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FEEL GOOD FRIDAY: Player attitudes ‘kept me going’
Coach/player crucial bond for Jones in recovery
Sam Jones had a lot of great medical assistance last fall in recovering from a serious auto accident that forced him to miss several weeks of teaching at Cloverdale Middle School and a majority of the season for the Clover varsity volleyball team he coached.
There were first responders immediately after the wreck, doctors and nurses at two different hospitals plus numerous physical therapists afterward to help him regain his mobility.
Yet, he credits some other people with perhaps being the most important to his recovery. None of them can perform the medical tasks of the others, but they sure can bump, set and spike.
“It was those nights that they got to play and I got to watch them [online] that were my brightest days,” Jones recalls. “The days where I had to push through going to [physical therapy] when I could hardly lift my leg off the table. My nurses were always asking when ‘my girls’ were playing next. They wanted to know how they were doing, as well. That kept me going.”
Many players came to Indianapolis to the hospital on the night of the wreck.
“I couldn’t believe they did that,” he said. “There is an inside joke we have with Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce, and they bought me the biggest bottle they could find. It’s still sitting at my house.”
Jones was at St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis for almost two weeks, and was then transferred to the IU Health Center in Bloomington.
The Clover players made the much shorter trip to Bloomington to visit, and Jones was able to see his first game in person from his wheelchair when they went to play at Edgewood.
“It was one of those things where I wasn’t emotional about it until afterward when I got home,” he said. “After all the time we spent together and – just like my co-workers – you have that ripped away from you. You’re staring at the same four white walls for weeks. Just the opportunity to go and see their smiles and see them having fun.
“The game days were the ones I was living for,” Jones added. “Their attitudes were amazing. They could have just played the victim, given up on the year and said they would try it again next year. That was never the attitude, and that inspired me.”
From there, Jones was able to make it to senior night and to the sectional. The Clovers finished second to Western Boone in the sectional, but no one considered the season a failure.
The path
Jones’s father (Bob) is going into his 34th year as head baseball coach at Edgewood High School.
“Edgewood baseball, and baseball as a sport, were the only consistency through my life,” Jones said. “Through life, death, my parents’ divorce and several other things, being on the sports field was always a big thing – but baseball always has a special place in my heart.”
Jones played football through his freshman year, and in his sophomore year he became introduced to volleyball. Mustang head coach Jeff Carmichael was looking for a manager to keep statistics, a task far more complex than that for any other high school sport.
“A bunch of my friends played volleyball, and I had already been a manager for basketball so I thought I’d do that,” Jones said. “Volleyball kind of fit in there.”
After graduation, Jones went on to attend Indiana State where he worked in the athletic office as a student secretary. He became friends with some volleyball players through his fraternity as well as then-coach Traci Dahl.
Jones had a “poor experience” as a manager with the Sycamore baseball team, and when coach Dahl called him the next summer to travel with the team as a manager – and she was looking for a male.
“They only had a male athletic trainer, and needed someone else either to help carry stuff around or to keep stats during the games,” Jones recalls. “They were going to a tournament in Long Beach (Cal.), and I thought this would be a great chance for me to travel the country.”
Jones jumped at the chance and enjoyed the experience, placing an ironic twist to his volleyball coaching path.
“I started looking at coaching at college level, and have worked my way backwards,” he said.
Jones coached the junior varsity team at Edgewood after college graduation for three or four years, and soon took a social studies teaching job at Cloverdale Middle School. He eventually became the junior varsity coach under Traci Scott last year and enjoyed that experience.
Scott resigned after the season, and Jones was thrilled to be able to take over the position.
“It was one of those things where it was exciting because I had had almost all of my players as students in middle school,” he said. “You establish a relationship and a trust with them as an educator first, and then as a coach.”
The wreck
The Clovers were 6-2 this fall, with their only two losses being to much larger schools in Jasper and Evansville North at the Scottsburg tournament on a very long Saturday.
Two days later, the Clovers made another long school-night trip to Bloomfield to play the eventual sectional-champion Cardinals.
Then came Tuesday, Aug. 28.
“I’ll never forget that I looked at my calendar that day in my classroom and realized I needed to go to Spencer that night for a union meeting at the Chambers Restaurant,” Jones said. “I was really looking forward to the fried chicken. I was so excited to be able to end practice early, go to the meeting and go home and relax.
“We had a big match coming up [on Thursday] against Greencastle.”
Jones ended practice early, threw everything of his in the car (except his wallet, which he left in the coaches’ office) and headed south on U.S. 231 toward the meeting.
“I used to have a really big black water bottle that I carried with me everywhere,” he said. “I remember I had filled it up before I left school, and I got just past the Marathon station on 231 and I decided to take a drink out of it. It was too big to fit in my cup holder. I unscrewed the cap, took a drink and went to put it in my seat and it slipped out of my hand.”
Jones looked down, and out of the corner of his eye he noticed that a car had pulled out in front of him down the road.
“I never slowed down,” he admits. “According to what I was told, I probably hit the SUV in front of me going about 40 miles per hour.”
The weather was not a factor, Jones recalls. The skies were blue and it was predictably hot on a late August day.
“From laying down on the asphalt after the wreck, I’m surprised I didn’t have burns on my arms from how hot it was,” he said.
When Jones tried to brake with his right foot, the impact of the collision forced his femur up into his hip socket and fractured his hip in three different spots. His top hand on the steering wheel was pushed up into the windshield, and kind of “filleted” the skin from his hand – all the way up to his Apple watch.
