INSIDE THE GAME: TORI DIXON “
Honestly, I was ready to practice three days after the surgery, but my trainer told me, ‘No.’ But I was in the gym with the team, shagging balls and helping out as much as I could. I got surgery on a Monday, and the Monday after I was practicing 100 percent.
nearly black out. “I couldn’t see anything when I was running,” she says. “That was an issue.”
The hospital at University of Minnesota has a reputation as one of
the country’s top cardiac facilities, and once the doctors got involved, the diagnosis came quickly. She was asked to wear monitors that would track her heart rate, and the plan was to keep an eye on her numbers for a month. Within a week, a doctor called and told her that they had all the data needed; she defi nitely had the condition they thought she had. Surgery was scheduled. It would involve removing a node on her
heart. According to her doctor, it was low-risk. He told her it’s a com- mon procedure, especially for athletes. Still, heart surgery is heart surgery. As McCutcheon says, “Any time you have the words heart and surgery in the same sentence, it’s not insignifi cant.”
If this is routine, why are there so many doctors? The operating room was huge, and, to Dixon’s surprise, there were doctors and nurses everywhere. She fi gured she’d be in a tiny room in a corner of the hospital, one doctor, one nurse, a few hours on the table, good to go.
“There were probably four or fi ve doctors and a few nurses, and I was thinking, ‘OK, this is a little over the top.’ … And normally the surgery takes a few hours. Mine took eight. There were a few differ- ent methods [to remove the node]. They could freeze it or they could burn it. They started off freezing it, and that didn’t work, so they switched to burning it.”
It was long, but it was a complete success. For the next day and half, she remained in the hospital, sedated and sleepy. When she was awake, her appetite was awake, too. “I made my family get me food at Chipotle,” she says with a smile. “I’m very demanding when I’m loopy.”
Once she got home, her priority was getting back to the gym as quickly as possible. “Honestly, I was ready to practice three days after the surgery, but my trainer told me, ‘No,’” she says. “But I was in the gym with the team, shagging balls and helping out as much as I could. I got surgery on a Monday, and the Monday after I was practicing 100 percent.”
In the gym with her was the team trainer, the head trainer for the Minnesota athletic department and her doctor. As Dixon puts it, “I had a full support staff if things went south.”
To Azerbaijan and beyond… What shouldn’t get lost in the larger story of Dixon’s dramatic re- turn from heart surgery is the sub-story of a very good young player who was willing to retool her game and get better. When McCutcheon took over as the Gophers’ head coach in 2012, Dixon had what he calls technique “ineffi ciencies.” Her hitting,
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for instance, was too straight away and tight to the setter, so Mc- Cutcheon had her work on opening up more and getting farther off the net. She did, and it led to her hitting with more power and more range. “The changes she made weren’t small, especially for a player going into her senior year. But she really worked hard to do what she needed to acquire the expanded skill set she needed to become a better player,” McCutcheon says. “It certainly paid dividends for us and for her.”
In a 2013 season in which the Gophers went 29-7 and made it through the fi rst two rounds of the NCAA tournament before falling to formidable Stanford, Dixon led Minnesota in a whole lot of cat- egories: kills (457), kills per set (3.66), hitting effi ciency (.399), total blocks (161), blocks per set (1.29) and points (570.5). As you’d expect from a strong, 6-3 player who possesses great athleticism, Dixon plays a physical game, jumping high, hitting hard. But McCutcheon says the scouting report on her is a lot deeper than just power.
“For a middle blocker, she’s remarkably complete,” he says. “She can hit a good jump fl oat, can hit a great jump spin, can block middle, can block at the pins. She can hit a front 1, a gap, a slide, but she can also hit a D, a pipe, a red, a go. She’s just very, very com- plete. She can also pass a ball if you need her to, and she can dig. She’s pretty rare, in that regard. In a college world where there are lots of subs and there are middles who don’t get to serve and middles who only play in the front row, she’s one of the rare ones that got to go all the way around. There were just so many ways that she could help us. When you’re coming into the international realm and you only have six subs to deal with, the middle position is much more expanded, so I think (that diversity) is defi nitely a strength for her.” It doesn’t hurt that she’s fi nally feeling good. No more jackham- mer heartbeats, no more gulping for air. “It’s so much easier not having that in the back of my head, espe- cially during conditioning,” she says. “I feel like a lot of the sum- mers in the past were affected by my heart. When I played with the national team last summer, it helped a lot that I could do everything 100 percent and not have to worry about my heart.” Dixon has every intention of returning to the National Team gym and trying to work her way up. There are a lot of great middle block- ers already in the USA program, and there are some very good ones coming up from college. But after seasoning her game overseas and getting a taste of what it’s like competing against some of the world’s top players in the European Champions League, she says she’s ready to work hard and go after her longtime goal of playing for the USA. McCutcheon, who was the U.S. Women’s National Team coach last quadrennial and the U.S. Men’s National Team coach the previ- ous quadrennial, is confi dent she’ll hold her own. “It’s hard to look into the magic eight ball and see what’s going to happen in a couple of years, but I can’t imagine she wouldn’t be worthy of a good look,” he says. “And given the opportunity, I’m sure she’ll represent herself very well.”
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