The coach met his parents and had to explain how he could have fallen out of a window

I awoke to a loud, obnoxious banging on the door. My alarm clock said 7:00 AM. I opened the door to find the team Captain standing there in tears. She blurted out, “There’s been an accident. The recruit was in an accident. It’s really bad.”

The recruit, which recruit? Late spring was heavy recruiting season for our team and a hard time keeping track of them. Accident--an auto accident?

She calmed down enough to tell me that the recruit had fallen out the window of a 10th floor apartment! He was in the hospital and was in bad shape.

Information was extremely limited for the next few hours. Rumors were flying all over campus. Students were talking about the recruit who got thrown out of the window. Others were saying the recruit tried to commit suicide. Someone jerk asked, “If a recruit commits suicide, who gets the 4.0?”

We didn’t see Coach at practice that afternoon because he had to meet the recruit’s parents at the airport and drive them to the hospital. We were, however, told that the recruit had been sleeping in a bed next to a window. Since it was a warm spring night, the window was open. Somehow the recruit moved around in his sleep, fell down ten stories and landed on the ground.

A student who happened to walk by found him lying on the ground in his boxer shorts. Naturally he assumed the recruit was a drunken fool who had passed out after a very rough night – and so he shook the recruit to rouse him from his “drunken slumber.” Not an advisable course of action when treating a spinal cord injury.

It was a combination of miracles that enabled the recruit to survive the fall. The apartment building is surrounded mostly by sidewalk, yet he landed on a small patch of grass. It had rained earlier that evening, so the wet ground provided a softer surface for the landing. Because he was asleep, the recruit’s body was relaxed and he sustained fewer injuries than he might have otherwise. And, legend has it, the recruit may have partaken at the off-campus drinking establishment earlier that evening – which would have contributed further to the relaxed state of his body. Go figure?

Over the next couple of weeks we heard encouraging reports of the recruit’s recovery. We took our final exams and went home for the summer.

When we returned to campus in September, we learned that the recruit had not only recovered remarkably but he had, in fact, matriculated. Campus Housing managed to find him accommodations in the new freshman dorm…on the first floor!

I eventually met the recruit and when I knew him well enough I asked him what his parents had to say about the accident. He laughed and said his mom said, “thank God for insurance.” He then provided an entertaining show-and-tell session of various scars from his many other “adventures.”

Freshman year was relatively uneventful for the recruit. Yes, while on a team trip he did knock over a lamp, which landed in a waste basket and started a small fire in a hotel room. And yes, he also passed out in the middle of practice one day. However, emergency services were not called in for either of these incidents.

I wonder what became of the recruit. Did he outgrow his “accident proneness” or did he simply move on to bigger and better accidents? I’ve lost contact with him, so I can’t say for sure. My guess is the former because anything bigger or better than the window accident surely would have landed him a 7:00 AM interview with Matt Lauer!