Maryland bonding through recovery
Plenty of empathy among team members dealing with pain
Her freshman year with the Maryland women’s lacrosse program loomed as an unnerving time for Victoria Hensh.
When she arrived in College Park in August 2019, Hensh moved out of the comfortable confines of her parents’ home in Woodstock. The Marriotts Ridge graduate saw more unfamiliar faces than familiar ones on campus, and her introduction to NCAA Division I lacrosse was put on hold because she was forced to maneuver around on crutches while recovering from a torn ACL and meniscus in her right knee.
“It is so hard coming into a school,” she said Wednesday. “That was my freshman year, and I didn’t really know that many people. I wasn’t really sure how to open up to people about an injury that was so serious. After the first few weeks, I just felt like I didn’t know what to do.”
Hensh’s saving grace occurred when she discovered there were other Terps players dealing with serious injuries. Calling themselves “The Injured Athletes Club,” eight players met every other week from October 2019 to March 2020 with the university’s top psychologist to discuss personal triumphs, disappointing failures and mental status.
Hensh, now a redshirt freshman attacker, said the club rescued her.
“Without that, I think that would have been really tough for me, that feeling every day like I’m going through it alone when I was going through it with some of my best friends on the team,” she said. “I think having such a place, I brought up a lot of things that I wouldn’t have thought to tell people. Even on days when I didn’t feel like talking, in those meetings, I talked, and that ultimately made those days better.
“I think it really limited the number of bad days I had, and it helped me cope with how to handle coming back from an injury.”
The series of meetings was the brainchild of Dr. Michelle Garvin, the school’s director of clinical and sports psychology. She had worked with other sports programs and coordinated the formation of the lacrosse group with Allie Boll, the team’s athletic trainer.
“We thought it might be good for me to come in and talk to them about what to prepare for,” Garvin said. “We decided to do
it as a group, and after the first session, we thought it was great and was going well.”
Garvin found an enthusiastic partner in Lizzie Colson, a starting defender who sat out the 2020 season after tearing the ACL in her left knee while training with the U.S. national team in June 2019 and was just a few days shy of a much-anticipated summer trip to Spain with her roommate.
After shedding some tears while relaxing on a beach, Colson, a Manchester resident and Manchester Valley graduate, underwent surgery July 3 and resolved to resume her lacrosse career. But back on campus, a coach asked Colson how she was feeling, and when the coach pressed her again, the redshirt senior broke down.
“I completely thought, ‘I’m an athlete. I’m tough. I don’t really need to talk about my health,’ ” she recalled. “But then I was like, ‘I’m not OK. I’m hurting, I’m sad, and I don’t want to do this.’ ”
Garvin and the players met every other week in the coaches’ office while their teammates took part in practice. Garvin had each player break the ice by reciting a success and a challenge.
The triumphs ranged from bending a knee to 90 degrees to returning to running to getting an “A” on an exam or paper. The obstacles ranged from a failure at reaching a certain physical benchmark to a setback to giving in to inner doubts.
The players offered words of support to encourage one another. They also shared advice in dealing with their injuries.
For example, to avoid getting braces wet while showering, players wrapped their injured body parts in plastic and applied petroleum jelly to the edges to prevent water from seeping in. They also washed their hair in bathroom sinks to reduce the amount of time spent in showers and wrapped the upper portions of crutches with hand towels to reduce armpit pain.
“I loved those meetings because they were so beneficial for me,” Hensh said. “You’re away from home, you’re dealing with the stress of school, you’re dealing with the stress of lacrosse, you’re dealing with an injury, and all of that piles on you. … It’s nice to talk to a group of people who are going through similar things and just to have people to hear you out. Even on your best day, it’s good to talk about what you’re going through and how you’re doing.”