Caroline Lawlor

CAROLINE’S COMEBACK

From a devastating injury to living in a single-parent household, sophomore Caroline Lawlor finds a way to overcome challenging situations.

BY SARAH HARRIS CO-EDITOR IN CHIEF & NATALIE SOPYLA REPORTER nees slightly bent. Hands out in front of

Kher body. Back arched over. She bounces on the balls of her feet. Left. Right. Left. Right. Her off-white volleyball shoes hint at where she has dived for the ball. The bruises on her knees and elbows indicate more. Her platinum blond hair has fallen to a low saggy ponytail. Practice is almost over. 5:40p.m. Only five more minutes.

“Focus on every pass,” Head Volleyball

Coach Robert Lampen said.

Focus. Right. Forgot.

The ball sails over the net. The seam is left and it’s her ball.

“Mine.”

Last year, sophomore Caroline Lawlor couldn’t play volleyball or even bend her back. In

July of 2013, two weeks before her freshman year of highschool, Lawlor fell off of a two-story balcony.

Wrist shattered. Back broken. Life altered.

The air whistles in her ears. She’s falling. Although it wasn’t until after the fact she realized it. It all happened so fast. So fast she can’t even remember how she fell.

“I had no clue I broke my back. My wrist hurt really bad, so I didn’t even pay attention to my back,” Lawlor said.

That day, when James Lawlor, Caroline’s father, received an unusual phone call, he immediately understood the urgency of the situation. He arrived on the scene soon after.

“I knew it was serious because the police called me, which means they were on the scene,”

James said. “I saw her laying on the ground before she was put in the ambulance.”

The fall landed her in the hospital for two days, but nothing was more agonizing than the week she spent on the couch, only able to watch television.

Two weeks later, in addition to her school work and weekly doctors appointments, Lawlor now had to endure the humiliation of wearing a full back brace.

“Wearing a back brace was hard. None of my clothes fit over it,” Lawlor said. “It was customized with cheetah print and my name on it, but it was still so ugly.”

Whispers, stares and the continuous generic questions followed her throughout the halls. Passing from class to class like the lone fish in a fish tank. Alone, exposed and vulnerable to the public.

Friends reached out to her, but the coping was done in silence. “I didn’t like to talk about it. I wanted to keep it as normal as possible,” Lawlor said. For Lawlor, however, school was the easier LE JOURNAL ISSUE 122 part of her life.

Lawlor’s parents divorced when she and her twin brother, Trey, were in first grade. Lawlor’s father, then a pilot in the National Guard, was deployed to Iraq for a year, leaving them to live with her grandparents. Unable to care for two small children, her mother had previously filed for divorce and signed over all parental rights to her father. Later she moved to Texas with her then boyfriend. After bouncing from Texas to Las Vegas, and Las Vegas to Salt Lake City, Lawlor’s mother tried to reach out to her daughter once again.

“My mom would always try to ask me questions about [my back], but she’s not in my life so I don’t like answering questions about my life to her since she’s not in it in the first place,” Lawlor said.

Growing up without her mother, Lawlor and her father were able to develop their relationship.

“He’s really supportive and pays for everything I do,” Lawlor said. “He does it all by himself and I look up to him for that. I don’t think I could raise two kids by myself.”

Lawlor’s dad was deployed a second time six years later in a heated Iraq war. Suddenly, the family was constantly worrying about what could happen.

“Both times when I left for Iraq, [I had to] say goodbye to [my] kids, and really say goodbye because you might not see them again and it’s going to be a long time if you do [see them again],” James said.

Recently retired from the military, Lawlor’s father currently works for FedEx in Memphis, Tennessee. Every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, he leaves in the early morning and returns the same evening from Tennessee. Living with two males, Lawlor uses this time to her advantage.

“Living with two guys, I like having my own space every once and a while,” Lawlor said with a smirk on her face.

Although her home is chock-full of males, at Sion she has an abundance of female influence around her. Lawlor transferred the second semester of her freshman year because she was unhappy in the negative environment of her old school.

“Where I was going to school wasn’t a good environment and I wanted to get away from it,” Lawlor said. “We would have kids get in fights all the time, get arrested in school, and do drugs at school and I didn’t want to be surrounded by people like that,” Lawlor said.

Sperrys, uniforms and the infamous rigorous grading scale upheld its reputation as Lawlor stepped into school for the first time. Although one change from her old school is better than the rest: volleyball.

The team. The camaraderie. The sport. With her back intact and her spirits high, Lawlor tried out for one of 22 spots on the volleyball team on Aug. 4. Three weeks later, she is playing in her first match against The Barstow School.

The ball is served. She bounces on the balls of her feet. It comes to her seam.

“Mine.”

Sophomore Caroline Lawlor huddles with the JV Volleyball Team moments before their game against St. Pius X. Last year, Lawlor could not even bend her back, let alone play volleyball, after a fall from a second story balcony left her in a back brace. (Photo by Sarah Harris.)

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