Senior Abby Rich has been a fixture in the Center Grove lineup since her freshman season.
Daily Journal file photo
During the state finals at Prairie View Golf Club last fall, Abby Rich was motoring along just fine until she got to the ninth hole, when she “got in this really funky lie” with the ball above her feet.
She lined up her shot, and as soon as she followed through …
Oh no — here we go again.
“That swing just ruined the rest of my round,” Rich said.
Ever since injuring her spine in a car accident late in her freshman year, Rich has had to live with the fallout on the golf course. As she’s found out in the two-plus years since, the sport isn’t particularly forgiving to those who have back troubles.
But the Center Grove senior has kept on keeping on. Physical therapy sessions, cortisone shots, whatever it takes to manage the pain and continue playing, Rich has been willing to do it.
Sometimes that even means transitioning to a completely different swing in the middle of a round.
“I can make it through about 11 holes, and then it starts to get inflamed and it’s hard to play,” Rich said, “and then I change my swing so that I can try to work around the pain.”
More often than not, it’s worked. Rich has been a fixture in the Trojans’ lineup since ninth grade, and while she has missed some time here and there, she’s generally been able to gut it out. Coach Cale Hoover held her out of one 18-hole tournament last year and the Franklin Invitational two weekends ago, and she withdrew from the State Preview earlier this season.
The term “load management” is usually used in reference to professional basketball players, but it’s been something that Hoover has had to remain conscious of so that Rich can be ready for the bigger tournaments next month.
“Ultimately, we want her for the really important stuff,” he said.
The most important of the stuff comes at the end of September, when the third-ranked Trojans hope to be competing for a shot at their first-ever state championship. To be in that position, Hoover knows he’s going to need Rich, a powerful player who he says “can hit the ball like no one we’ve had here,” to be all right.
Prairie View — the annual state finals host — plays much longer than most courses, and Rich’s length can be a tremendous asset there.
“If she’s healthy and right, that is a big advantage for her on that golf course,” Hoover said.
In an effort to stay healthy, Rich has worked with physical therapists such as Christopher Gray, who works at Forté Sports Medicine and Orthopedics in Carmel. Gray is a golfer himself, Rich says, so he’s been able to help her figure out ways to get around the back pain by altering her swing.
Sometimes, when she’s hurting, Rich has to deviate from the “right way” in order to get through the ball without making things worse.
“Instead of pushing my hips back when I’m coming down to make contact with the ball, I always try to move my legs too — and you’re not supposed to do that at all,” she explained. “I’ll always pop up so I can avoid pushing back and pushing into my hips more, which causes a lot of pain.”
The main issues for Rich have been in her SI (sacroiliac) joints, which link the pelvis to the lower spine. She’s gotten multiple cortisone shots to try lessening the pain. During therapy sessions, she does exercises to strengthen that area. Gray gave her a brace to lock those joints in place while she plays — but Rich says that the brace is “really annoying, so I just try to suck up the pain.”
But doing so isn’t always a realistic option, and so there are practices and matches when Rich needs to sit out. On the plus side, Center Grove has a deep enough team that it can replace her with someone from the second five and still beat most other schools.
Conversely, that depth potentially makes Rich expendable if she can’t be dependable. Hoover says he makes an effort not to punish any player for being injured, but adds that “there’s people chomping at the bit right behind her, so we’re trying to balance everybody’s opportunity to earn spots.”
That said, Rich has proven her worth on some pretty big stages over the past three-plus seasons, and her coach knows exactly what she’s capable of.
“Just such a powerful, explosive player, and she’s shot some really phenomenal scores over the years,” Hoover said. “It’s just trying to get her into the right physical place and the right mental mindset where she can just go play golf.”
Rich wants more than anything else to get to that place.
She knows that in the grand scheme of things, she’s got time to get there — she recently committed to play college golf at Taylor University — but Rich also wants to help Center Grove win a state championship in the coming weeks, and she acknowledges that a miracle cure probably isn’t coming in the next month and a half.
“I’ll have moments where I don’t have any pain at all,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Yes! Finally I can be comfortable playing a round’ — and I’ll go out the next day and I’m like, ‘Crap. Why is it bothering me?’
“I’m always trying to avoid having pain, and then I’m like, ‘Ah, well, that’s just not going to work out, so I just need to suck it up.’”
IF YOU GO
Johnson County tournament
Where: The Legends GC
When: 7:30 a.m.
