Nate Terhune: Determined and Back on the Field

From Nov. 13 Game Program

Football is filled with heroic and sometimes borderline insane stories of players fighting back from injury and returning to the field ahead of schedule.
In the NFL, Ronnie Lott famously had the tip of his mangled pinky amputated to avoid missing time in the 1986 season. A few years earlier, Jack Youngblood played in Super Bowl XIV on a broken leg.

Similar tales are abundant in college football as well. Right here at Kent State, Fritz Jacques found a way to finish his senior season by wearing a brace to protect the ACL he tore earlier in 2007.

The Golden Flashes can add another story to that list in 2013.

Just four weeks after breaking his lower leg in a game at Louisiana State, Nate Terhune was back on the field defending the Kent State goal line at Ball State.

Terhune's story is not a crazy, risk-life-or-limb comeback stories, however. Instead it should serve as inspiration to other athletes who can learn the value hard work can have in an unusually speedy recovery.

The broken leg Terhune suffered on Sep. 14 in Baton Rouge was a freakish friendly-fire accident that could have ended the redshirt sophomore's season.

"One of our own guys fell on my leg," said Terhune. "I heard it pop and didn't think it was that bad. I walked off the field believing they would tape it up and I'd get right back in there."

That didn't happen. Terhune was carted off the field to an X-Ray machine in the bowels of Tiger Stadium. A few minutes later he was told he had a fracture just above his ankle.

"I got all of my sulking out of the way that night," said Terhune. "It was a long airplane ride home. The next day, I had surgery. I was told that the earliest I could be back was 4-to-6 weeks. Sitting out and watching all of my teammates practice hurt more than the leg, so I decided right then that if I could be back in four weeks, I was going to be back in four weeks. Not six. Not eight."

Kent State's coaching and training staffs hope Terhune's teammates took notice of his work ethic during those four weeks.

"Nate was a beast when it came to rehabbing," said Director of Sports Medicine Trent Stratton. "There were days when he pretty much lived in the training room. He was there when we opened up in the morning. He would go to class, then come back to the training room and be the last one to leave.
"The way he attacked the things we asked him to do were second to none. He actually made a stationary bike movable at one point. The bike was actually moving along the ground because he was pedaling so hard."

Before doctors would allow him to move the lower leg and ankle with its surgically implanted metal plate and pins, Terhune kept busy on an upper-body only weight program created just for him by Strength and Conditioning Coach Antoine Sharp.

"He had me doing some new lifting four days per week and focusing on my upper body," said Terhune. "I was doing things like one-legged squats. And then I spent a lot of time in the film room so that I stayed in the game mentally. Every day I kept asking when can I get more rehab. Trent Stratton, our doctors and our coaches were great at making sure I didn't do too much and actually end up (hindering) the comeback. But I did everything that I could."
Terhune endured his rehabilitation without the benefit of the painkillers prescribed by his doctors, "because if I took them, they told me I wouldn't be able to lift weights," he said.

Paul Haynes already knew Terhune to be a hard worker. As a first-year head coach at Kent State, Haynes had assumed the redshirt sophomore from Chagrin Falls was actually a senior based on the way he carried himself in the Flashes' early practices.

"I didn't know how hard a worker he was until I started to see the way he practiced and started getting reports from coach Sharp on how hard he worked in the weight room," said Haynes. "We actually have to slow him down in practice because he only knows one speed.

"When he was coming back from his injury, we would say, 'alright Nate, slow down,' while he was on the stationary bike because he was going 100 miles an hour in the first period of practice," said Haynes. "I'd look over during period 10 of practice and he's still going 100 miles per hour. It was amazing. He just worked his tail off … When trainers gave him things to do, he did them on his own. With Nate's dedication and commitment to his teammates to make sure he is out there for them, it didn't surprise me he was able to come back fast."

That he played on Oct. 12 at Ball State was a bit of a surprise, however. Terhune had only participated in one day of practice prior to the trip to Muncie. And in that Thursday session, he only took part in individual drills. The X-rays showing his broken bone had completely healed had arrived earlier that morning.

"There is a lesson other student-athletes can learn from how fast Nate returned," said Stratton. "Just because it was determined that Nate was going to be out at least a certain number of weeks, it didn't deter him from working during those four weeks. He attacked his rehab right after surgery. Some guys will hear that they are going to be out at least four weeks and then they'll wait to start really attacking their rehab until week three.

"If we had 20 other guys like Nate Terhune it would make our jobs a lot easier, and we would have a much healthier football team."

Terhune did have some escapes to help him through the difficult month of rehab. He spent weekends after he was off of his crutches sitting in a blind, icing down his lower leg and ankle for almost six hours while duck hunting with family and friends on swampland near Sandusky.

He also had memories of a more frightening comeback he faced during his junior year at Orange High School when he spent several days in the ICU after lacerating his spleen while making a tackle in kick coverage.
"That happened in week five of the season and I knew I wasn't going to be able to come back until the next summer," said Terhune, who returned the next year to set a school record with 16 sacks. "This season, I had a chance to come back and I was determined … This has been a tough season for us at Kent State, but I wouldn't have traded being out there with my teammates for anything. We are still having fun playing the game, and the senior class has been great."

After increasing his playing time each week, Terhune returned to the starting lineup last week when the Flashes lost at the University of Akron.
"It was great to be back for that game, but that loss hurt," said Terhune. "It hurt more for the seniors, seeing them lose for the first time to Akron. I don't ever want that to happen again."

Kent State University Athletics

Nate Terhune: Determined and Back on the Field

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