“I wonder if I wasn’t wearing that watch if it wouldn’t have gone even further,” he said.
The tendons in three of his four fingers, plus his thumb, were lacerated. Jones recalls getting out of the car and not realizing how much further damage there was until he took a couple of steps.
“I knew something was not right with my hip, and grabbed the door of my car,” he said.
Luck was partially on Jones’s side that day. He recalls it was “Taco Night” at the nearby American Legion post, and several people happened to be there who had medical experience. In a matter of a few minutes, these helpers had tied a tourniquet around his arm and were getting him situated for the medical professionals who were en route.
Jones jokes that his first thought was about how he was going to miss out on the fried chicken at the meeting, but in recollection admits he had no idea of the extent of his injuries.
“So many things slowed down at that point, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about ‘how bad is this?’,” he said.
The answer quickly came, when he asked one of the ambulance workers if he could be taken to a Bloomington hospital near his Ellettsville home.
“Oh, no,” Jones recalls the lady saying. “You are going by helicopter to St. Vincent’s [in Indianapolis]. It’s a Level One trauma center, and you are a Level One patient [the highest degree of severity]. That really put things in the perspective.”
The aftermath
A lot of work needed to be done pretty quickly to make arrangement for Jones’s upcoming absences from teaching and coaching. He feels thankful for the many people who eased that process tremendously.
“If it wasn’t for people like [superintendent] Greg Linton, [middle school principal] Dawn Tucker, [high school principal] Sonny Stoltz and [high school athletic director] James Wade, and my substitute teacher [Kathy Salter], it would have been incredibly difficult,” Jones said. “All of those people are top-tier in what they do. I can remember being told not to worry about school stuff, because they knew where I had left off and my students had filled in Kathy on where we were.
“She’s had a lot of experience with long-term subbing, and she just ran with it. They all acted with my best interests first, and that meant a lot.”
Also on that list was Jim Spencer, a retired educator and long-time coach of many different sports (including volleyball) who is currently Cloverdale’s softball coach.
Assistant coaches ran Wednesday’s volleyball practice, and Spencer agreed late Thursday afternoon to coach the team for the rest of the season. Unlike Jones, who already knew the players when he joined the staff last year, Spencer only knew the few softball players who compete in both sports.
Junior varsity coach Paige Glassburn had gotten married on the day of the Scottsburg tourney (three days before the accident) and suddenly found herself in another life-changing situation with volleyball.
“I told her at our fall sports banquet that’s the worst wedding present you could ever be given, or will you ever receive,” Jones joked. “She was definitely a big part of keeping the morale up with the girls, and bridging the gap between what I did and what Jim was going to do.”
The season
Cloverdale went on to record an emotional victory over Greencastle, while Jones was in a hospital bed.
Twenty years ago, he would have had to learn about the results of the match on the telephone afterward. Thanks to technology, though, Patrick Rady (Cloverdale teacher/coach and father of Clover senior Hannah Rady) broadcast the game on Facebook Live so Jones could watch.
“There was a lot of pride in watching that match in the hospital while I was in traction with a rod through my legs,” he said. “It looked like the girls trusted Jim 100 percent, and were all unified with him on a common goal and continue what we had started.”
As far as the coaching went, Jones didn’t have a lot of say in what happened (“and I didn’t want to,” he added) since the team was Spencer’s now.
Jones is obviously glad he has made a full recovery, and that he is back with his students. Volleyball will resume this summer.
Still, the even more obvious wish is that the whole thing had never happened.
“I told my girls at the end of the year that I hated it for our three seniors [Rady, Tori Combs and Kayla Perdue] since they were in my first class together in middle school that I couldn’t coach them for their whole senior year,” he said. “It killed me inside that I couldn’t be there to help them.”
Jones credits his seniors for helping to keep everything together.
“They would have had every reason to quit [mentally] on the season, and I wouldn’t have blamed them,” Jones added. “I was their third coach in four years, and Jim was their fourth. But that’s not them. They were the energy that drove that bus to continue to have that success.
“I told them the hardest part, with the changing of coaches, was over. The game would be the easy part.”
A few positives moving forward
Finding very many positives from this experience would be difficult, but Jones admits there are some.
He lost a lot of weight during his rehabilitation, and also discovered a previously-undiagnosed medical condition.
“They found out I was a Type II diabetic,” he said. “I didn’t know that, and I didn’t know what the highs and lows of diabetes were. I was on long-acting and short-acting insulin, and finally they put me on Metformin. They made a lot of changes to my diet also.”
Jones was drinking multiple soft drinks throughout the day to help him through the long days of teaching middle school kids – “who I truly love,” he said – and then going to coach high school volleyball.
“I made some health changes and dropped somewhere between 40 and 60 pounds,” he said. “I don’t know exactly how many, but I was definitely in a really bad state health-wise before the wreck. Now, I’m hoping I can keep that weight off as I am finishing up the healing process.”
Jones can remember his mother telling him some chilling news in the hospital after the diagnosis.
“She said they may just have saved me from having a heart attack at age 35,” he said. “It was easier for me to cut out the sugary beverages, because I couldn’t do that in the hospital. That part was a big positive.”
As for the water bottle, which was the innocent cause of the wreck?
“I went online and ordered a Yeti tumbler that fit into my new car’s cup holder,” he said. “It has a straw and not a lid, so I don’t have to worry using two hands while driving.
“But I know it wasn’t the water bottle’s fault.”
