Wichita State softball’s Lauren Lucas spent her entire 2023 season playing with a nagging pain in her right shoulder. Amazingly, she was a third-team All-American anyway, putting up a .384 batting average and driving in 62 runs on 68 hits.
After the season ended, the then-junior outfielder consulted with doctors, who couldn’t find anything glaringly wrong. Lucas said they told her “that if you’re not comfortable having surgery, then you can give yourself the summer off and see if any of the pain … regresses.”
So that’s what she did.
But when she arrived for practices that next fall, Lucas worked with a physical trainer, going through throwing progressions, noting she felt the same pain the whole time.
“And so … finally,” Lucas said. “Coach B (head coach Kristi Bredbenner) was like, ‘Hey I need you to try to throw and if you can’t throw, we need to get this fixed.’”
No matter how hard she tried, Lucas’ pain would not reside, resulting in her getting her shoulder scoped, revealing a torn right labrum. She eventually had surgery, which she described as having three anchors put into her shoulder to “reupholster the anatomy.”
Subsequently, Lucas missed the entire 2024 campaign, which would have been her senior year. She spent the next eight months rehabilitating her throwing shoulder with hopes of putting on a Shocker uniform again. Now a graduate student, Lucas is “grateful for the opportunity to play a fifth year.”
“And I’m excited to get after it for the last time with these girls and especially (with) the senior class that we have,” Lucas said.
Rehab, rehab and more rehab
For the first month of her rehab process, Lucas said she was “pretty much immobilized.” Doctors had her in a sling to make sure that the anchors they’d inserted were fully set.
While feeling like there was nothing she could do in that timeframe, WSU’s Assistant Director of Sports Performance Audry Horn explained to Lucas “Yes, you can. There’s stuff that I can have you do so that you don’t lose the strength in your legs while you’re out for the next couple of months.”
Once out of the sling, Lucas gradually progressed from the “immobilized” state to gaining an “average Joe” range of motion. At first, she went through resistance band training, even training with no resistance bands.
“Honestly, our trainer at the time would just … move my arm around herself … especially at the very beginning,” Lucas said. “… It was really odd to have my left arm be stronger than my right arm for probably about six weeks. I was, like, ‘This is awkward.’”
But as the months went on, the weights went up.
“Right around month four (of rehab) was when we started really pushing,” Lucas said. “Right around month four is when they (health professionals) say that, ‘Okay, well, your anchors are not going anywhere. So, you know, really push the weight, really push the rehab. Feel free to kind of let go with your throwing. Like, you know, go a little harder.’”
A couple of months later, Lucas was cleared to participate in practices. Over the summer, Lucas said she even geared up for games in a league.
Role reversal
While Lucas was rehabilitating her season-ending injury, she initially felt there wasn’t much she could do to help the team.
She ended up approaching and working with associate head coach and hitting coach Elizabeth Economon, honing her coaching skills, something she said she wanted to do after graduating.
“(I) helped coach E (Economon) in any way that I could,” Lucas said. “Anything that she asked me to do, I was trying to … be her assistant, really, and just … make her life easier, so that she could make the hitters’ lives easier and … just be of use wherever I could be.”
With the trials and tribulations of missing what would have been her senior season, Lucas took the approach that it would be “a graduate assistant year.”
“Like, I’ll learn as much as I can, I’ll help as much as I can, and I’ll just be as active as I can in … the season without actually playing it,” Lucas said.
Bredbenner said Lucas’ time spent in the dugout soaking in knowledge has given her a different lens to view the game coming back as a player.
“I definitely think she’s got a little bit more of a coaching mind,” Bredbenner said. “And an understanding of how to make adjustments and a desire to have a really great year.”
All-American return
Now cleared to play in her fifth season, Bredbenner said Lucas’ return is huge.
“Last year, you’re going into the season a little bit and you’re thinking about how exciting it can be,” Bredbenner said. “You’ve got CC Wong added and (Addison) Barnard and Lauren Lucas coming back who had 70 RBIs as a junior. And … to not have the type of manufacturing (from Lucas) from an RBI perspective, was tough. I mean to me, … that probably wins us six, maybe eight ball games last year.”
Despite Bredbenner’s projection about how the 2024 season would have gone if Lucas had not missed the season, she is glad Lucas sat out.
“We have her this year, and she’s 100% healthy,” Bredbenner said. “And, you know, could she have sucked it up and played last year at maybe like a 75%, maybe a 60%, maybe by the end of the season at a 50% and not have (had) the best year? Yeah, but you know, we want her to have a great year.”
While injured, Lucas said she nearly lost her love for the sport she’d grown up playing. Now that she’s back, she has a better understanding of what the sport means to her.
“Playing injured, you know, gave me a new appreciation for and a new gratitude for the position that I’m in now,” Lucas said. “I’m healthy, I’m happy and I’m loving the sport more than I ever have because I know what it looks like without it, and I know what it looks like when I’m in pain.”
In her final season wearing WSU’s black and yellow, Lucas said there are no statistical categories that gauge whether her season will be successful but the memories she’ll make along the way.
“I just want to have fun,” Lucas said. “I want to enjoy my time, and I want to go out on a good note with the team and have a lot of team success.”
