USAFootball.com

Kristina DeCarlo: RISE Above

By Seth Wickersham, ESPN RISE, May 25, 2010

Kristina DeCarlo, an NFL FLAG player who beat a brain tumor and returned to the playing field. Kristina DeCarlo, an NFL FLAG player who beat a brain tumor and returned to the playing field.

04/30/10 - Kristina DeCarlo doesn’t seek attention. She doesn’t have to. Attention seeks her. On a cloudy February afternoon, at the NFL Girls Flag Football Showcase in Miami -- a tournament featuring four top local teams -- Kristina, a ponytailed highlight reel of a receiver for the Seminole Ridge (Loxahatchee, Fla.) Hawks, is in front of a TV camera urging high schools nationwide to add her sport. A few minutes later, the 18-year-old senior class president is running routes with the Palm Beach Punishers, a professional women’s tackle team. After that, Kristina -- tall and lanky, with an easy smile and sweet blue eyes -- stands opposite Jets wide receiver Braylon Edwards, one of the attending NFL stars, who explains the “clock” drill, a hand-eye coordination exercise where she practices catching passes at different angles.

the worst news
The folks on hand, like most, can’t help but be drawn to her. Growing up in Loxahatchee, Fla., Kristina spent weekends rooting for her beloved Florida Gators and weekdays playing in various flag football youth leagues. With her long, graceful strides and quick hands, she averaged 19 yards a catch in 2007 as a varsity freshman.

But in January 2008, while competing at an off-season club tournament in Orlando, Kristina began to suffer headaches. At first she thought it was just the symptoms of a head cold, but when she returned home, her balance was off and her vision blurry. She began to vomit. Moments before leaving to visit the doctor, Kristina searched her symptoms online. After viewing the results, she jokingly told her mom, Paulette, “I could have a brain tumor.”

Kristina’s doctor sent her for an MRI at Miami Children’s Hospital. A few days later, she was hanging out at her house when her dad, Frank, entered the room with tears in his eyes. She had never seen him cry before. He told her that she did, in fact, have a malignant and potentially life-threatening brain tumor the size of a walnut. Until then, Kristina had handled the uncertainty surrounding her health by playing football and writing in her journal. But, she says, “once I saw my dad crying, I starting crying.”

Two weeks later, Kristina underwent surgery to remove the tumor, falling asleep not knowing if she’d wake up. The operation was supposed to last four hours. But the growth was attached to the delicate area of Kristina’s brain that controls speech and swallowing, so the surgery stretched to 12 hours. The cancer was successfully extracted, but when Kristina woke up, she learned that the operation was just the first hurdle. The surgery had affected her balance, so she would have to relearn how to walk. She’d have to endure six weeks of radiation, which would cause hair loss, acne and weight gain. (“Just what every teenage girl wants,” Kristina jokes now.) And finally, she couldn’t risk head trauma, which meant no flag football for a year. That news, says her mom, “upset her most.”

starting over
Kristina showed up at football practice two weeks after her surgery. When she arrived, her Hawks teammates immediately stopped workouts and ran over to her for 30 minutes of hugs and tears and laughs. She spent the 2008 season, her sophomore year, as the team’s ball girl, watching her favorite sport from the sideline and reteaching herself the basic movements that she needed to play it.

It took about 90 days of practice before Kristina had the strength to walk normally. For the next few months, she jogged in her backyard. Then, once running felt natural again, she had to regain her football speed, so jogging became sprinting, for 30 minutes three times a week.

Kristina returned to football in 2009, as a junior. She was both nervous and excited before her first game. After all, flag football is supposed to be noncontact, but anyone who’s played knows that’s not always the case. After hitting the ground on a play, she grabbed the back of her head, almost reflexively. But she was okay, and soon Kristina was catching her usual assortment of deep passes and averaging 24 yards a catch, inspiring the teammates who had cried a year earlier, not knowing if she’d ever play again. Says coach Austin Bowe, “She was strong enough for all of us.”

back in action
Although Kristina still suffers occasional short-term memory loss due to the operation, her health seems sound. Just to be sure, she’ll undergo regular MRIs for the next four years. Now, as a senior bound in the fall for the University of Florida -- and, of course, a flag football intramural team -- she just wants to enjoy the last few months of playing in tournaments like the NFL showcase. In the second half of one of the games, Kristina runs four yards upfield before breaking toward the sideline, brushing off her defender like dust, wide open in the end zone. Soon, the ball is in her palms for a two-point conversion. As the crowd cheers and the announcer blares her name, Kristina disappears into the uneven sea of black Hawks jerseys and ponytails and high fives, no longer in the spotlight, happily buried in the embrace of her teammates.