Youth Soccer: Foot Injury

Kids love travel soccer tournaments. They love being with their friends and running around the hotel just as much as they love the competition. They love swimming in the hotel pool and pressing all the buttons on the elevator just as much as they love scoring a goal.

Friday night, we drove to an elite tournament in Columbus, Ohio. My wife drove up with my daughter, CC and son, Nic. I followed from work alone because we needed two cars. My son had a baseball game back home on Saturday. I was about an hour behind my family. As I turned down the road where the hotel was located, I called my wife. She answered the phone, "I can't talk CC just got hurt. We are in room 213. Bye" She hung up before I could reply. I got to the room just a few minutes later to find my daughter crying on the bed with a swollen foot.

CC had jumped on an elliptical exercise machine after swimming with friends in the pool. She got the momentum going on it then her wet foot slipped forward. She was off balance and the machine tossed her 63 pound body forward. She caught her self with the support bars but could not clear her foot before it got caught by the moving parts.

The foot did not look good. It was bruised on the top and back on the achilles heel. It was swollen on the side. On of the parents is a paramedic. He looked at CC's foot and said that it could be broken, but most likely is not. It was too late to go to an urgent care center and we did not want to sit in a city hospital emergency room all night, so we iced it up, went to bed and hoped for the best.

Game 129 and 130

Nationwide Children's Hospital Foot X-Ray

The next morning, the pain, swelling and bruising had not subsided at all. She could not put much weight on it.

We skipped the 8am game to go to the urgent care center of Nationwide Children's hospital instead. As she was getting x-rays her team was lost 2-0.

Fortunately, the x-rays were negative, no breaks. This gave her confidence to put more weight on the foot, but she could not bear much. She did not play in the second game and the team lost 3-0.

The Main Point

I never missed a game in my life until I was blew out my ACL playing adult softball at age 26. I played my entire senior year of lacrosse with a painful hairline fracture of my shin. I needed to get my dad to sign a school release to allow me to play with the injury. My mom wouldn't sign it. I wore a soccer shin pad and took lots anti-inflammatories to get through the season.

My wife had never missed a game in her life either.

We half expected our daughter to jump out of bed and play through it the next day. She didn't. She couldn't.

As I was wheeling CC through the hospital I saw a little kid who looked very ill. His parents were holding back the tears. I thought to myself even if the foot is broken things could be a whole lot worse. So what if she misses a game or two or ten. Ironically, this is the same advice I gave my sister in the post about her injured son last week.