Walk before you run: Adam Ploudre's long road back
Adam Ploudre lay on the ground with his left leg dangling in the air.
A few seconds earlier it had been at a 90-degree angle.
The date was July 29, 2011, the last day of preseason camp for Marquette High School in St. Louis.
Head coach Ryan Thornhill had the whistle in his mouth to blow dead the last play of the session when the ball was fumbled and fell between Ploudre’s legs.
The 6-foot-4 defensive lineman got caught in the pile and came out screaming in pain. He would spend the next five days in the intensive care unit of Mercy Hospital.
The recovery process took 49 weeks, with seven corrective surgeries where doctors inserted a titanium rod into his leg, only to be taken out, and a dream all but gone. It would take years, but that dream would resurface and be carried out.
Despite seeing scholarship offers disappear after the injury, Ploudre has gone from a player some doctors thought might not walk again to a starter on Missouri’s offensive line.
Ploudre had shown the ability to play college football from a very young age. His two older brothers, Anthony and Andrew, both played college ball, at Southeast Missouri State.
His father said his youngest boy showed the ability as a middle schooler despite having no interest in the sport until the sixth grade, “when the lightbulb went off.”
Ploudre’s father, Tony, who coached all of his sons in middle school served as the defensive coordinator for his Adam’s team. He regularly fought with the team’s other coach about his son, but it wasn’t about a lack of playing time. Instead it was about where to play him.
“I would have fights with my offensive coordinator about he wanted Adam, and I said, ‘No, I want Adam.’ Then it got to a point where we just played him both ways because he was so good,” Tony Ploudre said.
When Ploudre got to Marquette he starred as a freshman on the Mustangs junior varsity team that only lost two games by a combined three points. The next year, playing as a defensive end on a team that had 25 seniors, he was one of only two sophomores that started on a team that won its conference for the first time in school history.
That’s when schools like Indiana, Missouri and Illinois all started calling.
Ploudre had the rare combination of size and speed that coaches craved. Despite only being a year into lifting weights, had an impressive frame for his age.
“When he was a sophomore, the kid lived in the weight room,” Thornhill, now the coach at Eureka, said. “He was probably (power) cleaning about 360 (pounds) as a sophomore.”
In high school football, a player’s junior year is a major year for college recruiting and Ploudre knew it. He went into the summer before the season with the mindset that if he played his cards right, he could be a hot commodity for schools, and college could come at a discount.
“I was a making a name for myself before my junior year,” he said. “The only thing that went through my mind for my junior year was play this whole season and see what happens because I knew at that point I was going to play football in college. It was only a matter of who has the best offer.”
Ploudre’s life changed on that late July morning.
After the fumble, Ploudre tried to get up, only to fall “like a tree” seconds later.
The injury was so gruesome, the Marquette quarterback who fumbled the snap decided not to go out for the team after the play. It would end up being the last down of football he ever played.
“It was the worst looking injury I’ve ever seen,” Thornhill said.
Ploudre went to the hospital and diagnosed with a complete fracture of the tibia and fibula. He had to be given two doses of morphine to stop the pain because one dose wasn’t having any effect on his 6-foot-3, 275-pound frame.
He went into surgery later that evening and had a titanium rod that was almost a foot in length inserted into his leg. Because of his massive size, Ploudre had to have a fasciotomy the following day because the swelling was so bad. That entailed a 12-inch incision on one side of his leg, and a 9-inch incision on the other side. Ploudre had his third surgery a few weeks later.
His father thought his playing days were over.
“It was one of those deals where your kid has a dream and the back of my mind I’m thinking ‘He’s done,’” Tony Ploudre said. “And he doesn’t know he’s done, but I’m not going to tell him he’s done.”
As the school year started and he had to watch the high school football season from the sidelines, with friends and family encouraging him, Ploudre’s mind began to shift toward his senior season.
But his doctors didn’t share in his optimism.
“(The doctors) were more thinking of if I could walk again,” he said. “Because a lot of times with these injuries, bones don’t grow back the same way. My foot might be slightly to the right, might be slightly to the left. I think that’s what happened to my leg. My foot isn’t exactly the straightest. The doctors really didn’t think of me going out for sports again.”
