I was going to comment on Lloris's obvious concussion Sunday, but got caught up in other things, then I see this article in the Washington Post. I still can't believe the Spurs doctors let Lloris continue playing.Her biggest saveSoccer star confronts the concussion that killed her career and clouded her lifehttp://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2013/11/02/her-biggest-save/Briana Scurry couldn’t be sure if it was the painkillers or the fact that surgeons had just plucked pea-size balls of damaged tissue from the back of her head. But when the two-time Olympic goalkeeper and Women’s World Cup champion awoke at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital on Oct. 18, the headache that had hijacked her life for the past 3-1/2 years was gone.
Since an April 2010 game, when an overeager forward slammed into Scurry, that headache chased her from one defeat to another: forcing her to quietly retire from soccer, tripping her up during a short-lived gig with ESPN and finally pushing her into depression. Her roommate would come home from work and find Scurry listless on the couch, where she’d been all afternoon.
On those days, Scurry found herself beset with questions familiar to many athletes who suffer serious concussions: What is wrong with me? And why am I not better yet?
Scientists can’t entirely answer those questions, but a growing body of research suggests that - counter to the popular imagery of young men smashing into each other in football and hockey - female athletes suffer relatively more concussions than their male counterparts, and they struggle with more dramatic symptoms when they do.
In high school sports that have similar rules for boys and girls, girls get concussions at twice the rate, according to a 2011 study in the American Journal of Sports Medicine. Another study found that among all collegiate athletes, female soccer players had the highest overall concussion rates.
Even as she came up from the haze of anesthesia, Scurry could mumble one estimate to a curious hospital employee: about one in two female soccer players will get a concussion in her career.
Scurry has become something of an expert on concussions. For her, the biggest problem was always the headache, a relic of the damage done to her neck and occipital nerve when the blow to her temple snapped her head back. Neck damage occasionally accompanies serious concussions, says Kevin Crutchfield, the neurologist Scurry turned to in February. Many clinicians respond with prescriptions for drugs such as Vicodin.
But Crutchfield, in collaboration with MedStar Georgetown peripheral nerve surgeon Ivica Ducic, has pioneered a new approach to post-concussion recovery: occipital nerve release surgery, a procedure common for patients who suffer migraines and chronic headaches. The occipital nerve - a slimy, five-millimeter cord that runs up from the spine and fans across the back of the head - tunnels through muscles that can pinch it and cause pain.
It was the persistent pain that felled Scurry, 42, a slim, no-nonsense jock known for her on-field glower and intensity. The crowning moment of her career - a shootout save in the 1999 World Cup final against China - was a dramatic, across-the-goal dive memorialized on sports pages around the world. Scurry yelled and fist-pumped afterward, but she didn’t really smile.
Then again, maybe Scurry had simply grown accustomed to success. A native of Dayton, Minn. - “3,000 people, no stoplights,” she says - she tried out for the local boys’ soccer team at age 12. She wound up in the net only because that’s where her coach assumed a girl would feel safest. But Scurry’s father, Ernest, told his daughter - the baby of the family and the youngest, by nine years, of nine children - to play hard and “always be first,” whether in line at the bus stop or at the Olympics. She listened.
She went on to play varsity soccer, basketball, softball and track for the Anoka High School Tornadoes, deciding to continue with soccer only when the University of Massachusetts at Amherst made it clear that it was the best route to an athletic scholarship. She majored in political science with the vague plan of someday attending law school.
But in 1993, before she finished her undergraduate degree, Scurry got a call from Tony DiCicco, coach of the women’s national soccer team, who had heard good things about the U-Mass. Minutewomen’s goalie.
She started in the 1995 Women’s World Cup, where the United States placed third, and won gold at the 1996 Olympics, allowing only three goals during the five-game tournament.
But women’s soccer didn’t make many magazine covers or prime-time newscasts until 1999, when Scurry and the rest of the U.S. national team packed the Rose Bowl with a record 90,000 fans and beat China in an overtime shootout for the World Cup. History would remember Brandi Chastain’s shirtless celebration at the top of the penalty box, but Scurry’s save three minutes earlier made that possible.
“Briana Scurry at her peak -- no one has ever played better than that for the USA," said DiCicco, who coached Scurry for five years on the women's national team. "She was the best in the world. That's the truth.”
Scurry’s career got rocky after the World Cup. In the months that followed, she spent too much time appearing on talk shows and too little time at the gym, gaining 15 pounds and falling so far out of shape that April Heinrichs, who was then the coach of the national team, sidelined her in favor of newcomer Siri Mullinix. Scurry played not a minute in the 2000 Olympic Games.
“I was so incredibly bitter. I felt betrayed,” Scurry said in an interview last month at the apartment she recently began renting in Adams Morgan. “There was no way I was going out like that, not if I had anything to say about it.”
Scurry hit the weight room - and put on 10 pounds of muscle. She played three seasons for Atlanta’s professional team, the Beat, compiling the lowest goals-against average in the league. In 2002, two years after Mullinix unseated her, Heinrichs returned Scurry to the starting lineup. The United States went on to win gold in Athens in 2004.
She would always need to fight for her starting spot, however, first against Mullinix and then against the fresh-faced media favorite Hope Solo. During the 2007 World Cup semifinals, when Scurry gave up four goals to give Brazil the win, fans called for Scurry and her coach to retire.
But even before the rivalries, goalkeeping was intensely psychological for Scurry. After all, a professional soccer net offers almost 200 square feet of scoring opportunities. Missed saves are inevitable, and rarely forgiven.
To cope with this, Scurry gave herself a rigid mental rule: You have the time between the goal you just allowed and the start of the next play to sulk. When the whistle blows, you forget that anything bad ever happened.
That strategy served her well - until April 2010.
The hit happened during her second season on the Washington Freedom, D.C.’s defunct professional team. She had warmed up as usual for an away game against the Philadelphia Independence, diving and falling for balls thrown by her trainer and listening to the mix of Eminem and Nine Inch Nails that always got her pumped for play. The game started, then lagged, as the ball ping-ponged around the center of the field. Then, with 10 minutes left in the first half, a ball finally skidded toward Scurry and she dropped low for a routine grab.
She didn’t see the 165-pound, fast-charging forward from the Philadelphia Independence before her knee slammed into Scurry’s right temple, leaving them both on the turf.
“ ‘Let’s go, keep,’ ” Scurry remembers the referee saying, urging her to get up. She had, miraculously, blocked the shot. “ ‘You’re all right, keep.’ “
Scurry played for several minutes after the collision, even saving a few more balls, as the world began to tip up at odd angles and the numbers on her teammates’ jerseys zoomed in and out of focus. Anxious that she might throw up, Scurry stumbled to the sideline and down to the locker room, where she couldn’t repeat the string of words a trainer read her to test for brain trauma. Doctors initially estimated that she’d need a few days to recover, as most people who suffer concussions do. When her symptoms persisted, they revised that estimate to two weeks. Then 60 days. Then indefinitely. Her career was over.
You can read the rest @ the post. The article is really well done. http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2013/11/02/her-biggest-save/
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