2008 Woodie Awards
Here's Johnny
LB Haneline fully recovered from foot injury
By: Chris Voloschuk
Issue date: 8/27/08 Section: Sports
|
"I felt a pop and a pain I'd never felt before," Haneline said.
The pop he felt had come from his foot during the ninth game of last season against Akron at Doyt Perry Stadium. It was a Friday game under the lights, and the Falcons were in control of the game. They would go on to win, 44-20.
Haneline, a junior outside linebacker known for being all over the field making tackles, tried his best to shake off the pain and get out of the locker room and back to the field.
His attempt to continue playing didn't fare so well.
"I wanted to come back out," Haneline said. "The [trainers] told me I had to show them I could put weight on it and so I put weight on it and collapsed. I had to go to the hospital and everything else from there."
The "everything else" he mentioned was the long repair and rehabilitation that followed his injury. Needless to say, it came at an inopportune time.
Until the Akron game, Haneline had established himself as a leader on the defensive side of the ball and a guy who would travel to any part of the field to make a stop. The stats also didn't lie, he had 96 tackles, one sack, one interception and a forced fumble over the eight games he played in. He led the entire team in tackles up to the pop in his foot.
Haneline had a firm enough hold on the team tackles lead that it took fellow linebacker Erique Dozier two full games to overtake him. Even though he missed the final four games of the season, he still managed to finish seventh in the Mid-American Conference in tackles.
"Any time you lose a top tackler it's going to be tough on you as a unit and as a team," said linebackers coach Deion Melvin. "But you hope to mold the people around you, the younger guys, for when someone gets hurt they can step up and fill that role, although that's big shoes to fill. You hope you have somebody that can do as well as John did at that point in time last year."
While the coaches would look for answers with the remaining linebackers on the roster, Haneline began his long recovery. At first, he tried to wait and see if the injury would heal on its own. When it didn't, he had to undergo a surgery that took place two weeks before the Toledo game.
Be the first to comment on this story