Chris Haas was told he’d likely never play football again. He’s determined to prove that prognosis wrong.
“I’m definitely going to try my best to make it happen,” he said in an interview.
Last November, Haas was seriously hurt when his car flipped into a ravine along Speedsville Road.
He suffered a cracked sternum and cracked vertebrae. He also lost his right foot.
Haas still has a vivid recollection of the night of his crash.
He remembers hitting some sort of bump – he thinks it was an animal – then swerving his vehicle off the road.
The next thing he remembers is being trapped in his car and awoken by a woman who kept talking to him until paramedics showed up.
Since then, it’s been a constant stream of rehabilitation.
The Cambridge teen sees a physiotherapist three times a week, and spends about the same amount of time at the gym.
He says he’s seeing signs of progress – slow, steady progress.
“It’s going a little slower than I’m hoping for, but it’s getting there,” he said.
Next week, Haas will start his final year of studies at Jacob Hespeler Secondary School.
He says he felt disappointment earlier this summer, when his football teammates started their workouts without him.
He also felt something else – a resolve to do everything in his power to one day rejoin them.
“I just kept reminding myself that I’m going to get past this,” he said.
Helping him get past that is a new prosthetic foot he started using a few weeks ago.
It’s lighter and stronger than the prosthetic he had been using since March – and while it’s not perfect yet, Haas says it has him feeling better than ever about returning to the gridiron.
“It’s always been a passion of mine,” he said.
“Sometimes there are no words to explain how much you love something.”
With reporting by Marc Venema
