PARK CITY — When Park City senior Mat Christensen crunched to the turf near the end of a 7-on-7 game at a Naval Academy football camp last June, he didn't think too much of the searing pain he was experiencing.
"I thought maybe I had cracked some ribs or something like that," he said. "But I didn't really think it was anything major."
Fortunately for the sake of Christensen's life, however, Navy trainer Jeff Fair quickly recognized that the 17-year-old might've just sustained an injury that was much more serious than just cracked ribs or something like that.
"I had pain in my shoulder under my collarbone, and he said that's a common feeling for a ruptured spleen," said Christensen.
A subsequent ride in an ambulance to the hospital and a CAT scan revealed that Christensen had indeed ruptured his spleen.
It wasn't just a run-of-the-mill ruptured spleen, however, if there is such a thing. In Christensen's case, the star running back's spleen was completely broken up inside his body.
In an instant, he went from being a completely healthy teenager to being a guy who required substantial medical attention immediately.
"It was pretty surreal," said Park City coach Brandon Matich, who was at the Naval Academy for the football camp and rode with Christensen in the ambulance to the hospital. "You're a couple thousand miles away from Mat's mom and dad, and you're alone and you're responsible for this child. I'll be very honest with you — I was scared.
"We got to the hospital, and we're in the emergency room and he was very white and his pulse dropped significantly low."
Finally, however, Christensen's nightmare finally started to come to an end.
After waiting for someone to race back to the Naval Academy to retrieve his insurance information, Christensen was finally ushered into an operating room where a surgeon removed what remained of his spleen. Following that successful procedure, doctors gave him a blood transfusion to help replace the four units of blood he had lost from his body.
Everything went well, relatively speaking, but as Matich waited to receive that news, he was on edge — to say the least.
Christensen's operation took place during the middle of the night, and after getting dinner with some of his assistant coaches who were also at the camp, Matich found himself alone outside the hospital.
At that point, he couldn't help but think about one of his other players, Skyler Barkdull, whose football career ended two seasons ago after he sustained a near-fatal brain injury when he took a hard hit in a season-opening game. (Barkdull is currently doing OK and is able to play in some other sports.)
"I went out into the courtyard by myself, and I broke down," said Matich. "Just in lieu of what happened to Skyler the year before, I lost it. I called my wife and I said, 'I've earned my stripes. We don't get rolled ankles and such. We have a tendency to get organ damage.'
"Whether he was gonna be able to play football at that point was irrelevant. I was just so happy that he was gonna be able to be safe and to be healthy and to be able to act like a teenager again. And then for them to say that he was gonna be able to play football again was just a cherry on top for him, because I know how important it is for him."
Following the surgery and a subsequent five-day stay in the hospital, Christensen was told he would be able to play football again in six weeks.
It took him longer than that to heal, but he was finally cleared to play last Tuesday and got back on the field for Park City's loss to top-ranked Juan Diego on Friday. It's clearly going to take time for the star running back to get back to 100 percent, but he seems to be on his way, despite a scary moment after Friday's game in which he hyperventilated and required treatment.
Over what proved to be an eight-week process of recovery, Christensen was forced to watch all of Park City's conditioning sessions and practices from the sidelines.
It wasn't easy.
"You only know how much it sucks when you're actually injured and have to watch," said Christensen.
To his immense credit, however, the 17-year-old didn't waste the time he spent at those practices.
"In every practice that we had without him, he stood in the back behind the linebackers and coached," said Matich. "He didn't stand and goof around. It's amazing. He'd watch the guard reads. He'd do everything that he was supposed to do. I'd turn around to coach up a kid on a mistake, and Mat would already have him."
Christensen said the injury has revitalized how he feels about football. He said he was considering the possibility of not pursuing college football before the injury, but it's something he's very focused on doing now.
"Before the injury ... I didn't really know how important (football) was to me," he said. "I kind of liked just hanging out almost. But now that I'm back into it, I realized that doing nothing over the summer was a lot worse than playing football. That switched my mind around into it."
e-mail: drasmussen@desnews.com