Ploudre recalled a trip to the doctor for a checkup where his mother was getting aggravated. She kept telling the doctor that they wanted to be cleared in time for his senior season of football.
The doctor stared at them dumbfounded.
“It was hard seeing that,” Ploudre said. “A medical professional looking at you like you’re crazy trying to play a sport again.”
A month after his third surgery, Ploudre’s leg still wasn’t properly healing. His leg felt hot every time he touched it and despite his parents’ complaints, the doctor insisted that was a side effect of the bone growing back. Ploudre’s fibula, the smaller of the two bones, had healed fine. His tibia was the problem.
On Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2011, the day before Thanksgiving, Ploudre went under the knife for a fourth time to have an inch of his fibula removed to allow the tibia to heal. The idea was if the doctor re-broke the bone, it would put pressure on the tibia to get it to heal.
Ploudre still felt discomfort in his leg going into Christmas and got a bad case of the chills one night while watching a movie with his parents.
After switching doctors, they discovered the first titanium rod inserted into Ploudre’s leg was a little too long and a little thin for the bone so the rod moved around and dug into his ankle.
The heat Ploudre felt coming from his leg wasn’t the bone growing back. It was an infection. At the risk of losing his leg to amputation, Ploudre had his fifth surgery on Jan. 30, 2012 to remove the infected rod.
A few weeks later he had four HALO braces on his leg. The braces had 16 pins that looked like bicycle spokes running through each side of his bone with leg screws to hold everything in place.
Every day for eight weeks, at 4:30 p.m., Ploudre had to turn his leg with a clicker on the brace to straighten his leg. His new doctor told him to do that every day at the same time until he couldn’t do it any more. At the same time, he had to treat himself with antibiotics to fight the infection that the original rod had caused.
“Every day when he came home we had these bolts of antibiotic,” his father said. “They’re like the size of a tennis ball and you’d get them out of the refrigerator and you’d let them sit for 30 minutes for them to get to room temperature. He would have an infusion of these into the PICC line. He’d do this all himself.”
The process worked. Ploudre went in for his seventh and final surgery in April of 2012.
On July 5, 2012 only a few weeks before the one year anniversary of the original injury, he was cleared to go out for football.
He had lost a lot as a player. His speed was gone. While he lifted a bit, his frame wasn’t what it was. Thornhill recalls Ploudre lifting so much the first day he was cleared that he could barely walk by the time he was done.
“I didn’t understand the concept of easing into something so I would go full throttle and after workouts I would literally push myself as far as I could and it would be really hard to walk back to my car,” Ploudre said.
The schools who were recruiting him had stopped calling after the injury.
Between his injury and missing his entire junior season, Ploudre had fallen off the radar with all the schools. He once thought he’d have his pick of colleges. He now had no options.
“I was just another name on the sheet,” he said.
But in some ways, they did him a favor.
Ploudre switched to offensive line as a senior because of how much speed he lost from the injury and entered his senior season looking to redeem himself from all the time he missed.
He woke up at 5:30 a.m. during the season to go to school and lift before classes started just to get back into shape and pick up where he left off.
“The most frustrating part was I was one of those guys that was good enough to go to the next level but since this thing happened to me it’s like, ‘Oh we’ll never remember him anymore,’” he said. “I was that guy that could’ve been. And I didn’t want to be that guy.”
Despite being only around 80 percent of what he played like before the injury, Ploudre still managed to have a strong senior season. He was named first-team all-conference.
Now he had to find someone to take a chance on him.
He took an official visit to SEMO during his senior season, but decided to turn the Redhawks down even after they offered him a full scholarship. Tony Ploudre said the staff wanted to him to send Adam’s entire medical records for the visit and had the team doctor look at him while he was on campus.
Then there was Missouri.
While other schools cut off all contact with Ploudre after he broke his leg, Missouri running backs coach Cornell Ford, who is the program’s primary recruiter for St. Louis, never fully closed the door.
