Summer workouts and 7-on-7 football tournaments seldom draw much fanfare.
Saturday afternoon when Shady Spring took the field at the Richwood 7-on-7 tournament there was no band playing and no roaring crowd.
However, for Tiger quarterback Brady Green, there was plenty to cheer about.
When Green stepped on the grass it was his first organized competition since a knee injury sidelined him early in the season opener last year.
“It feels great to be back. It was a long recovery with a lot of hard work, time and patience,” Green said.
Green was a standout in both football and basketball back in middle school at Shady Spring, but attended Independence as a freshman where his dad, Mike Green, was the head basketball coach.
After playing only basketball in Coal City, Green returned to Shady Spring for his sophomore season where he planned to play football and basketball for the Tigers.
It didn’t take long for excitement and anticipation to turn into frustration.
Roughly four minutes into his first Friday night high school action on the gridiron, Green went down and had to be helped from the field.
“I came up to make a hit where they had dumped it off to a running back. I tried to breakdown and chop my feet, but my foot kind of stuck a little bit in the new turf,” Green explained. “I felt a pop and I knew something was wrong right there.”
The damage was severe and Green was forced to the sidelines for the entirety of his sophomore campaign.
“I had a completely torn ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) and partial (tear in the) meniscus. The meniscus was really minor, but they said the ACL was completely torn,” Green said.
The good news for the Shady gunslinger was his surgery went perfectly and the rehabilitation progressed well ahead of schedule.
The negative side of the process, of course, was having to sit and be a spectator for the two sports he loved without being able to participate.
“It was more mentally challenging than physically just knowing at that time you had football and a few months later basketball and I would be missing that opportunity to play. It was just a lot more mentally challenging,” Green said.
Having weathered the mental storm and healed physically, Green’s high school career finally started to see some normality this year.
“Probably about two months ago I started coming to the field throwing a little bit more and running,” Green said. “I was also able to lift weights a lot more. I wear a compression sleeve all the time to help me out, but it feels great and I have had no problems at all.”
Although he felt fine physically, Green admitted, as any athlete would, there were some concerns to deal with when he first made his long awaited return to action.
“Physically I feel fine, but when you first start making those cuts, the three step drops, catches and jumps shots, all of that kind of stuff, you always have that thought in your head that it can pop and something is going to go wrong,” Green said. “I have just had to trust myself and all of the hard work I had put in to get here.”
Shady Spring head coach Vince Culicerto has been pleased with Green’s progress, but he has also been impressed with his overall desire to better his skills.
“He is doing fine. He just needs to get back in there and gets some reps,” Culicerto said. “We knew he would get some quarterback experience last year whenever we could, but the negative for him was that he didn’t play football as a (freshman). Then he gets injured. Now he is back and ready. He has been to everything that we have asked him to be at and he is real excited.”
Having crossed the mental hurdles and still working to get stronger physically, Green now looks to complete the comeback by shaking off some game rust.
“I definitely feel like there is some work I need to do in that area. Over the month of July, I will get myself ready and with the flex days at the end of July, I think I will be ready for our first game,” Green said. “I feel like if we played tomorrow, I would be fine. I still have to build some strength in my right quad, but other than that, I feel great.”