Braden Bruce takes nothing for granted
Buckhorn rugby player has had long road to recovery from a pair of major knee operations
Braden Bruce takes nothing for granted now after a promising rugby career was nearly derailed by three catastrophic setbacks that cost him 3 1⁄2 years of development.
Bruce was one of 31 players who played for the Canada Selects squad that faced Major League Rugby’s Seattle Seawolves on Feb. 21 at Starfire Sports Complex, the home of the two-time MLR champions. It came nearly four years after COVID-19 put the first hurdle in his path and more than four years since he last represented Canada as a rising star on their U18 team.
The Buckhorn native’s long road to recovery from two major knee operations took its first major step forward last September when he played his first rugby game since March 11, 2020, as a member of the Pacific Pride Academy, Rugby Canada’s national development team.
“I’m more considerate,” said Bruce, 23.
“It’s almost like two separate careers. It was so far apart and I thought about coming back so much during that time and there were definitely parts where I had considered stopping all together. I was pretty beat up and pretty tired of doing rehab. There’s always that worry of reinjury. There was one point during that 3 years I thought I was done playing.”
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Bruce had ambitions of following the path taken by Lakefield’s Tyler Ardron, who left Canada to play professional rugby in Wales. It led Ardron to further opportunities in New Zealand and France playing in the world’s elite leagues.
After graduating from Thomas A. Stewart Secondary School, Bruce accepted a scholarship to attend Cardiff Metropolitan University in Cardiff, Wales, to further his rugby experience at the varsity level in the United Kingdom in August 2019. Bruce was a member of Canada’s U18 team and had just come off leading the TASSS Griffins to an OFSAA rugby gold medal with teammate Kal Sager, who now plays for Canada’s Sevens squad and is Bruce’s roommate in B.C.
Seven months into his first year, the pandemic forced Bruce, like many Canadians living in the U.K., to return home in March 2020. he returned to Cardiff that fall, but COVID-19 restrictions prevented any rugby training and in-person classes. With no rugby occurring, Bruce said the university pulled his scholarship six weeks into his second year, leaving him no option but to return home. He initially deferred his studies there, but eventually opted not to return.
It was the first of what would be several setbacks in Bruce’s rugby career.
“It was a good experience, but I didn’t love living in the U.K., to be honest,” he said. “The rugby was great and I made some really great friends while I was there, but, I don’t know, I just missed home and missed my friends. The way things happened with COVID and the quick turnaround, it left a sour taste in my mouth.”
He transferred to the University of Victoria for the fall of 2021, hoping to play varsity rugby while also playing for the Pride, who offered him a tryout.
Before he left for Victoria, Bruce suffered his second setback.
While training with the Peterborough Pagans to get back into shape, he tore his ACL when he stepped into a divot on the field at Nicholls Oval while running a noncontact drill on July 27, 2021. He had knee surgery in November and deferred his move to Victoria to stay home and rehabilitate his knee while beginning his biology studies online.
“It didn’t feel right,” said Bruce. “I recovered really quickly up until the three- or four-month stage where I was running and lifting weights. I could just tell there was something off.”
His instincts were right. Bruce suffered a third setback when he tore the ACL again doing sprints in the Trent University gymnasium in June 2022, seven months after surgery, and had to go under the knife again in August 2022.
“The recovery from the second one took a lot longer,” he said. “Every time you have surgery, you can’t walk for a while before you can jog and you lose a lot of muscle. After that second surgery, there was a massive amount of muscle lost. They took a graft from my patella tendon, so that was an entire thing on its own that needed to be rehabbed. It’s more a mental game than a physical game, too, because you just have to wait and, from month to month, you don’t see any improvement.
There was one point during that 3 ⁄ years 1 2 I thought I was done playing.
BRADEN BRUCE 23-YEAR-OLD RUGBY PLAYER
“You feel like six weeks ago it kind of felt the same. You’re stagnant. Eventually, you get to where two months ago I couldn’t do this and now I can. It was over a full year after my surgery, 13 months, that I started to feel like I could play again. I had joined the Pacific Pride at that point and they were monitoring me. I was training with the team but no contact.”
In September 2023, Bruce played his first game in 3 1⁄2 years, suiting up for the Pride.
“I was so rusty,” said Bruce. “I had been watching rugby and coaching rugby, but getting yourself out there it was like, ‘How do I do this again?’ ”
He said the Pride’s head coach, Phil Mack, understood it was going to take time for him to return to form.
“Originally, Kal and I had been presented as a package deal,” said Bruce. “There were these two guys from Peterborough who really wanted to play rugby at the next level. Obviously I was hurt and Kal came out and joined the Pride and was awesome. Him working out and then going up to the national team looked really good on me because I had initially been mentioned in the same breath.”
He said living with Sager helped him through his recovery.
“I got to be his No. 1 fan and I kind of lived vicariously through him. That helped me get through it.” Bruce has had to adjust his game. “I’m not necessarily the same player I used to be. My knee isn’t the same as before. I’m bigger now and stronger now than I have ever been, probably a better rugby player now than I have ever been, but there is a certain amount of elasticity, a kind of pop, I don’t have in my right leg that I have in my left leg or that I used to have when I was 19,” said the six-foot-two, 235-pound Bruce, who plays flanker and No. 8.
He played 11 games for the Pride before he was named to the Canadian Selects squad for their Seattle match. The Pride trains at the national team training centre in Langford,
B.C., and the team is monitored by national team coach Kingsley Jones.
“The Canada Selects are a bunch of guys around my age who are trying to push for that national team,” said Bruce.
Seattle beat the Selects, 54-7. Bruce came off the bench to play in the second half.
“The speed of the pro team is a lot faster than what we’re used to playing in the B.C. Premiership,” said Bruce. “It was a really good experience. With any sport, but especially rugby, you need to play with people who are better than you in order for you to get better.”
Bruce doesn’t know what rugby holds for his future but he’s satisfied with where he’s at right now given all he’s gone through.
“I’m getting looks from the Canada Selects already, which is super exciting. I look at my first few games back as just the adjustment of ‘Can I still do this?’ The training environment with the Pride is a really great spot to be. I’m improving a lot and kind of getting back to where I was as far as my level of comfort in playing. It’s a good training environment to push to that next level.
“I can definitely still do it. It’s hard on the body. I find the older I get, the more sore I get. I don’t bounce back even now at 23 like I did when I was 19. it’s a lot more prehab and ice baths and stretching and form rolling and making sure I get my sleep and I’m eating properly. There’s a lot more that goes into it. I used to just get by with not taking as much care. Now those are the things that really make a difference.”
He’ll round out the Pride’s spring schedule and will be on the longlist this summer for the national team, which has home games against Scotland and Japan before a European tour in the fall.
“Hopefully, I’ll get invited to camp and get a chance to come in at some point around June. That’s still up in the air. There are a lot of guys competing for that,” he said.
“If it doesn’t happen this year I’m not going to be too torn up about it. I’ve been trying really hard to push for that next level but there are a lot of guys working really hard to get there, as well. It’s really still only my first year back from injury and things don’t necessarily happen overnight.
These next couple of years I’ll definitely be pushing for that spot, though.”
At his darkest moments, one thing kept Bruce going.
“I needed to prove it to myself I could still do it because I had doubted that in my head,” he said. “Part of me had already accepted that my career was over: 2,000 hours of rehab in the gym doing the most boring exercises and sitting on a bike for an hour each day trying to get my knee right. Injuries are heartbreaking but the comeback and seeing all the hard work I put in paying off is really, really rewarding.”