Wednesday, October 8, 2008 10:22 PM CDT
Heart of a champion
By RICK DAWSON, Staff Writer
rdawson@jg-tc.com
MATTOON -- Brooke Dunning just happens to want to be a physical therapist. It has nothing to do with the personal saga that began during her latter years of high school.
Dunning came to Lake Land’s women’s basketball team this fall fully equipped with a monitor used to alert her whenever her heart beats too fast. It was a condition that required surgery and one that keeps her trainers on their toes.
When she gets her way, that can mean often.
“I hate sitting out,” she said. “I absolutely hate it. I can’t stand sitting on the sideline watching everybody run. If it’s running or conditioning or whatever, I just can’t stand it. So I try to do as much as I can.”
It’s the sort of personality that naturally appeals to a coach like Dave Johnson, who recruited Dunning out of Harrison High School in West Lafayette, Ind. The 5-foot-11 forward, a big Purdue fan, played just one varsity season but caught Johnson’s eye on the AAU circuit.
“She’s strong-willed, I would say – which is good,” he was quick to add. “I’d much rather have somebody that we have to tell to calm down or do less than to have to prod somebody to do more and more all the time.”
Sometimes she has no choice. The summer prior to her senior year she would exercise or practice and find herself completely short of breath. An hour later, her heart would still be beating at an astronomical rate.
“I told my mom about it but she was like, ‘Well, you know, that happens,’” Dunning said.
Initially, it would occur about once a month. The more she worked out, the more the “episodes,” as she called them, recurred. The incident that made her think twice came after one strenuous workout: a trainer tried to take her pulse and was unable to gather a reading.
“Literally, you could see it beat through my chest,” she said. “I could sit here and everyone was just like, big-eyed, because they could see my heart was going 100 miles per hour.”
Her doctors attached a monitor with electrodes containing five stickers that were placed on her chest. Wires from a monitor pack that clipped on supplied her heart signals. She wasn’t allowed to practice or play without wearing it.
“It was definitely uncomfortable,” she said. “It got itchy when I’d sweat.”
Furthermore, she underwent catheter ablation surgery, a burning of extra nerve endings in her heart to remove the electrical pathways causing the arrhythmia. To her dismay, more were discovered during surgery that weren’t treated.
Two months later, she found herself still suffering from a fast heartbeat. Now she takes medication that allows her to stay on the court. Johnson had previous experience dealing with a pair of students on a track team in the Bloomington school district who had conditions that required treatment, but nothing quite like this.
“We just have to be kind of cautious in conditioning,” she said. “We monitor her heart rate a lot in conditioning just to make sure it doesn’t reach a certain level. That was our main precaution because her doctor talked to us about keeping it a certain rate.”
The rest of Dunning’s freshman year has gone smoothly. A former student trainer, she is in Lake Land’s physical therapy program. Once she leaves here she hopes that Division I will be an option.
“I love the way Dave coaches,” she said. “I love the girls. I love the team. Everyone gets along with everyone. We don’t have, like, everyone’s out in their little groups. We play basketball together. We play basketball together as a team.”
Though she had just one year of experience in high school, Johnson likes the fact that she hasn’t developed bad habits that too many others bring with them to college. As raw as her talent is, it is imminently workable.
“She’s so athletic,” he said. “We’re just trying to get her basketball skills to catch up with her athleticism. She jumps well; she runs well; she has good instincts. We’re just working a little on her footwork and working on her ballhandling. I think when those catch up with her athleticism, it’s just going to do a lot for us.”
Soon enough, he should have a hearty dose of each of them.
Contact Rick Dawson at rdawson@jg-tc.com or 238-6855.
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