In February, Virginia Tech lacrosse coach John Sung coordinated one of his team’s full-speed, full-contact drills during a preseason practice, a drill that resembled an intrasquad scrimmage.
His players rotated the ball, and it eventually found its way into the webbing at the end of Mary Griffin’s lacrosse stick. She caught it and readied to make a move, but Sung immediately blew his whistle to stop play.
“Wait, who is that?” he said.
“It’s me, Coach,” Griffin said.
“Mary Griffin!” Sung yelled. “Welcome back!”
At that moment, the members of the Virginia Tech lacrosse team started yelling, cheering, and high-fiving their teammate.
Such is the response when one takes on a formidable foe like cancer and comes away victorious.
“I wanted to make sure the kids all knew she was back,” Sung said. “It was fun to watch the kids acknowledge just how far she’s come.”
“It’s a moment that I’ll never forget because there was a point in time before the surgery and even after when we didn’t know what the process was going to look like, how my recovery was going to look, and what the steps were going to be,” Griffin said. “So, to be in that position to be back on the field put in perspective how lucky I am and how blessed I am. Things could have been a lot worse, and I’m just really thankful for how things turned out.”
Griffin, a Sykesville, Maryland, native who just wrapped up her sophomore season and aspires one day to be the next sports broadcaster out of Virginia Tech’s sports media and analytics program, spent most of 2020 taking her lumps off the field: her dog died, a tree in the front yard of her family’s home fell during a thunderstorm and totaled her brother’s car, and both of her parents lost their jobs, becoming tertiary victims of COVID-19 pandemic.
But the lump that terrified her the most sat inside of her pancreas and in a portion of her spleen.
In September, Griffin felt sharp pains in her side while performing conditioning drills during an offseason workout. The pain intensified with each sprint and ultimately resulted in Anne Bryan, the team’s trainer, pulling Griffin out of the drill. Sensing something more serious was taking place, Bryan later consulted with Mark Rogers, the chief medical officer in the athletics department, and they decided to schedule an abdominal scan for Griffin.
The scan revealed the lump – one coincidentally the size of a lacrosse ball. On Sept. 25, Griffin underwent a biopsy to determine if the tumor was cancerous, and a few days later, she received the news that no one wants to get.
Griffin returned to the practice field in mid-January, starting out slowly with stick drills and ultimately working her way into contact drills. Two days before the Hokies’ season opener against Liberty, her team of doctors cleared her for competition.
Sung put Griffin in the game, which served as a salute to her recovery efforts. Three months after surgery to remove the tumor – the minimum recovery needed – she helped her team to a 13-5 victory over the Flames.
Griffin wound up playing just three games this season after playing in seven during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. Missing most of this past fall put her behind physically, but she was thankful simply for being back on the field and being with her teammates. She welcomes the additional work needed to get into peak physical condition.
“Am I still the player I was last year? Probably not,” she said. “That just means I need to do extra stuff. I see it every single day that I am getting back to where I was. My feet are getting a little faster, or I’ll have a knockdown. I am getting back to that part.
“I’m almost there. There is more work to be done, but I do see myself getting back to the speed that I was at.”
Her coach sees it, too. The Hokies struggled this pandemic-plagued season, going 5-11 overall, but an upset of Virginia in the regular-season finale and the return of players like Griffin has Sung optimistic.
“Mary Griffin will be a starter at Virginia Tech,” Sung said. “There’s no question about that. She had a couple of seniors in front of her, and we were teaching her a new position, but I think using her the way we want, she’ll definitely be able to be a big contributor for us moving forward.”
— Written by Jimmy Robertson
