Wake Forest Athletics
Gold Rush: Comeback Kid
10/28/2002 12:00:00 AM | Women's Volleyball
Oct. 28, 2002
By Sam Walker
If the ACC had a comeback player of the year award, Valerie Rydberg would win it hands down. The last year has been a difficult one for Rydberg, a redshirt freshman on the 2002 Wake Forest's volleyball team. She has experienced the anticipation of playing in her first collegiate match to the pain of a serious knee injury that forced surgery and a medical redshirt season. She summoned the determination to rehabilitate her knee only to sustain another injury requiring another surgery. Yet, after all the setbacks, she is back and playing at a level where it appears she's never missed a beat.
In the Wake Forest volleyball media guide, Rydberg's player profile asks about her craziest ambition, to which she answered, "to go through a season uninjured." It's a bluntly honest answer because there hasn't been a season without a serious injury dating back through her entire high school career. Year after year, surgery after surgery, Rydberg withstood the pain, strengthened her resolve to play again, and she kept coming back.
Rydberg grew up playing tennis and soccer in Western Springs, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. But in the seventh grade, she took up volleyball, fell in love with the sport and has played ever since. In her freshman year of high school, she tried out and made the Sports Performance Volleyball Club, a travelling club team with a national reputation for winning and producing collegiate volleyball players. And over the next four years she developed into quite a player. She was named the best hitter and MVP of the Lemont High School team in 2000 and was a three-time all-conference player. In 1999, she was awarded the school's Attitude Award for Outstanding Dedication, Discipline and Perseverance. But it was her experiences with the Sports Performance club team that helped her develop against the nation's best competition.
"That was probably the best idea," Rydberg said of her decision to join Sports Performance. "It was my dad's idea really. It's an intense club and one of the strongest in America. There's a lot of mental toughness you learn and develop in that club. They just push you really hard. They didn't treat you like babies, and that helped. It's kind of a best man wins (playing time) situation. They wouldn't put you in just because your parents got upset if your weren't playing."
Coming out of high school, Rydberg considered playing at Washington, Boston College, Penn and Air Force. Larry Kahl was Rydberg's club coach for two years, and his daughter, Heather, had been named assistant volleyball coach on head coach Valerie Baker's Wake Forest staff. So Wake Forest, which had been recruiting Rydberg, slipped into the mix. She liked the combination of academics and athletic competition and after a visit to the Wake Forest campus she committed to the Deacons a week later.
In the fall of 2001, she came to Wake Forest and played her way into some probable playing time. She had already undergone two ACL reconstruction surgeries, one on each knee. But just before the start of the season, knee problems halted what was supposed to be a strong freshman campaign.
One week before the first match of the 2001 season, Rydberg was transitioning off the net and felt like her left knee came out of place. "I sat out for two or three days, and it felt like everything was getting better," Rydberg said. "The day before our first match, the first shuffle step I took my knee gave out again, and it locked up. It was a lot worse than the first time. It locked, I couldn't extend it and was rushed into surgery that night because I was in a lot of pain. I had never experienced that before."
"Given her history of knee problems it wasn't terribly surprising," trainer Jeff Straum of the Wake Forest Sports Medicine staff said. "Her ligaments could have been loose, and she may have strained a ligament or had a little shift from her previous ACL surgery. She could have had scar tissue that kind of broke at one point. It could have been anything at that point, so we sat her down, put ice on it, evaluated it, and then we reevaluated the next day. Two days later she was back on the court and feeling good, and it looked like she was going to pull through with no problems. That practice she was doing a shuffling drill, and she went down similar to the way she did the week before. Her knee was locked and we knew, at that point, she had torn her meniscus. When a knee locks like that, short of giving them morphine there's noting you can do for that pain."
Dr. Walt Curl, head of Wake Forest's Sports Medicine staff, was immediately called, and he administered an injection for pain. After he determined he could not shift her knee to try to alleviate the pain and move the cartilage back into place, he took her to the hospital. Shortly after midnight, Curl operated to stitch together a tear that measured over two-thirds the length of the entire cartilage according to Straum.
With a three-month recovery period to follow Rydberg had basically lost all of her freshman season, and the wise decision was to take a medical redshirt to preserve four years of eligibility. After clearance from doctors, Rydberg was back working out at practices. But approximately two weeks after she was cleared to participate in practices, her knee caught and locked again. Curl operated again and found that this tear wasn't as bad as the first but that the area he had previously repaired had not healed properly. He decided to remove the majority of the meniscus in her knee.
After the third surgery on her left knee, Rydberg was on a quick two-week recovery period because, according to Straum, there wasn't anything there to heal. Straum said she has been diligent in her efforts to strengthen her knee, and she played all through the spring without injury, which allowed her to get back into shape and regain her timing.
"It was kind of like, why me," Rydberg said. "I was bummed out, but I knew I would get through it. I knew if I had gotten through it three times before, I would get through this. You just kind of have to make up your mind you're going to do this. My coaches gave me an option if I wanted to continue, and Jeff (Straum) was there for me, and my coaches were there for me. Heather Kahl was there knowing that I'd be back and that I'd be stronger than ever."
Rydberg has come back and is playing as well as anyone on the Wake Forest team. She paced the Deacons with 40 kills and 39 digs over 13 games at the Kentucky Conference Challenge in Lexington, Ky., and was named to the All-Tournament Team. Although this is just her first year of collegiate competition she was leading Wake Forest with 2.95 kills per game and .63 aces per contest in the early part of the season. She was also second on the team in digs per game. It's obvious she's glad to be back in action.
"I just love the sport, and I don't know what I'm going to do after college to replace that aspect of life," Rydberg said. "I like having something to work on all the time, like being with my teammates, and it feels good to win. The day before our first match we were all like maybe Val shouldn't try doing the pre-game warm-up today. I was kind of nervous too because I'm a prime example of Murphy's law. But the first time I made it through pre-game warm-ups, I knew it was going to be a good year."
