By the time Rakeem Vick was seven, he knew he was fast, and he started to really like playing football. As his love for the sport grew, so did his dream of playing in the NFL one day. By the time he was earning all-America praise at Friendly High School in Fort Washington, Md., his dream had become a goal.
Yet, that was the same time his coaches started preaching about having a Plan B. Coaches in youth, high school and college athletics know that less than 2 percent of college football players achieve careers as professionals, and they constantly remind athletes to have other options. Vick knew the odds, but he was determined to beat them.
He was not ready, however, to put his Plan B into action so soon.
COMING TO NCCU
Vick’s talents brought him all-state and all-America accolades during his senior season at Friendly High in 2006, with 127 tackles to his credit. He was also a leader. As team captain, he led the Patriots to a 14-0 record, the 2A Maryland state championship and a national ranking of No. 22.
His football success and his desire to attend an HBCU landed Vick an athletic scholarship to North Carolina Central University. He made an impact right from the start, finishing among the team’s top 10 defenders as a rookie linebacker with the Eagles. He improved steadily as a player and a leader during the next two seasons.
Entering his senior year, Vick’s expectations were high. He pushed himself during the off-season to be in top condition and to be a motivational leader. In the 2010 season opener against Johnson C. Smith, he made four tackles and recovered a fumble in a 59-0 rout of the Golden Bulls.
In the next game, on Sept. 11, the Eagles faced Winston-Salem State under the lights at NCCU’s O’Kelly-Riddick Stadium. As the stadium announcer introduced Vick as the starting outside linebacker, he strode out of the tunnel to the roar of the crowd, shaking his head and tossing his dreadlocks. The intensity that had built up within him all day exploded onto the field.
The game was tied, 27-27 midway through the fourth quarter. With six tackles already under his belt, Vick was exuberant and ready for more. Given a brief rest on the sideline, he was champing at the bit to get back into the game. So when fellow linebacker Anthony Sharp rolled his ankle, Vick grabbed his helmet and was ready to go.
THE LIFE-ALTERING PLAY
“I remember everything,” Vick recalls. “We were in a cover-three formation. They ran a draw play. It was number nine; the big guy. Marc Lewis and Mark Blakeney hit him first, and then I came up to hit him.
“I hit him with my helmet and everything started to go in slow motion. It felt like I flew back five yards and my head hit the ground. Once I hit the ground, I knew I was done. I couldn’t move anything but my eyes. I immediately started thinking about my Plan B.”
Athletic trainers and team doctors rushed to his side. The crowd fell silent. Players and coaches knelt in prayer. Vick lay motionless on the field, taking rapid, shallow breaths, unable to wipe the tears streaming down his face.
Sean Thomas, the head athletic trainer, spoke quietly, urging him to be calm. The medical staff began the careful process of placing him on a spine board. Vick asked to see his mother, Angela, and she hurried down from bleachers. “Everything is going to be all right,” she assured him.
After several minutes, the medical staff lifted Vick, strapped securely to the board, onto a cart. As the cart wheeled toward a waiting ambulance, the fans gave a supportive ovation. Vick recalls his frustration at being unable to give a thumbs-up signal, as he has seen so many players do in his situation.
Once in the ambulance, he felt a new emotion: Fear. “That’s when I got really scared,” he says. “I thought I was going to be paralyzed for the rest of my life. I told my mom, and that’s when she started to cry.”
Battling the tears, Angela continued to reassure her son, “Everything is going to be all right.”
On the way to Duke University Medical Center, Vick experienced the first hopeful sign: He would wiggle his left foot. “It was a relief,” he says.
THE ROAD TO RECOVERY
After a long wait in a cold hospital room, Vick received some good news from the doctors. “They told me that my spine was bruised and my nervous system was shocked, causing everything to shut down,” he says. “They said I was not paralyzed and they expected me to get movement back.” The medical term for the injury is transient quadriplegia, a temporary full-body paralysis.
Gradually over the next few days, Vick regained some movement. “I got feeling back in my right hand and could move both legs,” he says, “but my left arm was still really heavy and could not move.”
Though not long removed from the fear of lifelong paralysis, Vick began to contemplate a return to the field. “I was already thinking about playing football again.” The injury occurred in his fourth and final season of collegiate eligibility, but he figured he could qualify for a medical redshirt waiver with the NCAA that would allow him to play one more season at NCCU.
His mother was supportive. The doctors were another story. “They were looking at me like, ‘Are you sure you want to take that risk?’ They kept saying risk,” he says. “I didn’t talk about playing football again too much, but it was in my head.”
Vick moved to Durham Regional Hospital to begin his rehabilitation. With the help of a physical therapist and an occupational therapist, he had to relearn how to operate his body.
