UW football: Recovering from back injury a slow, frustrating process for Hoey
Brandon Hoey realizes he looked a little silly at times last fall.
Like when he'd get out of his seat 15 minutes into one of his classes and spend the rest of the lecture standing up while taking notes.
Or when he stood pretty much straight up on his scooter during rides to class.
Or during those long trips home to the Twin Cities, when he'd tilt the seat up as much as he could -- while still being able to drive safely, of course -- for the 90 minutes or so he could last before he'd have to pull over and stretch out his ailing back.
But those weren't the times that annoyed Hoey the most.
It was the Saturdays he spent standing on the sidelines at Camp Randall Stadium, watching helplessly as his teammates on the University of Wisconsin football team competed.
"The whole time I was thinking I was actually going to get back out there," Hoey said.
Hoey would like to avoid the same scenario playing out during the 2008 season. He dismisses the possibility that his UW career might be over before it ever began.
In fact, ask him how his back is doing these days and a smile appears on his face.
"It's getting better," he said recently.
Then again, it couldn't have gotten much worse. Hoey, a defensive lineman from Shoreview, Minn., was injured early in preseason training camp last August during a routine drill in which he was engaged with a teammate and felt a twisting sensation in his back.
"It just tightened up on me," said Hoey, who will be a third-year sophomore in the fall. "It was weird. I stretched out and finished up practice. Then the next few days it was getting worse and worse. I took a few weeks off, and then I tried coming back and it started hurting getting out of my stance."
Each time Hoey would try to return to practice, the pain was too much to handle. He was diagnosed with three herniated disks in his back, two of which were repaired when he underwent surgery in early December.
The recovery process has been a slow, frustrating one for Hoey, a first-team All-State selection who was ranked the seventh-best defensive lineman in the Midwest by Scout.com coming out of Mounds View High School.
Like the other UW players sidelined this spring -- at one point, there were eight defensive linemen sitting out due to various injuries -- Hoey has spent practices watching and helping out in any way he can.
"This spring is even worse" than last fall, Hoey said. "You just want to go out there, but there's nothing I can do right now."
What bothers Hoey the most is he knows he'd be getting plenty of reps to prove himself to first-year defensive line coach Charlie Partridge, who said recently that he doesn't know what he has in Hoey. Since Hoey redshirted in 2006 and didn't play at all last season because of injuries, Partridge has no film to watch to get a read on Hoey, who set a school record at Mounds View with 22 tackles-for-loss as a senior in 2005.
Hoey is optimistic he'll play for the Badgers at some point, though he refuses to look too far ahead.
"I'm just trying to get back to practicing," he said. "Anything leading up to that -- hitting bags, anything -- would be great. I just want to do something -- something other than walking around."
