Broken Twice, Not Beaten : As Daws’ Foot Heals Again, She Prepares to Kick Up Her Heels

It is fall, 1994, and the Indiana sun is beaming down on Alumni Field near the east edge of the University of Notre Dame campus.

Young women sprint up and down the field, one side controlling a soccer ball, the other pursuing. Women’s soccer coach Chris Petrucelli barks instructions as he moves among the players.

Something catches his eye, a little thing, and he drops his head and mumbles something to the grass.

Cindy again. Cindy Daws.

The Northridge native has done nothing particularly wrong. She just wasn’t perfect. And Petrucelli has come to expect nothing less from his star midfielder.

“People who don’t know could watch Cindy play last year, and say ‘There is a great player,’ ” Petrucelli said, “but I and she know the parts of her game that were missing, the little things that were off. Not many people could tell, but I knew.”

And Petrucelli knew why.

Daws, a former Louisville High standout, has an injured foot which has troubled her for more than a year.

“It is so discouraging because it seems like just when things get going, my foot gets injured and then everything is put on hold,” said Daws, a former national high school player of the year. “It has been hard because when I first got injured I felt like I was at the top of game. Now I’m just been trying to get back there.”

Daws, 19, was named freshman of the year by one soccer publication following the 1993 season, one in which she scored 16 goals and had 20 assists, helping Notre Dame earn its first NCAA tournament berth.

Anson Dorrance, North Carolina’s coach and coach of the U.S. National team at the time, invited Daws to a tryout in January. In her third practice, Daws went up for a header and came down in pain. She felt the arch in her left foot bend and knew she was done.

“My foot had been sore most of the season but I just thought I had a stress fracture,” Daws said. “But when I came down on the foot at the national team practice I knew it was serious.”

She had broken a bone and because of the stress that playing soccer placed on the foot, doctors inserted a screw in the bone to strengthen it.

For Daws, surgery seemed more of a nuisance than a necessity. She was in a hurry to resume playing. But rehabilitation hit her like an unexpected slap. She spent the summer swimming, walking, lifting weights. She didn’t touch a soccer ball until training sessions started in mid-August.

“Cindy was behind when she came in, in more ways then just having her foot not completely ready,” Petrucelli said. “She hadn’t been playing so her timing and stamina weren’t there, and her injury never let her get back into it completely.”

Even so, Daws played well enough to earn All-American honors for the second consecutive season, leading the Irish to the NCAA final in Portland.

However, with 10 minutes left in the title match, a 5-0 loss to North Carolina, Daws went up for a header and again came down on the foot.

“I felt my arch give again and I knew,” Daws said. “It was the same thing all over. I played the rest of the game but I knew that I had hurt it again.”

In January, 11 months after her first operation, doctors inserted a longer screw in Daws’ foot and performed a bone graft, removing bone from her hip and plugging the hole in her foot.

Daws expects to play next fall, but trainers have urged her to focus on a return date sometime in 1996.

“Having the surgery was the only way to be sure that at some point my foot would be completely healed,” Daws said. “I thought about not having the surgery, because it is hard to know that I could have the surgery, go through all the rehab and still not play this year. But what I really kept thinking about was that I wanted to win a national championship, and I didn’t win a national championship playing injured last year.”

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Her thick blond hair, tied in back, is bobbing in rhythm like a cheerleader’s pompon. She is favoring one side as she walks, glancing down at the treadmill beneath her feet.

Tomorrow, maybe, Daws can increase the speed of the machine. Her foot will tell her. Who knows, in a few weeks or a month, she might have it up to a jog.

Maybe.

Who knows where Daws would be right now if she wasn’t recovering from surgery.

Maybe returning from Gavle, Sweden, where the national team recently completed play in the world championships.

“Everyone talks about it, so it is hard not to think about the national team,” Daws said. “All the games have been on TV and I’ve been watching, but I’m trying right now to think about that. I’m concentrating on my rehab and getting my foot healthy for the season.”

A small consolation for Daws is that her spot in the national team was filled by Holly Manthei, a Notre Dame teammate.

When she is healthy, Daws is expected to regain her place at the top her sport.

“She will be the next dominant player in women’s soccer,” Dorrance, the Carolina coach, said.

Daws scored 12 goals and had 19 assists in the 1994 season and was a finalist for the Hermann Award--the Heisman Trophy of women’s soccer. Tisha Venturini of North Carolina, Tiffeny Milbrett of Portland and Daws were the top three candidates.

Milbrett and Venturini were in Sweden.

Daws remains a candidate for the U.S. Olympic team.

“When I was twelve I played on the under-16 Olympic Development team with people like Tiffeny and Tisha,” Daws said. “When you play Olympic Development they gear you for the final stage, which is playing in the Olympics. It is certainly one of my goals, but I can’t think that far ahead. My first goal is to get healthy.”