Byrd happy to still help boost Seminole
During the past two Friday nights, Marcus
Byrd has been signaling plays from the sideline to his Sanford Seminole High football teammates.
The former starting linebacker is happy to be involved in the game he so dearly loves, even though he is relegated to spectator status for the rest of his senior season.
“A lot of people would have quit. A lot of people would have said, ‘Forget this,’ but he’s not that type of person,” said teammate D.J. Artis, the person with whom Byrd collided, causing the fluke injury — a lacerated liver — that has sidelined Byrd for the rest of the year.
“I love being out here with him. Even with everything that happened, he still comes out here with a smile on his face and that’s amazing to me.”
Byrd knows how close he came to catastrophic circumstances. Late in Seminole’s 28-13 victory over Port Orange Spruce Creek, Artis and Byrd were converging on Spruce Creek quarterback Kyle Minckler, who stepped forward as Artis collided with his teammate.
“We both saw each other going at the quarterback, but we were going full speed … there wasn’t really enough time to stop, so we collided. … I got the worst of it,” Byrd said. “After I kinda caught my breath, at first I didn’t think anything was wrong, but when I got to the sideline, that’s when I started feeling the pains in my chest and stuff when I took deep breaths.
“That’s when I thought it was something wrong, like maybe my heart or something, but I had no clue.”
His mother wanted him to go to the hospital immediately. The game was all but finished.
“I was like, ‘No, I’m fine,’ and I just wanted to wait and shake hands and stuff, and sing the alma mater,” Byrd said. “After we shook hands she was going to take me to the hospital, and that’s when the pains got worse and I laid down on the track and they called the ambulance.”
He was taken to Central Florida Regional Hospital in Sanford and they held him overnight, running tests to find out what was wrong. It wasn’t until the next day that doctors finally had a diagnosis.
“After a second CAT scan, they told me what was wrong and it was pretty scary,” Byrd said. “They told me it would heal on its own, but if I went back out and played football, any slight tackle or something like that could cause the laceration to open back up and I could bleed out and die.”
“That made me realize, ‘Man, this is really serious,’ … but the weird thing was that with my love for the game of football, that’s all I thought about, not the dying part. All I thought about was football.”
Byrd was released from the hospital three days later. He could walk and talk and do pretty much anything, except play football.
It’s not the first taste of adversity for Byrd. He lost his father, who was killed by a gunman in a Sanford robbery when Marcus was in eighth grade. He also was there for teammates Artis and his older brother, Demetrius Artis, whose father died in 2013. Then last summer, adversity hit the entire Seminole team after assistant coach Ron
Moore, the father of teammate Brandon
Moore, now a freshman at UCF, was also killed by gunfire.
He has been through a lot for an 18-year-old kid.
But, as Trine University head football coach Troy Abbs told Byrd shortly after he came home from the hospital, things happen for a reason. Many of those things, Byrd said, will make him stronger.
“I texted the coach and told him what happened. … He told me, like a lot of people did, that God does things for a reason, and that there would be something good come out of this,” Byrd said, “And he also said that this happening did not change anything, that he still wanted me there at his school.
“That made me feel like I would be home if I was there. He still wanted me to play on his team.”
So Byrd called Abbs a few days later and committed to the school in Angola, Ind.
“He said, ‘Man. That’s awesome.’ ”
What would be even more awesome for Byrd would be to see his teammates make it to the Class 8A state championship game. The Seminoles are 4-0 so far, and Byrd is still a big part of their success.
“Without me, I believe they can still do a lot,” Byrd said. “If we keep doing what we’re supposed to do. We can win state.”