Quick recovery leads to quick victorine

Monday, September 28, 1998

Quick recovery leads to quick victorine

FEATURE: After sitting out for a year because of injury,
star

midfielder Sasha Victorine leaps back into action

By Moin Salahuddin

Daily Bruin Staff

You’re going for a header over a defender, and as you seemingly
hang in the air, looking for the glory of scoring a goal, you
suddenly realize that you’re on a collision course with the ground
below.

You extend your left leg till it’s straight, and as you make
contact with the ground, your knee buckles and a sharp pain zooms
through your body.

What do you do?

Well, you’d like to get up and continue playing soccer. You
realize, however, that you can’t because you have just suffered an
injury all too common to athletes – you’ve torn your ACL (anterior
cruciate ligament).

This situation is all too familiar to junior midfielder Sasha
Victorine. Last year, Victorine tore his ACL early in the season
against Fresno State.

Yet, Victorine is no average player. Days before his injury, he
was selected as one of 10 nominees for the Missouri Athletic Club
Player of the Year Award. He was one of the top freshmen in the
country and the state player of the year in high school.

Victorine has also played on U.S. youth national teams (under-20
and under-23 squads). This year, he has been named a finalist for
the Hermann Trophy, which annually honors collegiate soccer’s top
player.

All of these accolades could have stopped for Victorine if his
injury had proved to be career threatening. Yet Victorine battled
back and is now leading his Bruins back into the spotlight, looking
to repeat their NCAA Championship of a year ago. But he won’t
forget what happened last year.

"My second year started out all right," Victorine said. "I
started two games and scored all my points during those two games.
The next game, I was going up for a header, and as I was coming
down over a defender, I landed on just my left leg without it bent,
and it just went both ways.

"I thought I sprained it, and I just played on for a little
while. But I couldn’t get to a full sprint. My left calf started
tightening and my knee was pretty swollen. I was trying to run
around and do as much as I could, but it just didn’t feel right.
When I took a shot with my left foot with four minutes left in the
first half, I knew I had to come out. So the coaches checked out my
knee, and it appeared to be all right

"I had an MRI done the next morning, and the doctors said that I
had a second-degree ACL tear. It was devastating at first because
you don’t know if you can come back from it. It takes so long to
get back, and when people hear about ACL, it sounds like such a big
injury. There is an definite element of being scared with that
injury."

Victorine had been one of the top players for UCLA, and without
his presence, it seemed as if the Bruins season might come to an
abrupt halt.

UCLA, however, used his injury as motivation for future
opponents and marched through the regular season and into the NCAA
Final Four. Yet, as the Bruins marched forth on their season,
Victorine was rehabilitating his injury.

"I had surgery at 9:30 the next morning, which was less than 48
hours after the injury. I spent the night, and my leg was hooked up
to a CPM (counts per minute) machine. That kept my knee moving and
sped up the healing process.

"I then left the hospital and went back to my apartment where I
had to have my leg in the machine for 12 hours a day. I did it
while sleeping, watching TV or any other time. It was fairly hard,
but after I got my stitches out a week later, I started training
with my physical therapist. We set little goals that I could keep
on accomplishing. I didn’t push it so that I could come back
healthy. They say that after 12 months, your knee should be back to
about 95 to 100 percent normal and I’m 11 months into
rehabilitation so far."

The NCAA Final Four had arrived, and Victorine did not want to
be left home watching his Bruins fight for a national title.

So, he decided to attempt to support the team in Richmond,
Virginia.

"I traveled the day after they made it to the Final Four and met
the team there," Victorine said. "There were three of us who went:
me, Peter Vagenas and Kevin Coye, who were all injured. We went out
and bought body paint and painted ourselves blue and put yellow
letters on … I think I was the captain. We did this in the locker
room, and the team was excited to see us. And I think they were
more motivated for the game (against the Indiana Hoosiers in the
NCAA Semifinals)."

As UCLA went on to beat the Hoosiers and the Virginia Cavaliers
in the finals, Victorine thought about the upcoming season and his
return to the lineup with the Bruins. But he needed to prepare
himself before the season began.

"My first game back from the injury was fun," he said.

"I was just tired of sitting and watching all the games. It was
scary playing, though, with a huge knee brace on and I wasn’t very
mobile either. But once that came off, I started to play better.
However, I still haven’t reached the point where I’ll attack the
headers like I had done last season."

Victorine was not only successful in the collegiate ranks. He
has always been superb at soccer from the outset.

"I was about four and a half years old when I first started
playing soccer," Victorine said. "I just kicked the ball off my
garage and played with the kids in the neighborhood. I started club
soccer when I was 10. I always played a year up, and we were pretty
successful. We won the state cup on my under-10 team and went to
the finals a couple of other years. We won the state cup three
times in a row when I was in high school."

Victorine continued on into high school where he was immediately
playing on the varsity squad. "I started my freshman year on, but
it was never easy," Victorine said. "I had a great time playing
with my friends."

During his junior and senior seasons at Rio Americano High
School in Corona, Calif., Victorine was noticed by numerous
Division 1 schools from across the country.

"I was being heavily recruited by most of the top schools in the
nation," Victorine said. "I chose UCLA because of their superb
coaching, great academics and the serene area. I love the beach,
and the weather is great, too."

While most players suffer from the transition between high
school and college sports, Victorine excelled and adjusted easily
during his freshman season.

"There’s a big difference between high school soccer and college
soccer," Victorine said. "It’s a lot more intense at the college
level. Everyone expects a lot more of you and it is definitely more
physical. But I think I adjusted fairly well here.

"I played all right for my freshman year," Victorine said. "We
lost our first NCAA tournament game so that put a damper on our
season. We wished we went a little further than that. After that
first year, we all were trying to improve on our finish in the
NCAAs. We just had to push a little harder in each and every
practice. We were 17-3 my freshman year so we had to dig deep into
ourselves to get home-field advantage throughout the playoffs."

Victorine has almost completely recovered from his injury and is
currently helping lead his Bruins both on the field and in spirit
back to the championship.

"Our goal this season is to repeat," Victorine said. "We believe
we have the capability of winning the championship, and we all have
more confidence after winning last season. I consider myself a
leader on the team. I try to get the game moving and help start the
attack for our forwards and other players."

Naturally, Victorine is one who loves the outdoors. Besides
playing soccer, he enjoys going hiking and fishing – a simple life
for such a talented person both off and on the field. Victorine is
one who has overcome adversity to always succeed.

So the next time you turn on your television and notice that the
U.S. World Cup team actually does well, look for Sasha Victorine,
because he shouldn’t be too far behind.

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