Inside Guilford boys tennis player Santiago Herrera's return from a broken neck

Seven minutes to play. Santiago Herrera had just scored to give the Rockford Hockey Club’s 18-and-under team a 3-2 lead. The objective now was to keep that lead for seven more minutes.

Seconds later, the goal changed to just being able to walk.

Herrera crumpled to the ice after being checked from behind and elbowed in the neck by a Peoria player, who received a one-game suspension for the hit.

“I just remember a sustained pain in my head. I was laying on the ice, waiting for it to go away,” said Herrera, a 16-year-old Guilford junior who also started for the soccer team and plays No. 1 singles in tennis. “I knew it would eventually stop. After a while, they tried to help me up. I wasn’t able to, not with my neck hurting so much.”

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One of the coaches made a hand signal to the bench, miming a phone call so someone would dial 9-1-1.

“No, why are you doing that?” Herrera told them, stopping the call.

Five minutes later, he got up, skated gingerly off the ice, took off his hockey equipment and watched the end of the game from the bench.

Only then did he go to the emergency room. And only then did people learn how close Herrera came to never walking again.

And yet less than six months after his Nov. 10 hockey injury, Santiago Herrera finished fourth in the NIC-10 tennis tournament at No. 1 singles on May 4 in Freeport.

“It’s crazy,” said tennis teammate Ethan Pederson, who plays No. 1 doubles for Guilford. “There were doubts that he would even walk again and now he is playing tennis.

“He was always so excited to play. There were doubts, but he was, ‘Nah. I want to play. I am going to play.’ I think he is better than before he broke his neck.”

When Herrera left the ice that night, he thought he just had a muscle tear or a stretched neck muscle. Even when he learned his C2 vertebrae — the second of seven in the neck — was 95 percent broken, he planned to quickly return to the tennis court.

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“I believe in myself,” he said. “It’s hard to explain why I thought I would get back into it so easily, but I did in the end. I was right about that.

“It’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to miss this tennis season. That’s what I was most scared of, missing this tennis season and having to wait a whole year to play again.”

That’s not what his mom feared most. Not after they arrived at Javon Bea Hospital at 11:30 p.m. and doctors told Jennifer Herrera her son had a hangman’s fracture.

“They told me to look it up, which was a very bad idea,” she said. “It’s called a hangman’s fracture because that’s where they break the bone when they hang someone. You then die because you won’t be able to breathe.”

This type of injury occurs most frequently in car accidents. And usually leaves a person paralyzed.

But Herrera turned out to not even need surgery. Doctors said if the bone had moved even a centimeter or two he probably would have been paralyzed. But because he was able to move around and the bone never moved, they were able to let it heal on its own without surgery.

“Thank goodness it did not move and we avoided that one,” his mom said. “They Mayo Clinic called me. They have a department that researches traumatic hockey injuries. They had 26 spine injuries on record and only three fit in the same category as Santi’s — between C-1 and C-4 and just the bone, no spinal cord injury at all and no concussion. Just purely the bone.”

That was all Santiago needed to hear.

“I wasn’t worried at all after that,” he said. “But my family, especially my mom, was quite worried for me. She always wanted someone looking after me. She never left me alone at all when I was home every day. She was always worried I might move it, fall or something, and be paralyzed. But I wasn’t worried at all.”

Santiago Herrera spent three days in the hospital, which included a visit by Rockford IceHogs players Marcel Marcel and Kale Howarth.

“That was pretty cool. And unexpected,” Herrera said. “I didn’t think they would do something like that for me.”

Then he returned home for several months, living in a neck brace. No school.

And maybe no tennis, coach David Woosley said.

“I told him it’s OK to take a year off,” Woosley said. “I was so surprised he made it back. He wasn’t at school, so most of the guys couldn’t even see him. He was home-bound. Toward the end, he got back to school, the kids were, ‘I think Santi is going to play.’ The guys rallied around him.”

Herrera has played hockey and soccer a lot longer than he has played tennis, but he loves all three sports.

“I started playing tennis after my freshman year of high school,” Herrera said. “I really got into it. I went from not knowing how to play at all to practicing in the park every day, hitting with my dad on days we didn’t have practice. It was addicting just to hit back and forth so much. That’s what had me wanting to keep playing this year.”

Sometimes, Herrera’s ordeal just feels like a bad dream, especially in the beginning.

“The first time I woke up in the hospital after sleeping most of the day, I thought: ‘Why am I in the hospital? Not able to move. This must be a dream.’ ”

Santiago Herrera’s sports dreams were interrupted for six months. But they are all back on schedule now. He will try to qualify for state in tennis at the Class 2A Guilford Sectional on May 17-18. And he’s scheduled to get clearance to return to the soccer pitch and hockey rink at the end of the month.

“Everyone says he is never going to play hockey again,” his mother said. “Oh yes, he is! That’s what he wants to do. He has broken bones before. He has broken his collarbone twice and he broke his finger. He has been hit from behind a million times before. This was just bad luck."

This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Guilford tennis player Santiago Herrera returns after breaking neck