“I have this gift of CP. I couldn’t imagine my life without it.” Charlie Duffy has cerebral palsy, and dreams of playing college softball. ZHBuchanan shows how Duffy is making a career possible and why her coaches believe she can reach the next level.
PHOENIX, Ariz. — Mechanical gears rattle from the ceiling of Phoenix Children’s Sports Physical Therapy one recent Wednesday afternoon as a green mesh batting cage slowly unfurls toward the ground. In minutes, Charlie Duffy will step inside and approach a milestone she has been yearning for months to encounter. For the first time since May, she will swing a bat.She’s nervous. “Can I just do it to contact first?” she asks a therapist, who nods in agreement.
But while her CP has been easier on her than others, that doesn’t mean it’s been easy. Duffy is here, at a sports therapy gym, because she has long been determined to transcend her limitations in pursuit of an athletic career. Before her surgery, Duffy was a dynamo of a softball player, playing year-round for both her high school and club team while handling both second base and catcher, a position that is notoriously rough on a player’s legs.
It was a tedious and painstaking process that took years, but Duffy’s parents were adamant that she enjoy all the activities available to the average child. Duffy did ballet and softball in her casts. She played soccer. Other parents would whisper in disbelief —— but “we never let it define her,” her mother says. Cerebral palsy was a hurdle, not a wall. “Nothing’s wrong with me,” Duffy says. “It’s just an obstacle I have to face.
Duffy still comes to these practices, even if she won’t be able to take the field until January or February at the earliest. Softball is her passion. She’s been told she took her first steps on a softball field, having attended all the games of her older sister, Drew. She’d sneak into the dugout during games and would perform the chants. Now, she does the same from the sidelines, shouting encouragement to her teammates. Duffy “keeps a mean scorebook,” says her coach, Rob Reedy.
It represented a modulation of her desires, a small concession that sheer willpower sometimes isn’t enough, but it gives Duffy the possibility of a future in the sport. Before, she would put her body “on mute.” But now, she says, “I have to realize what my body is telling me. If not, I’m going to put myself back.” There were still limitations to plan around at second, like a lack of first-step quickness, but that “doesn’t mean she can’t play it,” Reedy says.
To spend time with Duffy often is to accompany a sunny personality in the midst of cloudy circumstances. As she sits tantalizingly close to the action at softball practices, she shouts encouragement and tips, happily hobbling to assist the coaches in one drill or another. Physical therapy tests her patience and pain tolerance — she goes twice a week at UCP, and twice more a week at Phoenix Children’s for training that is more softball-specific — but looks of frustration rarely cross her face.
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