Interesting article in the Toronto Star today about butterfly goaltending injuries.
Young goalie Liam Herbst's NHL dreams derailed by injuries related to his butterfly style: Feschuk | Toronto Star
With his NHL dream waylaid by injury, you’d forgive Liam Herbst for cursing his lot in life. But this week he was counting his blessings.
The best equipment, a private coach, private school — from the time he took up goaltending at age 6, Liam enjoyed no end of luxuries provided by two loving parents.
“Most people say you spend $250,000 on a child before age 18,” Liam, 16, said. “My parents have probably spent two or three times that. They’ve given me the best of everything.”
What they can’t give him is an imminent return to being the best. Less than a year ago Liam was a highly touted prospect, the only goalie picked in the first round of the Ontario Hockey League’s draft. But this week he was at home in Toronto’s west end, gingerly pedalling a stationary bike while recovering from the latest in a series of surgeries designed to correct the menacing collection of hurts that has threatened his career.
Such have been the ravages of the up-down grind of the butterfly style on his 6-foot-3 body. This past summer Liam underwent microfracture surgery to both knees, a procedure to stimulate the growth of new cartilage more commonly associated with mid- to late-career basketball pros closer to twice his age.
This month Liam had another surgery to repair damage in his right hip and another on his left knee. In the coming weeks it’s expected he’ll be encouraged by doctors to submit to operations on his left hip and right knee.
“It’s pretty significant damage to his knees and hips,” said Mark Guy, Liam’s agent. “What I’ve been told by the doctors is they believe there’s a chance they can fix it, and he’ll have a chance to come back and play.”
The injuries Liam has endured, while not often seen in teenagers, aren’t uncommon among goaltenders who play the dominant butterfly style. The scars of hip surgery, once associated with aging blue hairs, have become common among the young men who patrol blue ice. Four years ago, Sports Illustrated pronounced the problem an NHL “epidemic.”
Why? The butterfly, the flop-to-the-knees technique popularized in the mid-1980s by Patrick Roy and adopted nearly universally since, is an unnatural movement that’s being practised incessantly — as many as a few hundred times a day among those as competitively driven as Liam.
All that repetition can put undue stress on, among other body parts, the hips. The hip is a ball-and-socket joint. The head of the femur — the thigh bone that connects the knee to the hip — acts as the ball. A scientific study has estimated that a typical butterfly save sees the ball jammed into its socket with the force equal to an Olympic weightlifter performing the clean and jerk.
Liam was told by doctors that prolonged exertion caused bony bumps to form on the heads of his femurs. As he splayed his legs from post to post, as the ball rotated inside the socket, the bony protrusions inhibited movement. This transferred strain to the knees while also scraping away at the ring of cartilage that surrounds the socket known as the labrum.
Liam, whose right femur was smoothed and his labrum repaired during this month’s surgery, said doctors have told him there were “a lot of factors” working against his body as he so passionately repelled pucks.
“I’ve been playing the position a long time. I grew a lot. I grew fast. And my muscles weren’t strong enough to absorb the force,” Liam said. “You get a problem in one area, you get compensation patterns in another area, it gets worse and worse.”
In pursuit of the game’s mega-dollar pinnacle, Liam now sees one of his biggest problems as a lack of money. Liam’s parents, Peter and Cynthia Herbst, estimate they’ve already spent about $10,000 on his post-surgery rehabilitation. They figure it will cost at least another $20,000 to get the help required to return him to the ice. But who will pay the bill remains an open question. While the cost of Liam’s surgeries were covered under OHIP, specialized physiotherapy and other forms of rehab do not generally fall under the universal plan’s purview. Peter Herbst, Liam’s stonemason father, says the recession has hit his business hard, and that with two other sons in AAA hockey, he and his wife no longer have sufficient means.
Liam signed a contract with the London Knights last year, shortly after the team drafted him, but he isn’t technically a member of the club. OHL commissioner David Branch said the league’s contracts aren’t certified until a player appears in a game. Without his contract being certified, Liam won’t get the OHL education package that would have guaranteed him four years of post-secondary tuition as long as he didn’t quit the team.
Because he’s not under contract and because the injury didn’t occur in the OHL, Branch said neither the team nor the league “bear responsibility on their part to pay for extraordinary expenses that the family chose to incur.”
“What’s getting lost here is the health and welfare of this young guy,” Branch said. “Let’s hope he can make a recovery so he can live a normal life. And if he gets to play hockey at a high level — hey, that becomes a bonus.”
Peter Herbst said he feels as though his son has “fallen through the cracks” of the system.
“Really, nobody is at fault,” said the father. “It’s not like the OHL are bad guys or the London Knights are bad guys. But that’s the way the system works.”
There has been acrimony amid the injuries. The family has heard accusations from the team that Liam failed to disclose a hip ailment two or three years ago, which the family denies. The family, in turn, has expressed discontent with the way the Knights oversaw Liam’s rehab from microfracture surgery.
Mark Hunter, the Knights’ general manager and part owner, said he has informed the Herbsts that Liam is welcome to come to London to recover from his injuries; he’ll get room and board and gratis treatment at Western University’s highly regarded sports medicine clinic, the club’s go-to care provider. The Herbsts said they want Liam recovering at home under a team of professionals they know and trust, an option the Knights will not bankroll.
Both the team and the family can agree on one thing: They’d like to see Liam back in the crease, and he’s good at convincing people he’ll get there. Liam hasn’t played a game in 11 months but his outlook, in a couple of separate interviews, was unfailingly, infectiously positive.
“Almost every goalie in the NHL faced a lot of adversity before they got there. And I think that has to do with why they got there,” Liam said. “I think this injury, this surgery, will make me more likely to achieve my goal because now I’m a stronger person, a much stronger person. And I’m really ready for anything.”
Pedalling a stationary bike is a long way from bouncing into the butterfly, of course, but Liam Herbst was riding onward. Painfully aware there are no sure things but far from bemoaning his fate, he was counting his lucky stars as he pointed a course toward his passion’s elusive heavens.
and get in good shape at 55 it's not like I'm going to play in competition to create major issues.
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