by Lucas Fiedler
There are five different professional leagues and all 5 of those professional leagues are spreaded out across America. Those professional leagues consist of the National Basketball Association (NBA), Major League Baseball (MLB), National Football League, National Hockey League (NHL), and Major League Soccer (MLS). In all of these associations and leagues, the total number of franchises comes out to 152. The average number of players on a roster between the 5 is 29 players. All of these players have a chance of getting injured no matter the amount of the time they get to play.
Injuries suck for athletes for multiple reasons. Depending on the injury, the rehab could be up to a year, and this isn’t just to play again, it could be to just simply walk again. The process of getting back to 100% from any injury is tough and could be hard on the athlete during rehab for their specific injury. But unfortunately injuries are simply just part of the game. Zach Miller, a player in the NFL, dislocated his knee and tore his popliteal artery in that same knee. He had to go straight to a local hospital in New Orleans after a play he had made for a touchdown, and needed immediate surgery. He would need 9 on the same knee. It took him a year and a half to fully recover from the injury. To add on to that, he hasn’t played a single snap of professional football ever since his injury. There are multiple injuries that can take the same amount of time, and it's hard.
“Imagine if you really think you can open and shut a door with your mind, but that darn door doesn't move.” Zach Miller, Bears TE, a few years after the injury, in a video about the knee.
The injury didn’t only take a toll on Zach, but it took a toll on his family, especially his daughter, who said in the video “when my dad got hurt, I was so lonely.”
Athletes are not sad when they get injured, they are only frustrated because they put in all of the work during the off-season and it all went to waste and they have to work really hard on that one injury for how long it takes. Players who sit on the sidelines due to injury also have the risk of losing their starting job. You wanna know how Tom Brady started his rise to fame? His teammate that had been playing instead of him got injured and that same guy by the name of Drew Bledsoe would never play for the Patriots again. So those are the reasons why injuries are a lot worse for athletes than you think.