Ford said he’d leave a preferred walk-on spot for Ploudre and he accepted. He decided if he wanted any chance at playing in college he’d have to act like a scholarship player even if he wasn’t one. So a few days after graduating high school, Ploudre packed up the car and made the two-hour drive west to take part in summer workouts.
“The good thing about Mizzou I think is deep down they knew what kind of football player I was,” he said. “I think they were a little timid because of my broken leg they just wanted to see how everything panned out. They didn’t leave me out of anything. That was a big thing I was concerned about. I didn’t want to be another guy on the roster.”
During a family dinner in November 2014 at Red Lobster in Columbia, Ploudre could tell something was up.
His parents, older brother and sister had driven in for the weekend and announced they were going to get dinner. They wouldn’t say why.
Throughout the meal, Ploudre sensed something was wrong and a few minutes later his suspicions were confirmed; his mother told him she had stage IV colon cancer.
“I was like, ‘When will I have a break?” he said. “I just remember that night specifically was just terrible.”
At the time Ploudre was a redshirt freshman who had yet to see the field in a Missouri uniform. He had thought he had been proving himself in practice but he understood that college football is a business.
Coaches are paid millions of dollars to win and a lot of that is determined by the players they recruit. He felt he wasn’t necessarily behind some kids because they were better than he was, but because more resources had been put into getting them on campus than himself.
With his mother’s diagnosis, Ploudre began to wonder if football was the the really the thing he should be worried about.
“It was more of a battle since I wasn’t on scholarship; should I go home and help my mom or should I keep doing this?” he said.
Both of Ploudre’s parents told him that it was time for him to focus on his own life and not to worry about them. He motivated himself even more to get put on scholarship in order to help his family out financially.
And it paid off.
After head coach Gary Pinkel stepped down at the end of the previous season and was replaced by Barry Odom, Ploudre started to see a change. While Pinkel was known as a guy that stuck with veteran players, everyone on the roster got a new slate when Odom took over.
Coupled with the departures of multiple offensive linemen from the team, Ploudre spent the majority of spring football playing with the first and second teams in practice after being buried on the depth chart for years.
“He was taking reps with an opportunity to get better,” fellow offensive lineman Kevin Pendleton said. “He had the best attitude about it. He’s a guy to learn from. When things get down you just don’t quit. You work harder.”
At the end of April, Ploudre met with Odom to recap spring practices and see how he looked going into this season.
Throughout the meeting, Odom told repeatedly how much respect he has for him and left Ploudre with a message.
“I’m going to try finding money for you,” the new coach told him.
Ploudre awoke in his basement in August with a missed call from Odom. A call from the head coach isn’t always a good thing.
This time it was.
Odom had delivered. Ploudre was on scholarship.
He ran upstairs to his mother, Kim, who was on a conference call for work. She had been declared clear of colon cancer in January, but had tumors turn up in her lungs a few weeks earlier during a checkup. While Ploudre was trying to deliver the news she keep silencing him until he couldn’t hold it any longer.
“She went nuts,” Ploudre said.
Tony Ploudre, who works as a salesman for floor companies raced home when he got the call.
“I feel like my family, it's just kind of a light in a dark area,” he said. “It lightened everyone up. I’m glad I did that because I feel like I haven’t had good news in three years.”
Ploudre has played in all seven of Missouri’s games this season and had his first career start at right guard against Delaware State.
While his mother is still going through chemotherapy treatments and has a positive prognosis, she was able to be in the stands to see her son start.
Ploudre started again on Saturday against Middle Tennessee and said he still isn’t satisfied despite two starts this season. He wants the move to be permanent.
“You see him up here a lot watching video, trying to prepare the right way," Odom said. "He’s embraced the opportunity to go have a chance to go compete at that spot and play well. I’m proud of him.”
And despite all of the challenge's he’s faced, Ploudre has come to the conclusion that he wouldn’t change any of it. He even says he might not be in the position he is without the obstacles life has thrown at him.
“There were a lot of moments where I was the stereotypical ‘why me’ guy,” he said. “How can all this stuff happen to me? And the more I think about it, everyone has their story. Everyone has their own path.”