Murphree's law: you can keep fighting through it
by Paul Harrison
(Posted 6/23/2010 08:00 am)
By Paul Harrison
Sports Writer
A major injury early in a career has one of two effects, it either defeats them so they give up playing, or they fight through the pain and the recuperation and uncertainty of sudden change to rise again. Industrial senior outside hitter Taylor Murphree describes herself as a dominant hitter, but she almost wasn’t playing volleyball at all after a spinal injury in June 2005.
She down plays the nerve damage and three bulging disks she suffered the summer before her eighth grade year after an 18-foot fall off a waterslide kept her in prone for a while and in a back brace for three months.
“I didn’t cry when it happened,” Taylor said. “The first time I cried was when I couldn’t play in the [club basketball] tournament that weekend.”
Her parents, Brenda and Randall Murphree, brought her basketball to the hospital when they visited her. She was already determined to go.
“It made me see how strong I was, to fight through what I knew I could fight through in order to do what I needed to do,” Taylor commented.
What she can do is vitalize a team. The Cobras were off to a rough start this past season with a young team and with Taylor out 20 games from recurring back pain, missing some of their upperclassmen leadership. Murphree returned as the team gelled and found themselves together and advanced to Regionals in the playoffs for the second straight year.
