University of North Carolina Athletics
Head Trainer Dan Hooker On Ronald Curry's Rehab
August 16, 2000 | General
Aug. 16, 2000
y: Joe Bray
TarHeelBlue.com
TarHeelBlue: Would you take me through Ronald Curry's rehabilitation process, from the day he ruptured his Achilles tendon through today?
Dan Hooker: "Ronald got hurt down at Georgia Tech, and Scott Oliaro and myself were the first two onto the field to evaluate him. We were a little worried that he had hurt his knee when we first went out there, because he was holding his knee, but he said it was his ankle.
"As we evaluated him, we said let's just get him off the field without putting any weight on it. As we began to evaluate him, we realized he didn't really have an Achilles tendon that was in the right place.
"We got him on crutches and put him in a splint so we could protect him, then brought him back to Chapel Hill.
"Once we got back to Chapel Hill and Dr. (Tim) Taft operated on him, the first couple of days after the surgery it was a matter of getting him up and getting him moving on crutches.
"The question then was when can we bear weigh, when can we get him out of his splint and start to make his ankle work. Dr. Taft chose to go with a pretty strict immobilization plan at the very start, so that meant we could work on his other body parts, but not do much with his ankle and his Achilles.
"After about three weeks, we started to give a range of motion to his ankle, but very low key and gentle things. The big danger with Achilles tendon types of repair is that you will re-rupture and tear down whatever the surgeon did, and that's bad. (Laughing) The surgeons don't like you then, so you have to have a very patient approach to things, but you have to go at it progressively so that you do make some gains in their range, but you want it to be within a safe range.
"We got him in the pool to do some workouts. The pool's a good place to start some gentle kinds of things, because you can do resistance against the water, the water buoys your body, so your body doesn't weight much.
"Our first goal was to try to get him back to the point where we reestablished his range, got him full weight-bearing, and then increased his range to what is normal for athletics. We also started strengthening the calf and the knee."
TarHeelBlue: What kind of things did you do to strengthen him?
Dan Hooker: "Besides the pool, he did calf-raises with both feet equal weight, or a little less weight on the injured side. He did some tubing resistance, where he pulled against a tube and worked his ankle in different directions. Then he did some body weight types of things, such as squatting.
"Then we worked on normal walking, trying to get him back to a normal gait, because everybody gets into a kind of fear-driven walk, then they can't figure out what normal is.
"We then got to where we did some body weight, plus some additional weight on the calf raises. Then we started him on some beginning running."
TarHeelBlue: At what point in time did he start running?
Dan Hooker: "At about six months, back in March. To start, we told him we want to see you jog, and we want to see you jog normally. The same thing is true with jogging as with walking, you start to get protective.
"Then we wanted to move him from just a jog back to a plyometric, which is a forceful jumping, landing type of thing. That was probably the hardest thing for Ronald to go to, because he didn't want to land on that foot. He was fine with the tip-toes and all that, but we'd say get up on this step, jump, and land on your foot, and that seemed pretty foreign to him, so we had to progress him back into that.
"Then we did a variety of balancing and agility exercises. We got him doing some single-leg squats, we got him doing some single-leg hopping, hopping up a step and down a step. He'd jump on both legs, then the good one, then the bad one, trying to shake it up and keep things fresh. He also did some jump rope.
"You try to challenge him a little bit about what he's doing, because people get into protective behaviors, and they're not even aware they're doing that. I would watch and notice that he had that behavior, so at one point I went over and said 'We can't have you doing this the rest of your life. If you're going to come back out with us, you're going to have to change this behavior.', and that's a hard thing to do. It's like you've swung a golf club one way all your life, and suddenly someone says that's not a good swing, and you try to change and it feels awful.
"Even though we were trying to get him to do something he had done in the past that's normal, he was not liking the fact that he was putting himself at more risk, so he had to make conscious adjustments and figure out how to do it. We have all kinds of tricks in our bag to help, and we'll say try this, try that, but you've got to find something that makes sense to the individual and will make that individual change.
