West Beats Addiction, Returns to Stanford

The moment Stanford midfielder Martha West took her first puff of marijuana as a teenager, there was no turning back. Addiction is a disease in her family. It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been cigarettes, candy or caffeine.

A top soccer recruit, she practiced and played high or hung over, again and again, despite everything her coaches and teammates did to try to help her.

West abused her body and all the people close to her so badly that she risked losing everything -- her family, the sport that defined her, a prestigious education, even her life.

Still, she was defensive.

She was a sports star from a strong family. She could handle herself.

“It’s like building a sand castle and the tide slowly taking it away, bit by bit,” West says, recalling her downward spiral. “I had a lot of accolades and awards on the outside. Whatever was missing on the inside, when I had alcohol or a chemical in me, I was free of that.”

Following a four-year absence and stints in several rehab facilities, West is finally back with the Cardinal soccer team at age 25. Clean and sober since early 2002, she’s working toward a degree in philosophy and religious studies with a minor in art history.

She attends 12-step meetings almost daily.

Her family considers it a miracle she’s alive at all.

West’s problems began when she was a 15-year-old high school freshman. She started drinking and experimenting with pot, then took on hallucinogens and cocaine. “How can I have as much of this for as long as possible?” she thought. Before long, she was popping Ecstasy, snorting crystal meth and smoking crack.

By her senior year, she’d accepted a scholarship to Stanford. But that winter, she was gone from her small Catholic high school in Fort Worth, Texas. She holed up for three months in a drug treatment center across the state -- it was get help or get kicked out of the house, her parents told her.

Stanford coach Steve Swanson called looking for her several times, just to check in. West’s parents eventually revealed that she was in treatment.

Once released, West called Swanson. He might have revoked her scholarship. Instead, he told her they would get through it. “They.” His caring words made her believe everything would be fine once she stepped on campus.

“It was an interesting scenario. You could pull the plug on it and say, ‘We’re not going to do that,’ or you could stand by her,” Swanson says. “I stuck by her. I’m glad I did. It’s an amazing circle, that’s for sure.”

But that first in-patient treatment in East Texas didn’t work.

“I didn’t see that I had something life-threatening,” says West, who figured the dark circles under her eyes were a normal part of her appearance back then.

Twenty pounds heavier and out of shape, West still appeared in 18 matches as a freshman, getting three goals and an assist. But she couldn’t stay clean. Sitting at her computer, fiddling with homework, all it took was a party invite and she was out the door -- so what if she slept through weights.

Swanson knew. That spring, he suspended her from the team until she agreed to a list of conditions that included attending a 12-step program, being sober and going to class.

But West kept partying, and begging teammates to keep it from their coach. Drugs were interfering with her friendships, her hygiene, her studies.

The $400 monthly allowance her parents sent her was spent before it arrived. Friends loaned her money, then eventually cut her off.

Back on the roster, West had four goals, three assists and started 14 matches as a sophomore. Then, Swanson left for the head coaching job at Virginia.

He felt awful leaving just when he thought West was starting to turn her life around.

In fact, she was abusing more than ever. Speed and crystal meth kept her up for days at a time.

“It was like a chemistry project, Martha the chemist,” she says.

She showed up at one final that second year and realized she’d never been to class.

“In one sense, I think our team saw an amazing person and an amazing talent in Martha the first two years,” Swanson says. “In another sense, you knew it wasn’t all she had to offer, which was impressive. She could do some of the stuff not being 100 percent.”

West kept using while coaching youth soccer camps in Southern California that next summer, wearing dark sunglasses to hide her bloodshot eyes. After one cocaine run, she landed in a detox shelter for the down-and-out in San Francisco, went into a bathroom and snorted another bag of cocaine.

She was too sick to return to Stanford.

“I had become a blur. I looked at life like living in a movie,” she says, carefully rewinding through her darkest days during an interview before a recent practice. “My way out was, I’d go to treatment again.”

She stayed for 45 days in a state-run facility in Little Rock, Ark., then at a halfway house in San Diego. Sobriety didn’t last, so she moved again, back to Texas, to live with her grandmother and train with an old friend. That didn’t help either -- she was soon asking friends to buy groceries while she was off buying drugs.

West hadn’t given up on soccer. She persuaded Swanson’s successor to give her a tryout at Stanford in fall 2001. But two weeks before the preseason, she relapsed again, this time on crack.

Her family told her never to step on their property again. Her grandmother died in October.

West actually stayed sober for five months -- until that December.

“I doubted I could love Martha, because there was so much pain and hurt, just so much under the bridge,” says her mother, Eran, herself a recovering alcoholic, with 17 years of sobriety. “We were all aware things were going from bad to worse.”

West finally hit bottom just before Christmas 2001. Feeling depressed, she went on another drug run, and ended up injecting cocaine in a cheap hotel room. She was hospitalized the next day, but still trying to fool everyone. She was calling her dealer each night from her hospital bed.

Five days later, West’s mother arrived, along with several of their friends. She had already packed her daughter’s bags.

“I had made up my mind she was going to die,” her mom says. “I decided to go tell her I love her and that I was convinced she was going to die, and I couldn’t be around her. I couldn’t handle it another time.”

The women made sure that she didn’t walk out -- that someone stayed with West until she got on the plane for New Jersey, where they had secured a bed for her in a longterm treatment facility.

It was another miracle, West’s mother still believes, that she didn’t manage to slip away.

“If there hadn’t been an intervention, I don’t know if I’d be here,” West says. “I was able to drop to the next level and do whatever anybody told me. My guard was down enough to say ‘OK.”’

Alina Lodge in Blairstown, N.J., allows no phone calls. There’s no gym. No magazines.

With no other distractions, West says, she finally realized she had to change -- “Alina Lodge was the last stop for a lot of people. That place saved my life.”

West stayed 10 1/2 months, then moved to a halfway house in Minnesota, where she got up each morning at 4:30 a.m. to work in a bakery, and spent her evenings in 12-step meetings.

Last November, she decided to call Stanford again -- this time with no expectations. She asked for her transcripts so she could apply to a Division II school, figuring that was her best hope of playing competitive soccer again.

Instead, the athletic adviser encouraged her to come back to Stanford, where today she’s slowly raising her grades, and striving for a 3.0 when she graduates.

“On Jan. 7, I walked back here,” she says. “I didn’t know if I had soccer in me.”

Once the season began this fall, she quickly put those doubts to rest. Heading into Sunday’s match against Cal, West had a goal and an assist in five starts. She scored the game-winner in a 1-0 victory over Yale on Sept. 19.