Something to Smile About
Nikki Ryan didn’t cry until she saw her mother break into tears inside the crowded emergency room. She didn’t agonize until doctors told her she probably wouldn’t play soccer again for at least a year.
Ryan has fought through dark times since that day 14 months ago, particularly with debilitating headaches from post-concussion trauma and shattered confidence at her temporary disfigurement after she broke nearly every bone in her face during an on-field collision as she played goalkeeper for the Anaheim Esperanza High girls’ soccer team early in her junior season.
The damage, from what was believed to be an opponent’s knee, included the breaking of her left eye socket, the shattering of her jaw, which dislocated from the skull, and the crushing of a cheek, orbital bone and nasal passage.
“I looked like a monster,” said Ryan, who went through a six-hour surgery that included wiring her jaw shut and inserting three metal plates to hold together or replicate portions of broken bones.
Ryan has returned from her physical and psychological traumas to start in goal again for the Aztecs, competing with a passion like never before. The senior recently signed to continue her career at Western Kentucky.
“Suffering a traumatic injury can really affect the way you play goal,” said Ali Malaekeh, Ryan’s club coach. “The way she has come back is a tribute to her.”
It took more than courage to come back from an injury such as Ryan’s, according to Dr. Larry Bernard, who teaches sports psychology at Loyola Marymount.
“The pain is designed to teach us not to do it again,” Bernard said. “But some are able to overcome it through confidence and force of will.”
Unlike a baseball player who gets hit by a pitch and eventually must face his fear and return to the batter’s box to continue in the sport, a goalkeeper routinely has a choice of charging out of the goal for the ball and taking the chance of colliding with an opponent coming forward, or staying back in an attempt to disrupt or block an opponent’s shot.
The injury occurred during Ryan’s initial save opportunity last season. She won the goalkeeper job as a sophomore but said she became complacent with her training in the fall of her junior year.
Though she had begun to refocus in the weeks before the season started, she said, she had to watch the first two games from the sideline. When finally called upon to start in the South Torrance tournament, Ryan was eager to make a strong impression.
It didn’t take long. In the game’s opening minutes an Orange El Modena player headed toward Ryan on a breakaway. At the same time, the Aztecs’ sweeper began moving closer, attempting to cut down her opponent’s angle.
All three met in a horrific collision that caused arms and legs to flail and bodies to tumble. Ryan’s first thought: Maintain possession of the ball.
Ryan had experienced concussions before, but this one was different. She felt an indentation on the left side of her face and struggled to stand.
“My brain wouldn’t let my feet walk,” said Ryan, who had to be carried off the field.
It was the first time her mother, Marla, was not on the sideline to support her daughter. It was a Saturday morning, and Marla worked on Saturdays until noon.
Ryan’s grandparents, who lived nearby, were watching and they were the ones who called the ambulance. Ryan said she felt awful that they had to witness the injury, but Marla was relieved they were there. Ryan rode with her grandmother to Torrance Memorial Medical Center.
When Marla arrived at the emergency room, the first thing she saw was Ryan’s face, which appeared elongated because of her offset jaw. But the worst was still to come.
“I didn’t know the extent of it until they showed me the MRI and how smashed [her face] was,” Marla said.
Doctors said the swelling would have to subside before they could perform surgery -- Ryan was still wearing her game jersey because she couldn’t pull it over her swollen head -- and Marla wanted her daughter closer to home anyway, so that night they returned to Yorba Linda.
Eleven days later, she underwent surgery at Placentia-Linda Hospital in Placentia
“The bones were shattered in so many places, they just had to take them out,” Ryan said.
The injury and resulting surgery left Ryan so disfigured that she barely left her house for weeks. Because her jaw was wired shut, she lost considerable weight and her mouth bled the few times she smiled. Her family felt helpless in trying to minimize her depression.
“Every time she went into the bathroom, she came out crying,” Marla said. “She wanted us to take all the mirrors down in the house.”
Ryan finally acquiesced to the urging of friends and accompanied them to a Laker game. The wires holding her jaw in place set off a metal detector at the Staples Center entrance. Ryan pulled her hair back and stared into the eyes of the security guard, who quickly turned and waved her through.
In the stands, she sat next to a little girl, who looked at Ryan “in horror” and cried out to a younger sibling.
“At first I wondered who was she talking about,” Ryan said. “Then I figured out it was me.”
Ryan began suffering from extreme headaches. Reading became so painful that she was on the verge of falling behind in her schoolwork. She began attending school for only one period a day, needing tutors at home for the rest of her classes.
The entire time, Marla was trying to find a way to get her daughter back on the soccer field. Ryan had been a goalkeeper almost from the time she began playing as a little girl, and the sport formed a foundation in her life.
“I finally made her get up,” Marla said. “I said, ‘If you want soccer back, you have to work at it.’ That’s what got her up off the couch.”
While Ryan dutifully says she would recommend following doctors’ advice, she knew doing so herself -- not playing soccer for a year -- probably would have eliminated many of the rewards she enjoys today.
“Taking that away from me was like not giving me food,” she said. “It’s what I do.”
After the school district received clearance from her doctor, Ryan returned to play in a Southern Section Division I semifinal playoff game only two months after her injury.
“The day she was cleared she came out and started training again,” said Malaekeh, a former assistant women’s coach at Louisville. “I was saying, ‘You don’t need to dive. Slow, slow, slow,’ but that concept didn’t even cross her mind.”
Ryan returned full time to her high school classes in the fall, when she helped the under-18 Irvine-based Slammers Futbol Club to its biggest victory of the season over the top-ranked girls’ club in the Southland, the Southern California Blues of San Juan Capistrano.
When the high school season began, Ryan was starting only in home games, but as it got closer to playoff time, she was also in goal on the road. The Aztecs, ranked No. 7 in Division I, finished with an 11-8-2 overall record and a 5-4-1 mark in the highly competitive Sunset League. Their third-place finish qualified them for the playoffs, which begin with wild-card games Wednesday and the first round Friday.
Despite the steel plates, recurring headaches that kept her out of practice as recently as last week, and the lack of sensation on the left side of her face, Ryan is now the one leaving the impression.
“She absolutely blew my mind,” Malaekeh said. “She’d be training and have these horrible headaches. She’d have to sit down for five minutes and regain composure and then start training again.”
As Ryan’s face began looking more like the one she recognized, her psychological scars began to heal as well.
She said she has never felt any fear of a similar injury and even jokes about the collision now, laughing with teammates when they call her by her new nickname, Smashface.