"Scott Oliaro did a great job of the day-to-day operation of that, because he and Ronald developed a great friendship over the time period of his rehab. I give most of the credit to Scott in this area, because he was the one who had to get Ronald to come in, Ronald had to do what Scott wanted, and Scott had to make it fresh enough that he could have a good thing to work on that day in the things he was having trouble with. They responded well to each other. Scott had a huge impact in helping Ronald reassume the risk of athletics.
"In April and May we started moving more to the high performance things, where we tried to do some running and cutting, and make sure he was ready to go back to the Strength & Conditioning Program in a more full-time way. We had him on a schedule where we would stress it, then we would monitor it, and if he had any symptoms which would alarm us, we'd back off for a certain number of days.
"Then we would stress him again, and get him to where he was doing more and more high-level things, and pretty soon he was back doing everything on that foot that he was doing on the other one.
"We decided that we would let him play a little basketball the first summer session, because it's a running, jumping, landing kind of thing. We didn't want him to play every day, but we wanted him to play once or twice a week for 40 or 45 minutes to start with, then gradually increase it.
"One of the first times he went to the Smith Center this summer, they matched him up with Vince Carter, and he did OK, so that was one of those 'ahah' moments for him. He thought, 'I was matched up against Vince and he didn't blow me out, so I guess I've recovered to a certain extent.' That was good.
"With the second session, he's been doing more football types of things.
"This has been quite an experience for Ronald, Scott and myself. It's a real science to rehabilitate someone from such a severe injury. I'm really impressed with the knowledge of our staff here. We've hired some smart people who know what they're doing.
"We had to coordinate between basketball and football because Ronald in the winter was going to basketball practice and hanging around the basketball team. We didn't want to compromise his time, where he had to do all his rehab at the Football Center, so we worked out a plan with Marc Davis (head basketball trainer) where he did some of it, we did some of it, and it was my job to coordinate it and make sure everyone knew the direction in which we were going.
"I had two great people doing the day-to-day work for me. Scott did more, but Marc's contribution was tremendous. Marc's been here since 1975, and he is a very, very knowledgeable guy.
"We have two academic programs here in the area of exercise science, and that has helped to keep us all up-to-date and fresh with our knowledge. We've also got some very bright graduate students who help to keep us on our toes."
TarHeelBlue: It sounds like Scott's your right hand.
Dan Hooker: "He is my right hand. He's a great asset. I have a great deal of responsibilities that take me away from the day-to-day, put your hand on somebody things, and you can't run a team without having a consistent person to be there that know's everything that's going on. Scott is that person.
"Also, Rob Schneider is a very big help to us. Rob came to us from Boston University. He's here for an Advanced Masters in Physical Therapy. He's worked with football, wrestling and field hockey. He's a very knowledgeable trainer with a lot of practical experience."
TarHeelBlue: How fully has Ronald recovered?
Dan Hooker: "When athletes come in as freshmen, we do an awful lot of testing on them. We want to find out what their 'normal' is, so we get a snapshot of them as a freshman. What can they do when they run certain drills, what can they do when they jump, what can they do when they are in a balance-testing situation.
"We do some neural cognitive testing to make sure we have an idea about how their body and their brain function so that if there is a problem, we've got something to measure them against. We can say, this is how you were back in August of 1998.
"We've had those figures on Ronald, from the standpoint of how does he run this drill, how does he run that drill. When we decided to let him go back to some basketball, one of the criteria was how does he do when you put him through performance things. Can he jump the same, can he run similar times.
"He surprised us. He was back to 95 to 100% somewhere in May. That's really pretty good. There's still some fine tuning to do, but when we ran those tests on him again in the summer, he's doing better than he was as a freshman. That's pretty scary when you have an athlete of Ronald's ability. His performance figures exceed what they did in 1998. We were extremely pleased with that.
"When you think of the things that give you the psychological rewards from your profession, that's one of those things. He had a bad injury, and we were able to guide him through the process and get him back to a point where he was doing everything that he had done as a freshman, and was doing some things better.
"When you reach the point where you have rehabbed somebody to that degree, you say to yourself, this is proof that I know what I'm doing.
"We don't get to score the touchdowns, and we don't get to throw the ball 75 yards, but we try to get the athletes back to the point where they're able to do those things.
"Those were great rewards for Scott and myself when Ronald reached those landmarks."
