A journey back from the brink

Ryan Coyle can rely only on eyewitness accounts of the play that nearly ended his life, much less his basketball playing days.

“I remember nothing from the game,” Coyle said. “Like, I don’t even remember walking into the gym to play.”

In a July 29 AAU tournament game at the University of St. Francis in Fort Wayne, Ind., playing with the Illinois Attack, the St. Francis High School senior stole the ball at midcourt.

Coyle dribbled in for a dunk when an opponent took his legs out from under him. Coyle’s hand slipped on the rim in the hot, humid gym and he lost his balance. He crashed to the court, landing on the back of his head and his left shoulder blade.

Without emergency medical personnel on hand, Coyle’s traumatic brain injury sent him into seizure on the court for more than 20 minutes, “on and off,” he said, until an ambulance arrived to rush him to the hospital. In the emergency room conditions only seemed to worsen.

“I guess that my brain was in such bad shape that my heart did stop for a little bit,” Coyle said.

“He doesn’t remember anything — thankfully — while I still have nightmares,” said his mother, Kathryn.

Now, the 6-foot-6 swingman has achieved a dream. Having made a complete recovery from brain trauma and a shattered left scapula, St. Francis High School’s all-time leading scorer capped his miraculous turnaround on March 31 by verbally committing to play basketball at Illinois Wesleyan University, which this season went 23-8 and reached the Division III Final Four.

“I called coach (Ron) Rose and told him I wanted to be a Titan,” said Coyle, who declined an overture from Division II Ohio Dominican among other suitors.

Scary times

This was a much cheerier call than the one St. Francis coach Bob Ward took last summer.

“I got a phone call the afternoon that it happened from somebody who’d gotten a call from his mom,” Ward said. “The phone call was scary bad, it was a really, really bad injury. The first phone call was kind of a touch-and-go kind of thing.”

When Ward visited the Coyles’ Lisle home he said, “it was probably four days afterward and I don’t think he’d eaten yet.

“We weren’t sure what his future held,” Kathryn Coyle said.

More than one medical opinion said basketball would not be part of his future. That only lit a fuse.

“I had family and friends who helped me stay positive by saying to me, just keep working hard, you’ll get back,” said Ryan Coyle, who now, after two years away from the volleyball court, is starting as St. Francis’ middle hitter, voted a team captain.

“I worked hard trying to get back to my goal,” he said. “I think that’s good advice for kids — don’t lose sight of your goal, keep working hard to achieve it.”

He had to rehabilitate a shoulder that would not allow him to raise his left arm — a quarter-sized chip of bone lodged in his back remains as a souvenir — and get his brain back into shape from a vestibular concussion that caused blips in focus and memory two months after the incident.

“He is truly a very blessed kid to have had great doctors and therapists help him make a full recovery,” Kathryn Coyle said.

A matter of time aided by problem-solving in school helped heal his mental state while nearly three months of rehab prepared the shoulder. In late October, two weeks before basketball practice started, Coyle was cleared to resume physical activity.

“Right when I was first cleared I spent hours and hours and hours to try to get in as many (weight) lifts as I could, try to put up as many shots as I could,” he said. “It definitely was a seven-day-a-week thing to try to get back to as close to what I was before the injury.”

A season to remember

Out of the gate he averaged 20 points, 8 rebounds and 2.5 steals to became the first two-time MVP at Batavia’s Ken Peddy Windmill Classic. Coyle was on his way to being named player of the year in the Suburban Christian Conference Blue Division, and on a third-quarter 3-pointer against Marshall in the Class 3A Glenbard South sectional final, he took St. Francis’ all-time points title from Ronnie Kammes. Coyle finished with 1,193 points in his four years on the varsity.

“Maybe I started to get there physically, but mentally I wasn’t 100 percent into basketball yet,” Coyle said of those three games at Batavia. “But after playing those games, winning those games and having nothing happen to me, it definitely helped the way I looked at it and helped me get back to normal and not even worry about it, get back to just playing basketball.”

Physically, Ward felt Coyle was “a work in progress” until the Spartans’ playoff run, which included games of 23 points and 15 rebounds against Wheaton Academy and 26 points and 11 rebounds against Crane.

Regarding every other attribute of a senior leader — complete attendance at team activities and events, buying into what the first-year St. Francis coach demanded, serving as a role model on the court — Coyle was 100 percent present.

“He’s as good as any player I’ve ever coached,” Ward said. “But he’s also the best teammate I’ve ever coached.”

St. Francis won the SCC Blue sportsmanship award (“unanimously,” Ward noted) and Coyle was a big reason why, diffusing emotional situations Ward said could have devolved into “flash-point responses.”

Coyle knows first hand about those — or at least he’s been told. Buoyed by his miraculous recovery, since that hard foul his anger receded after the player who committed it and his coach called his mother.

“He just felt terrible and apologized, and once I found that out it definitely changed the way I looked at it. I looked at it more as an accident,” he said.

A preventable one.

“There’s no reason for a hard foul because something like this could happen,” Coyle said. “Ever since it happened, I’m not a big fan of it.”