ng with heart
Tori Dixon had a choice: Get heart surgery or stop playing volleyball.
She chose volleyball. by Don Patterson
ori Dixon wasn’t freaking out about her upcoming heart surgery, but some of her friends sure were. Every time she came back from the doctor, the questions were endless.
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Of course, this was just a case of friends being friends, check- ing up on her, making sure that everything was going to be OK. But in the weeks leading up to a procedure that would be carried out on March 25 of last year, Dixon’s matter-of-fact approach to the whole ordeal was being severely tested by the not-so-matter-of-fact ap- proach of those around her.
“Everyone was making a really big deal out of it,” said Dixon on a recent morning, Skyping from Azerbaijan, where she is playing for a professional club team (Rabita Baku) after having fi nished her senior season at University of Minnesota. “I felt like I was the most relaxed one about it all. My friends would ask all these questions, and then they’d say things like, ‘That’s so scary. I’m so scared for you.’ And I was thinking, ‘I’m not that scared, but the fact that you’re freaking out is kind of making me a little nervous.’” A year later, it’s all good, and when you consider everything that happened to Dixon in 2013, it adds up to one of the most remark- able stories in college volleyball. The middle blocker from Burns- ville, Minn., went from being slowed in practice by severely rapid heartbeats to undergoing successful surgery for a condition known as atrioventricular nodal reentrant tachycardia to returning to practice a week later to training last summer with the U.S. Women’s National Team to leading the Gophers to the NCAA Regional fi nals to stand- ing among the best-of-the-best in December as a fi rst-team AVCA All-American.
It could have been different. Doctors told her that her condition
wasn’t life threatening, so surgery wasn’t mandatory. But they also told her that if she wanted to keep playing volleyball, they would recommend she get her heart fi xed. That’s all she needed to hear. “When they put it that way, I thought, ‘I’m getting the surgery.’”
A lecture from the coach As offseason practices heated up in February of 2013, Minnesota Coach Hugh McCutcheon noticed that Dixon was lagging in team sprints.
“It was clear that she wasn’t going hard,” McCutcheon says. “I went over to her and said, ‘Tori, you’re going into your senior year here – you want to lead by example. And clearly, in all of these other phases of our program you are. But here, you’re not going hard. What’s the deal?’ And she said, ‘OK, I’ll go faster,’ and she gave maximal effort on the next ones, but then she looked a little dis- tressed. I went over and said, ‘Are you OK?’ And she said, ‘No, my
GOLDEN GOPHER: After recovering from heart surgery, Tori Dixon bounced back to lead the University of Minnesota in fi ve offensive categories.
heart is beating funny.’ So we shut it down immediately, and then the doctors and trainers and cardiologists got involved and we found out about the tachycardia.”
Symptoms had been lurking for a long time, all the way back to high school. Back then, though, the rapid heartbeat episodes were much less frequent, and also much shorter. Over the years, they got progressively worse. But with exception of one meltdown when she fi nally told the team trainer everything that had been happening, she would just shrug off the episodes and tell herself that it must be easily explainable – maybe something she ate or lack of sleep or not drinking enough water or stress from homework. And she’d make light of it to teammates, saying things like: “Hey, if something hap- pens, tell them it’s my heart.” They’d laugh and keep practicing. Clearly, she has always had somewhat of a tough-it-out philoso-
phy, which is no doubt part of her DNA. Her dad, David Dixon, was a guard in the NFL for 11 seasons, so you might say that playing with pain is a family tradition.
There came a point in 2013, though, when Tori realized that what was happening couldn’t possibly be normal, so toughing it out was no longer an option. By then, she would be running sprints and
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PHOTO: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
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