Tuesday, August 4, 2015

My inspiration

Last year my oldest daughter decided that she wanted to play volleyball. She had to do a lot of preparation in order to get ready for practice because she's never played a sport before. My wife and I worked with her doing some conditioning exercises and running to build up her strength endurance. My daughter found out from some of her friends who are on the volleyball team that they also play in a club outside of the school team. So she called up the coach and started getting herself ready to play. 

Within about three months she progressed in leaps and bounds and really started to become a volleyball player. Since the school year was ending she was going to be practicing and conditioning with the beach team to get ready for try-outs at the end of the summer. Three nights a week we were up and down the road going to practice and we even spent two to three days going to our local park where there's a volleyball court for her to practice on her own. I was so proud of her and the hard work she was putting in to become a better player.





















During one of our extra practices she got a bad shoulder injury and wasn't able to continue. Her shoulder had been giving her some problems a couple of times before this but it wasn't nearly as bad as this particular time. What I didn't know was that she was having shoulder issues before she even started thinking about volleyball. 

She talked to her coach and the coach referred us to a physical therapist who would be able to assess what was going on. We found out that she has an unstable labrum joint which causes her shoulder to "float" out of the joint. The P.T. told us that this is very common among young athletes and that she would need to build the muscles around her shoulder joint. If she didn't build up the muscles and her shoulder kept slipping out the joint, then she might start getting tears which would mean that she would need surgery. 

Even though this news felt like a hard pill to swallow, my daughter decided that it wouldn't deter her from playing volleyball. All that was fine and good until she went to practice two days later and her shoulder slipped once again. This time the school coach was there and informed her that she would need to take it easy and possibly find another sport to play. This crushed my daughter. She had been working so hard and was just beginning open gym at her school so that she could try out for the team. 

Once she got home (and after a couple good cries) she made a decision. She would take this entire year to build up her strength and work on serving and attacking with her left arm rather than her right arm which was the one that was giving her trouble. I was impressed! She decided that this setback would not stop her from playing volleyball. Instead of giving up and turning her back on something that she really wanted to do, she would put the work in to make her wishes come to fruition. 

So many times as a parent you wonder if the words of encouragement that you tell your kids are really absorbed. I always tell my daughters how proud I am of them when they accomplish something that was a hurdle. To not only be proud of them but to be inspired by them is such a wonderful feeling. I guess those encouraging words do stay with them.


No comments:

Post a Comment