Strande’s return has inspired Muskego’s run
Volleyball player had serious brain injury
MUSKEGO – Jake Strande smiles nervously. He stops and starts his words. He apologizes when really there is no reason to apologize.
You could chalk it up to all the trauma the Muskego senior boys volleyball player has experienced over the last six months, but it goes deeper than that.
Strande had volleyball long before the accident last spring that nearly took his life. Ask him to explain what fuels his passion for the sport and it’s clear the answer touches him.
“The sport for me pushes my dedication just so much," he said. “This sport has driven me through my life and made me happy.”
When Muskego takes the court for its WIAA state volleyball quarterfinal against Brookfield East at 3 p.m. Friday at Wisconsin Lutheran College, it will mark another celebration of the strides Strande has made since a golf cart accident left him with a traumatic brain injury.
How powerful can one’s passion for sport be?
In Strande’s case, three weeks in a medically-induced coma and a 21⁄2-month hospital stay in Madison were no match. Neither was the paralysis that grabbed the right side of his body or the challenge of regaining pieces of a memory that had lost so much that he initially struggled to re-
cite the alphabet.
You won’t see any signs of those struggles when the 6-foot-6 middle hitter takes the floor for the school’s first state tournament appearance in five years.
“No one knew if he would ever play again,” Strande’s father, Jay, said. “He’s the miracle boy.”
It was April 18 when a relaxing trip in Wisconsin Dells turned bad. The family has a cabin there and Strande and his sister, Haylie, went up one day ahead of their parents, who still had to work.
Strande was fishing when his sister asked him to go on a golf cart ride with her. With Haylie at the wheel, the two cruised around the neighborhood and eventually up a steep hill. When they went back down, they ran into trouble.
Near the bottom of the hill, Haylie lost control of the cart. Just before it rolled over, Strande tossed his sister out of the cart. He fell out too and hit the back of his head on the concrete.
Haylie suffered a broken ankle that required surgery. Strande's brain was swelling. He was flown to Madison and taken for surgery to remove part of his skull.
"After the surgery, the bleeding was really bad, so the neurosurgeon came in and said we have to go in and fix this,” Jay Strande said. “We don’t want to, but we don’t have a choice. He’s not going to make it another hour. We’ve got to stop that bleeding.”
Doctors put Jake in the medically-induced coma to limit the work the brain needed to do and speed up its healing process. After 22 days, they pulled him out.
The wait for him to wake up was filled with worries. Doctors told his parents that the injured part of the brain affects a person’s personality, so the two had no idea what to expect.
“Two days later is when he kind of started opening his eyes,” Strande’s mother, Julie, said. “That was a really tough time because every morning you’d have to remind this kid where he is and why he’s here. That was a rough few weeks.”
Though Strande didn’t have a full grasp of how he landed in the hospital, volleyball never left him.
His first words after coming out of the coma were “season, what about the season?" Strande’s therapists incorporated the sport in his therapy whenever they could.
Rather than recite the alphabet in speech therapy, he’d rattle off the positions of players on a court. In physical therapy, they’d have him swing his arm down in a spiking motion, even though initially he could only do that with his off (left) hand.
He was a therapy workhorse and recovered at a pace that surprised the medical staff.
Strande didn’t have his skull pieced back together until early August, and yet a month later he was practicing on the court four months to the day after the accident.
Competing for the team was food for his spirit.
“Just being on the team really drives me,” he said. “It makes me do better in school. I just love it all.”
Strande, who received all-conference mention last year, eventually worked his way back into the starting lineup. He arrives at state with 25 kills, a .395 hitting percentage and 22 blocks, 10 solo.
He doesn’t completely feel himself yet, and school is a little tougher now than before the injury. But on his road to recovery, Strande achieved the No. 1 goal on his list: he and his team are going to state.
“Emotionally for the guys and the team, he’s the glue,” Muskego coach Joe Arbinger said. “When the guys saw him come in, you saw attitudes change.
"It’s inspiration for all the guys (to see) that no matter what if you keep fighting for whatever you want to achieve, you can get it.”