Less than 24 hours after being elbowed in the back of the head and neck, Caroline Doty was in the starting lineup for the Huskies tonight. Coach Geno Auriemma and her teammates didn’t expect anything less from a player known for her toughness.
Doty finished with one point (0-of-3 FG), two rebounds and one assist in 16 minutes. She also dove for a loose ball in the first half.
Doty was clearly not at 100 percent, though. She played just four minutes in the second half.
“She didn’t look right,’’ Auriemma said. “(Assistant coach) Shea (Ralph) noticed it right away. After she went up and down a couple times Shea made a comment. You can usually tell. You ask Caroline a question and she snaps at you, and this one was … `You alright?’ `Yeah.’ Like, `yeah, right. Get her out.’ And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with her. She’s probably just tired and sore and all that. There came a point in time I said, `It’s no more. We’ve got bigger games than this one coning up. Let’s just give her a breather.’’
Rich
You really need to write a follow-up article about how Doty was treated medically. Of course she “wasn’t right”, she’d sustained a concussion.
I do hope you go back and examine why she wasn’t taken to the hospital, how she could possibly be diagnosed as not having suffered a concussion after lying prone on the court for several minutes, and whether the medical staff overruled experts on brain injuries to get her back out on the court for the championship game.
Something’s wrong here.
Comment by Sean — March 10th, 2010 @ 10:11 am
Sean-
Caroline wasn’t motionless because she couldn’t move. The trainers told her to not move just in case there was an injury, because that would just aggravate it. Your comment makes it sound as though she was unconscious, when she clearly was not, and even when lying on the court, her arms and legs were moving. The medical staff is qualified to look for these kinds of injuries, and I wouldn’t believe Geno would sacrifice Caroline’s health for this game if you paid me. If she wasn’t okay to play, she wouldn’t have been cleared to play.
Comment by Rachel — March 10th, 2010 @ 1:26 pm
But she wasn’t OK, and Geno took her out of the game last night, because he and his assistant realized that she wasn’t “all there”. Something was definitely wrong. And even though she could move her arms and legs, that only means that she wasn’t paralyzed, not that she didn’t suffer a concussion. And one doesn’t need to lose consciousness to suffer a concussion.
Far too many athletes on every level are put back into games, or have their brain injuries downplayed. Indeed, one out of every five scholastic football players suffers at least one concussion. And just look how the New York Mets badly botched the treatment of one of their players, Ryan Church, who suffered two concussions and had to sit out weeks of the season.
Doty should have been taken to the hospital and examined. And our press corps should press UConn on their procedures for dealing with players who’ve suffered head trauma and tell us if they are up to state of the art standards.
Comment by Sean — March 10th, 2010 @ 3:36 pm