On a Terrapins volleyball team stretched thin by broken bones, sprains and tears, outside hitter Mary Cushman represents both the best and worst of what this trying season has offered.
The talented sophomore leads the team in kills this season with 249, averaging almost three per match. She’s also done so as she’s battled lingering injuries, enduring the aches and pains so many of her teammates have this year.
Like many of the walking wounded on this season’s Terps squad, she’ll enter tonight’s match at North Carolina less than 100 percent. But nearly a year after she first started hurting, Cushman’s memory of that injury still resonates. One day in practice during her freshman year, Cushman dove for a ball and immediately felt something was wrong.
“I felt a burn go through my arm, but I let it go at the time,” Cushman said. “I couldn’t sleep the next few nights, and I waited a week before I told the trainer.”
She proceeded to take a rotator cuff test — and failed. She had torn her labrum in her right shoulder, her doctor told her, and would need shoulder surgery after the season ended last December. But that was just the beginning of her return to normalcy on the court.
“That recovery was a six-month deal,” coach Tim Horsmon said. “She was in a sling and wasn’t allowed to do anything overhead. She got back this summer, after being an all-ACC freshman player.”
“It’s always tough coming back from any injury,” Cushman said. “But for me, it’s frustrating at times, because my shoulder is my weapon, and sometimes, you know, it’s not as strong as it was. Sometimes after balls go up and you attack them, they don’t come out as fast as they used to.”
Cushman probably didn’t expect the lessons she learned about playing through pain in the final stages of her freshman season to be so applicable to her sophomore one. After a number of Terps players suffered injuries of one form or another, she said she at least knew there was a threshold her teammates had to keep in mind as they weighed recuperation against resilience.
“There’s a certain degree to which you should push through pain, but there comes a time when it’s just not beneficial to you as a volleyball player,” she said. “I definitely encourage players to push through things, but there are limits to how far you should go.”
Cushman eventually made it through her own arduous recovery, and came back to summer workouts this year at full strength. She is still struggling with the injury bug, just as many Terps are, and is facing back problems. But for the Terps to compete, they need Cushman to be the vital attacker on the court. And she knows she hasn’t yet crossed that threshold.
“She’s overcompensating right now, and is having problems with her back,” Horsmon said. “So she’s really been hampered by the injuries this past year, but not a single day has she complained about it, or made excuses about it. She wants to practice every day physically, and what she’s done. … She’s exactly what we want to be about.”
munson@umdbk.com
