Four concussions, two broken legs and a displaced hip can’t keep junior off the field
Karli Garzillo, a junior forward on the Nottingham girls’ soccer team, has had three goals in the Northstars’ first 15 games.
That seems like a modest figure — until you consider that she’s playing on a hip that is probably better suited for sitting on the couch than running up and down a field, kicking balls and knocking into other girls.
If there was a Colonial Valley Conference award for courage in girls’ soccer, they would just FedEx it to Garzillo’s house.
“The kid wants to continue to play,” Northstars coach Elyse Diamond said. “She’s not content to just be part of the team and sit on the bench and go, ‘Rah rah rah.’ That’s not her. She has a high threshold of pain.”
And she needs it.
Garzillo suffers from hip dysplasia, which she describes as an abnormal formation of the hip socket.
“The femoral ball doesn’t fit into the hip socket because the socket is too shallow,” she said. “Also, my femur is turned outwards which is adding even more stress to the whole hip joint.”
If that sounds bad, it’s because it is. But it won’t stop Garzillo. People constantly ask her how much pain she’s in, and she terms that “my least favorite question. I’m the type of person that will tell you nothing’s wrong even if I was in the worst pain.”
But…
“Yeah, I’m definitely in a lot of pain, and it sucks because I’m not capable of doing all that I know I can,” said Garzillo, who once played a month on a broken leg. “I am blessed to have teammates and coaches that are willing to bear with me when I get frustrated or when I cannot do any more, and I am forever thankful for such a supportive group of girls next to me.”
A phrase her parents always used, “This too shall pass,” gets her by when the pain gets tough.
“And I know that the pain is only temporary, and it’ll all be gone soon, so why not give it my all on the field and put the pain to the side,” she said.
She plans on treating that pain on Nov. 4, which is when surgery is scheduled at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The Garzillos rave about her doctors and nurses, and she is extremely grateful for the support. She’s going to need it over the next half year, as she will miss school for two months, and has an approximate recovery time of sixth months filled with intensive physical therapy and re-strengthening.
“Without a doubt, if I’m able to be back on that field next year, I will be,” she said.
She has everybody rooting for her because, if anyone deserves a break, it’s Karli Garzillo.
She has been injured so many times in various ways, that she was given the nickname “Boo Boo Queen” as a little kid and was told by her parents that she “had a Flash Pass to the hospital. Between stitches and casts, I had it all.”
A member of an athletic family, her father Rick is a former township baseball standout who now umpires baseball and referees basketball.
“My dad definitely raised me and my sisters around sports, and we were always at a game and watching them on TV,” Karli said. “I think he certainly influenced me because I saw how much he loved and devoted a lot of his time to sports. I wanted to be just like him. Both my parents and both of my sisters are so supportive of what I do and I know I can always count on seeing their faces in the crowd of all my games.”
Or in the emergency room, a place with which she is quite familiar.
Garzillo began playing soccer at age 4 and has never stopped. She joined a travel team four years later and played through last year. She also played CYO basketball for St. Raphael’s until 8th grade before playing for Nottingham.
Through it all, she was getting hurt.
“My parents have no hesitation telling you I was the problem child, and I was always getting into some kind of trouble, and a lot of those situations led to endless hours in Robert Wood Johnson’s ER,” Garzillo said. “But the more serious injuries started in middle school. Besides the broken fingers that I refused to tell my mom about in fear of her telling me I couldn’t play, a broken leg was more difficult to hide. I did the best I could though.”
She sure did. At age 11, she went in for a slide tackle and hurt her leg enough to actually tell her mom. X-Rays were negative for a break. So Karli played in pain for a month, went away on an overnight class trip and when she returned her ankle was still swollen and bruised.
After getting a second opinion, the doctor asked “What color cast?” Garzillo had played with a broken leg for a month.
A year later she was playing basketball for St. Raphael’s, came down after a lay-up and felt immediate pain. It was another fracture in the same leg.
In 8th grade, she suffered a concussion playing flag football at Grice and went to the school nurse—who happened to be Tina Garzillo, her mother.
“As soon as I walked through the nurse’s door, my mom knew something was wrong because in my three years there, I only went down to her a handful of times.”
That was followed by three more concussions during her freshman and sophomore years at Nottingham, and she was forced to miss last basketball season. If you lost count, that was two broken legs and four concussions.
And that’s just the start.
Through all that time, Garzillo was constantly battling hip and lower back pains, which were written off as growing pains by doctors. After her freshman basketball season, she was told she had a groin/hip flexor strain. She got it wrapped each day but it never stopped hurting.
That continued into her sophomore soccer season, and the Northstars trainer advised her to sit out sports for while.
“That’s where the long journey begins,” Garzillo said.
It started last January. Initially, it was feared she had a labrum tear. After visiting University of Pennsylvania Hospital it was diagnosed as psoas tendinitis. Six weeks of physical therapy seemed to help but in the second game of a college showcase tournament “I made one wrong twist and I knew I was done for that.”
Next came acupuncture, which didn’t help. Finally, in July a specialist at CHOP determined this was far worse than a tendon, and they began surgery plans that will be carried out this month.
“The doctor told me that he did not want me to play,” Garzillo said. “Later, he told me that I can play as long as I listen to my body. All the decisions made were difficult, this surgery has a lot of risks, and the fact that he didn’t want me to play definitely ran through my mind a lot. But I’m happy with the decisions I made.”
Diamond and Garzillo have had to work in tandem to make sure she doesn’t do anything too dangerous.
“We took it a day at a time,” Diamond said. “She got second, third and fourth opinions. Her mom must have driven down to CHOP like 12 times to get all the information she could to make the decisions she had to make.
“She’s in a lot of pain, and she plays as it’s tolerated. We use her sparingly. She’s a competitor. She wants to play. We’ve got to go with how she’s feeling because I can’t feel the pain she has. I can see it in her face, but I can’t really feel it. But she’s a trooper. She doesn’t stop. She’ll run right through you. She doesn’t have any fear.”
Diamond says Garzillo is an inspiration to her teammates, but Garzillo says she doesn’t look at herself that way.
“I’m just a girl who will do anything to play soccer,” she said. “There’s been a few times where some girls on the team have said ‘If Karli can do it, we can do it.’ And yeah it’s a great feeling that I’m giving these girls that little motivation, but I want them to be motivated for the same reason I am: the love of the game.”
And that love can never be questioned after Garzillo has played through her gauntlet of obstacles.
“Soccer has been my life for 13 years, and I can’t just throw that out like it’s nothing,” Garzillo said. “At first, the doctors told me I wasn’t going to be able to play this year at all, and that was not going to fly with me. But when I was diagnosed with the dysplasia, they told me it was optional, and when I heard the words optional, that was a green light for me.
“They told me no further damage can be done, but it wasn’t going to get any better, and the only thing I had to worry about was playing through this pain. The game of soccer is so important to me, and I couldn’t imagine my life without it. Especially my life during high school. There was no way I was going to give up playing high school ball due to a little setback.”
Garzillo then summed herself up.
“Many people think I’m nuts for playing through this,” she said. “But I think I’m just nuts for the game.”
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