Drew Dieth ’28, struggled with an ACL injury through 2025-26. Dieth has had many struggles with this injury, but he made the most out of it and kept his social, academic and athletic life intact.
Dieth sustained this injury during the football season in 2025. After driving to St. Mark’s School in Dallas and playing five drives in the game, Deith had to be driven straight back home and get medical aid for his injury.
“Not being able to play sports, and for a long time, not even being able to walk was pretty insane to me,” Dieth said. “I was definitely limited to activities with my friends, playing football, wrestling, and lacrosse because I wasn’t able to do any of those things all year.”
As well as fundamentally impacting Dieth’s life, the injury also affected his friends and family. His family needed to take care of him for a long time, and his friends were limited in hanging out with him every day.
“My ACL injury definitely impacts my family because they had to take care of me for a long time because I wasn’t able to do things normally; especially right after surgery, I had trouble doing simple things like getting in the shower,” Dieth said.
Although Dieth went through a lot of downs with this injury, the injury also helped him learn things.
“I learned how to have empathy for people and think about other people that were hurt, too. Since it happened to me I understand the pain they’re going through and how it can affect your mental health,” Dieth said.
To recover, Dieth had to go through an entire rehab process to be able to walk and run again. He says the process was very long and took a lot of time out of his day.
“The rehab process is definitely difficult because I’ve been going twice a week for an hour and now it’s going a lot better, but the first few weeks were definitely super hard because I couldn’t do any strengthening,” Dieth said. “The process was more of getting my knee straight and getting it to calm down from the surgery.”
