Doubt Doesn’t Slow Desatoff’s Run to Net

Outwardly, Cypress midfielder Vedda Desatoff looks to be every bit as good a soccer player this season as she was in 1996 when she had 18 goals in 19 games.

But inwardly, Desatoff isn’t so sure.

She asks her teammates, her coaches and her family and all tell her that she is playing as well as ever.

Everyone tells her that her game is as sharp as ever but she wonders. The swarming case of self-doubt comes because of a broken leg suffered in the semifinals of the state tournament last season.

“Physically,” Desatoff said, “I’m fine. But the thought is always in the back of my mind [that it could happen again].”

Desatoff went for a loose ball near the goal and missed it on the wet field. But the American River goalkeeper slid cleats-first into the lower part of Desatoff’s right leg.

The result was a broken tibia for Desatoff, but that was just the start of her troubles. It took about a week for the swelling to subside and then the damaged leg was put in a cast.

Less than a month later, the doctors detected that the bone wasn’t healing correctly and she had to endure two failed attempts to manually set the bone back in place.

The next course of action was surgery in which Desatoff had a rod screwed into a bone in her lower leg to hold her tibia in the correct position.

She can explain the injury and recovery step by step with exacting detail because she made her doctors do the same. “It was crazy,” she said. “They would say they we’re going to do so and so and I made them explain it so I would know what was happening.”

She was able to jog by mid-March and returned to the field shortly after but was slowed at first because of the loss of most of the muscle tone in her leg.

“It was weird to be back,” she said. “It just seemed like everybody was going so fast and I could barely move.”

Though she is still skeptical that she is as good as ever, Desatoff has the numbers to prove that she is.

Desatoff, a sophomore, has scored 13 goals in 14 games for Cypress (12-1-1), which is ranked fourth in the state. She is fourth on the team in goals and first with 13 assists for the Chargers, who play at Orange Coast at 3 p.m. today in a key Orange Empire Conference game.

Orange Coast comes in with a 10-2-2 mark and is 5-0 in conference. Cypress is 4-0 in conference.

“I could care less about scoring,” Desatoff said. “It’s not a bad thing to score, but to our team winning is more important than anything.”