He needed help getting out of bed and walking. Regaining use of his hands was especially hard. “It was frustrating. I got tired. My occupational therapist was tough on me. I had to learn how to brush my teeth again, how to put on socks, how to dress myself. I was starting from scratch.”
Over and over, his therapist made him pick up pennies, put a key in a lock, pour water. “I knew I was getting better, because I could start doing the small stuff.”
THE BIG GAME
When the 2010 schedule was announced, Vick had circled one particular game on his calendar: the matchup with archrival North Carolina A&T. The annual Aggie-Eagle clash always draws a big crowd, but this one was special. For the first time in 18 years, it was being played on NCCU’s campus. “I didn’t want to miss that game,” Vick says. “I felt like it would motivate the team.”
The game, though, was on Sept. 25, just two weeks after his injury.
Before Vick’s doctors would allow him to attend, he had to show that he could walk. “They put me through a test,” Vick says. “Walking up a hill, walking in the grass — stuff that I may face at the game that I don’t in the hospital. I aced it!”
Vick used a wheelchair to get around the stadium. Before the game, he visited the locker room and sat in front of his locker, still in a neck brace and wearing a custom T-shirt with his name, jersey number and action picture on it. “I saw tears in the eyes of my teammates,” Vick says. “It hurt them to see me like that. I told them to go hard and take advantage of the opportunity.”
Named an honorary captain for the game, Vick joined co-captains Anthony Sharp and Tim Shankle at midfield for the coin toss. With those two holding his hands, providing emotional, if not physical, support, Vick steadily walked onto the field from which he had been carted off of just two weeks earlier.
“It wasn’t hard for me to walk on the field,” he recalls. “It was all adrenaline.” So much, in fact, that he was craving to play. “I was staring at the A&T players the whole time, thinking, ‘You are lucky I am not playing.’”
Perhaps motivated by Vick’s return, the Eagles scored the first three touchdowns and cruised to a 27-16 victory. “It was fun to see the boys get after it,” he says. “Like a part of them was doing it for me. And I got so much love from the fans — it was unbelievable. It was a good feeling.”
BACK TO REHAB
Elated by the victory, Vick returned to the hospital for four more weeks of inpatient rehabilitation. That was followed by two months of intensive outpatient therapy. When he returned to his own apartment, his brother Ronald moved to Durham to help take care of him.
“I was very dependent,” Vick says. “My brother cooked for me, bathed me, walked with me, turned the TV channel for me, held the phone up for me.... It was crazy.”
Even so, his vision remained set on a return to the game he loved. “The whole time I was rehabbing, I was trying to get myself right so I could come back to play football.”
By the next summer, he was much improved, although his left hand and arm still felt heavy and were not as strong or coordinated as before the injury. Vick’s doctor presented two options: Have surgery to repair the damage and never play football again, or return to playing football without the surgery and face a high risk of permanent paralysis.
Vick was devastated. He knew his dream of playing pro football was over for good. He kept his composure until he climbed into his car. “Then I went crazy,” he says. “I was cursing, hitting the dashboard, questioning the Lord – asking ‘Why me?’”
After deciding to have the surgery, he shared his resolution with his family. He particularly remembers breaking the news to his 13-year-old nephew, who plays youth football and looks up to Vick, as a turning point. “As I talked with him, it hit me that playing football was not my calling. I had to dig deeper to find my purpose on this Earth. It’s not scoring touchdowns or making tackles. My true calling is using my voice, being a leader. I learned that my greatest gift is to motivate people.”
Cheered by his newfound purpose and with a fresh set of goals, Vick visited the new football head coach, Henry Frazier III. Frazier, seeing a potential leader, offered a job as a student coach, and Vick happily traded his helmet and pads for a whistle and clipboard.
“It surprised me the way my former teammates responded,” says Vick. “They all called me Coach right away and accepted me as a coach. It was a good feeling, knowing that I still had a voice on the team — that I could still motivate.”
ANOTHER MEMORABLE STROLL
While spending the fall semester as a student coach, Vick was also completing a significant off-the-field journey. On Dec. 10, 2011, he became the first person in his family to graduate from college, earning a bachelor’s degree in mass communication with a minor in literature. “It was a relief. I really did it,” he says. “Through all of the rehab, I am back and I am better. It’s now time for better things in my life.”
Vick was not so wrapped up in the moment that he lost the significance of his ability to even walk across the platform. “As soon as I got to the edge of the stage after receiving my degree, I knelt down and gave all the praise to God. I gave all thanks to Him right there.”
Vick’s next step? Graduate school at NCCU to study educational technology and another season on the sideline coaching the Eagles.
“Now through coaching, I can still motivate, teach and empower kids through football,” he says. “And I can truly preach the ‘Plan B’ principle. I really did play Division I football. I really did graduate from college. There is life after football.”
