Tuesday, Aug. 05, 2008

Olson moves on, moves past the game

Former Irmo High standout turns the page after a career-ending injury

It started as a nagging pain in his foot a year ago. No problem, Aram Olson thought. He was a 6-foot-2, 240-pound football player, after all.

One year later, now that the source of that pain is known, the proper verb tense to describe Olson’s career is the past tense.

What was supposed to be the season he ascended to the starting fullback spot at Ohio State instead will be the first one during which Olson will be an ex-football player.

The Irmo High graduate, an Ohio State junior, has a navicular stress fracture. That means his foot no longer could handle the pounding it would absorb if Olson were to do what is required of a fullback: run 10 yards at full speed and smash into a 250-pound-plus defender.

“He wanted to play football,” said Dick Tressel, Ohio State’s running backs coach and the older brother of head coach Jim Tressel. “A couple of doctors in a row said, ‘This really isn’t going to get better.’ That was a little hard for him. His goals were to be a great football player as well as getting a great education.

“He’s comfortable with it; I don’t think he’s happy about it.”

After a series of meetings last spring with doctors, including a specialist, the reality hit home and he moved on. Having his career end at age 20 didn’t come easy.

“I came to grips with it a long time ago,” Olson said this week. “At first, (it was) kind of shocking. Now I see I have a whole new opportunity.”

That opportunity is a career in strength and conditioning. Ohio State is honoring his scholarship, and Olson is pursuing a degree in sports and leisure studies with plans to attend graduate school for exercise science.

This season, he will assist the team’s strength and conditioning staff to gain experience.

“We try to let him have a variety of experiences as he pursues life after college,” Tressel said. “He helped out in the football recruiting office last year. He’ll work with strength and conditioning this year.”

A year ago, the plan was much different.

Olson was to be the starting fullback this season. He redshirted as a freshman in 2006 and, after backing up the three seniors who manned the position last season, he was to have the starting job for three seasons.

“We really felt like this was going to be his time,” Dick Tressel said. “We had awfully high hopes.”

Will Newell, Olson’s Irmo High teammate who now plays linebacker at Newberry, knows Olson would have had a great career.

“He was as strong as an ox, probably the strongest guy we had on our team,” Newell said. “When you hit him, you knew you hit a man.”

But the plan hit a snag when Olson began having problems with his foot last summer.

“I didn’t know what it was,” he said. “It didn’t hurt that bad. But every time I did something on it, it hurt worse.”

Olson didn’t think much about it, but after two more weeks of conditioning drills, he barely could walk. “I knew something was up,” he said.

Doctors prescribed rest. But every time Olson tried to come back, so did the pain — and the frustration.

“It was a long, drawn-out process,” he said. “The coaches expected me to be better. First it was that I’d be back after camp was over. Then back after midseason. Then back in bowl camp.”

Then, about a month after he and his teammates returned from New Orleans after a second consecutive loss in the Bowl Championship Series championship game, Olson realized his career could be in jeopardy.

One option that could have given him a chance to play called for surgery and a screw to be placed in the foot. But that only would have given him an outside chance at playing one season while increasing chances for long-term complications.

Instead, Olson said goodbye to the game he loves. He is able to walk without a limp and will be able to lead an active, normal life — as long as it doesn’t involve football.

“I was just dumbfounded,” Newell said when he learned of Olson’s condition. “I hate hearing things like that. Someone with that much talent and ability, it gets cut short. You realize that its part of the game, but you never think it will happen to you. Unfortunately, it happened to him.”

Olson is at peace now. And after he finishes his degree at Ohio State, he said he could return to South Carolina for graduate school because USC has one of the nation’s top exercise science programs.

Either way, he doesn’t regret heading to Ohio State, where he has experienced two BCS title games.

“I’m still happy with my decision,” Olson said. “Even with the whole career-ending injury and everything, I don’t think I could have set myself up better for the rest of my life and my career.”

Reach Wiseman at (803) 771-8472.

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