Injury wiped out her ’24 season, but WSU’s Lauren Lucas still craves ‘storybook ending’
The 2024 season had all of the makings of a dream year for Lauren Lucas to conclude her time with the Wichita State softball team.
She was going to finish her illustrious career with fellow All-American outfielder Addison Barnard, who was in the same recruiting class, the Shockers were set to play at North Texas, a 25-minute drive from where she grew up in Little Elm, and WSU was slated to host the American Athletic Conference tournament, an expected springboard for the program to secure another postseason berth.
“That seemed like a storybook ending, right?” Lucas said. “Unfortunately, that’s not the way it ended up for me.”
Doctors couldn’t seem to agree on the extent of a nagging shoulder injury she played through during the 2023 season (in which she still hit .384 with 62 RBIs to earn All-American honors). Her MRI scans were coming back clean, so Lucas took that summer off from playing and attempted to allow the injury to heal naturally.
But the pain never subsided and Lucas finally scheduled surgery for November 2023. It wasn’t until she went under the knife that doctors discovered she had a complete tear of the labrum and required anchors, which are small screws used to repair the tear by attaching it back to the bone in the shoulder.
It didn’t take long into the rehabilitation process for Lucas to come to the crushing realization that her storybook ending was not going to happen.
Spending an entire season in the dugout was always going to be agonizing for Lucas. But it became even more so when the Shockers lost in the AAC tournament championship game at Wilkins Stadium and were one of the first teams to miss out on an NCAA Regional berth.
“The whole season was heartbreaking,” Lucas said. “There were so many games that I was like, ‘God, I would sell my soul for an at-bat right now.’ But that wasn’t in God’s plan for me. At the end of the day, what happened in 2024 happened and there’s nothing we can do to go back. There’s nothing I can do to go back and fix my injury, no matter how many times I wish I could.”
WSU head coach Kristi Bredbenner said there were conversations about Lucas potentially returning halfway through the 2024 season and trying to give whatever she could to help lift the Shockers back to the NCAA tournament.
In the end, Bredbenner’s message to Lucas about deserving her final year in a Shocker uniform to be a full season and at 100% strength resonated. That’s not to say the coach hasn’t played the “What if?” game about how last season ended.
“You add her to the lineup and, without a doubt, I think we win the league,” Bredbenner said. “There were so many times and opportunities where we could have really used that RBI manufacturing that she did for us her junior year. A 60% Lauren Lucas is good, but a 100% one is great. So it’s a bummer, but she made the right decision.”
Rehabilitating the injury was hard work, but it paled in comparison to the mental toll it took on Lucas to not play softball for an entire year.
“Any athlete who has been through a traumatic injury would tell you that the mental side is the toughest,” Lucas said. “We put ourselves through physical pain every single day and it’s something we can cope with, but at the end of the day, a huge part of myself was softball.
“Not being able to tap into that side of my identity was really hard. I leaned a lot on close friends, on teammates, on coaches, on my parents, on my fiance. There was a long list of people who picked me back up off the ground every time I fell.”
Near the top of that list was teammate Camryn Compton, a Riverton native who was experiencing the roller coaster of her own season-ending injury at the same time.
They laughed together, cried together, persevered together. It was never easy, but it was easier because they had each other.
“Knowing that we were going to have hard days, but we had each other and we had our support systems to push us through the bad days was huge,” Compton said. “We had a great team, a great run last year, but it just motivated both of us to get back healthy and make a run for ourselves. We’ve been here five years now, so might as well make the most of it, right?”
Lucas said the physical rehabilitation for a torn labrum was even more difficult than she expected.
“They tell you it will take you four to six months, but I’m stubborn, so I thought I would be back in four no problem,” Lucas said. “To be honest, I probably didn’t feel 100% until closer to eight months.
“Doctors told me that a labrum tear could be a career-ending injury when it’s in your throwing arm and I was like, ‘Yeah, whatever.’ Then going through the whole process, I was like, ‘OK, yeah, I get it. This is hard.’ I couldn’t even use my arm to write or anything for a long time, never mind the stuff that I love to do like hit and throw and play.”
What helped distract her from the heartbreak of not playing was embracing her desire to someday become a softball coach.
Instead of sulking in the dugout for the entire season, Lucas was engaged and constantly in the ear of WSU hitting coach Elizabeth Economon. She started studying pitchers more closely, picking up on tells, predicting pitches and expanding her overall knowledge of the game.
“It’s really tough to go through an injury and keep yourself motivated and involved,” Economon said. “It would have been the longest year of her life if she didn’t have something to pour herself into, so she needed it. Not only did it keep her busy, but it’s going to help her get better when she comes back and that’s the most important thing.”
Lucas officially returned to playing softball this past summer and fall. Her bat is still a major threat and her arm strength is closer to 100% than its been since the injury.
Perspective has made her realize that, while she was robbed of what she thought was a storybook ending last year, she can write her own magical final chapter this year.
WSU opens the 2025 season with five games in three days at the Grand Canyon Kickoff Classic in Phoenix Feb. 7-9.
“Ever since I’ve known my last season was going to be in 2025, I’ve had all eyes on that,” Lucas said. “You dig deep, you take your rehab seriously, take lifting seriously, take every play every day seriously like it could be your last time because it very well could be. I don’t think I realized that until my career was almost ended.”
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