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By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com
CHARLOTTESVILLE –– Antonio Clary underwent reconstructive knee surgery on Nov. 5, 2019, after which he began the long rehabilitation process. Four months later, the COVID-19 pandemic intervened.
In mid-March, the University of Virginia shifted to online classes, and most students were asked to go home. Initially, student-athletes recovering from major injuries––a group that included Clary, a safety on the football team who’d torn his left anterior cruciate ligament––were to stay in town and rehab at the McCue Center. But that option soon was eliminated.
“The plans changed so quickly as the pandemic’s seriousness elevated,” said Kelli Pugh, UVA’s associate athletics director for sports medicine.
The McCue Center was closed, and Clary returned to Jacksonville, Florida, where he’d starred at Sandalwood High School. He’d been cleared to start straight-line running, but not cutting. The Cavaliers’ athletic trainers sent him workouts to do at home and checked in with him regularly on FaceTime and Zoom, but Clary didn’t have access to the equipment he’d been using daily at the McCue Center.
“So that kind of set me back a little bit,” Clary, a 6-0, 200-pound sophomore. “The first two months [at home] I was on my own, because nothing was open, and I’d never been through an injury like this, so I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know how my knee was supposed to feel.”
On his own in Jacksonville, Clary said, there “were some tough times in the rehab where my motivation wasn’t there. There were just days where I didn’t want to do anything. There were days where I was thinking in the back of my head, ‘Why am I doing this? Why me? Why do I have to go through this?’ I was just second-guessing myself about playing football, because I’d never been through anything like this.”
Pugh said she and her staff worried about how rehab would go for student-athletes at home.
“When they’re on Grounds, we can see them multiple times a day, multiple times a week, six days a week,” Pugh said. “There’s just a difference in the intensity of the therapy that they get when they’re here. Some of them had no access to a gym, so no access to any resistance training until June. So there’s no question that it set some student-athletes behind in their progression.
“As we were monitoring student-athletes, if they weren’t hitting the milestones we would expect, that’s when we would start asking, ‘Do we need to get this person into therapy?’ So that’s exactly what happened with Antonio.”
For the final month he was in Jacksonville, Clary worked with a physical therapist, “and that’s when I started making progress again,” he said. That progress accelerated when, in early July, he resumed working with athletic trainers and strength and conditioning coaches at UVA.
He wasn’t cleared for contact until September, and with seniors Joey Blount and Brenton Nelson back at safety, Clary began the season as a reserve. But in the Wahoos’ fourth game, an Oct. 17 loss to Wake Forest, Blount and Nelson suffered injuries in the first half, and neither has played since.
Clary and D’Angelo Amos, a graduate transfer from James Madison University, took over for them in the secondary. Each is expected to make his third straight start Saturday when UVA (2-4, 2-4) hosts ACC rival Louisville (2-5, 1-5) at Scott Stadium. The 3:30 p.m. game will air on ACC Network.