Injured Athletes Share Injured Experiences

With more and more people joining sports, more and more athletes are getting injured. When injured, an athlete can oftentimes expect to be unable to compete.

“My injury affected my season greatly. I missed the first game and from there on even running hurt very very bad,’ Junior football player Leelyn Desiletes said. ‘So I missed a lot of conditioning things and had to take a week off and just take it easy.”

Although injured athletes cannot compete or sometimes even practice with the team, that doesn’t stop them from showing up to practice.

“I wasn’t able to do anything with the team, I was helmet only so I was only able to do half the drills and spent the rest of the time watching trying to take mental reps,” Desiletes said.

Many athletes enjoy the company that a team provides, but when they are injured and watching from the sidelines, they begin to miss that company and friendship.

“If you’re hurt and you’re not at practice, then it’s real tough when you come back and attempt to play because you weren’t there. If not for anything, go for your teammates and go for yourself if you want to play,” Desiletes said.

Even though an athlete’s season ends they still have to deal with their injury in many different ways until it goes away and many times past their injury healing.

“I’m still doing rehab on it and exercises and physical therapy so that eventually it heals,” Desiletes said.

Athletes may feel a strong urge to come back to their sport early even if they aren’t fully healed in order to get to play again. Oftentimes when athletes return to play too early, they can end up getting injured worse than before or have a new injury appear.

“For other people who are hurt, take care of yourself, don’t feel obligated to get right back in there because someone else expects you to. If you’re hurt you got to take care of yourself because if you’re still hurt and you get back in there the chances of you getting hurt either with the same injury or something else because you’re compensating for that injury is way too high.’ Desiletes said. ’Be smart

Sports 22 do what you can, push yourself it’s going to hurt, but do as much as you can, but don’t get bullied into doing more than you can and risk getting hurt worse,”