher than I do. At some point things will get better. This isn’t the end of my days.”