One of the toughest adversities all athletes face are injuries, particularly season or career-ending injuries. From my experiences, they are much tougher mentally on most players than physically.
From a recruiting standpoint, not all season-ending injuries will effect your potential to earn a scholarship. From my experiences, college coaches will often stick by injured players and continue to recruit and evaluate them, possibly even offer them. If you already have scholarship offers, an injury doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be pulled.
The toughest situation is for those players who are seniors and still working towards getting offers, if you find yourself in this situation you will just need to get more creative and more aggressive. The key to success in this situation is to remain mentally tough. You must keep your confidence, develop other aspects of your game, become a master of the playbook.
If you are a basketball player who breaks their leg—get in the job, get someone to help rebound for you, and get shots up! If you break your right hand, get in the gym and learn to shoot with your left hand, work on your quickness, vertical and conditioning.
If you are an unsigned senior, you must continue to pound the pavement, work the phones, send your highlights and follow-up. You may have to go to prep school, Junior College or a much less competitive program.
You must find a way to OVERCOME. You must work towards this every day. You must stay positive! Remember—you always have options, even if you may not see them in the moment.
