A victory off the field: UNC women’s soccer star’s campaign for recovery

Story By Sammy Ferris

Photos by Carmen Chamblee

Video by Jacob Karabatsos

Audio by Aurora Charlow

In the thick heat of North Carolina’s end to summer last August, the first game jitters vibrated the locker room as UNC Chapel Hill women’s soccer team geared up to play UNCW. 

A Carolina freshman at just 17, Ally Sentnor was entering a new arena of the game she’d been playing since she was four. Fourteen years leading up to this moment; fourteen years of  dominating every field she had played on. Now, dressed in Carolina blue and jumping on her toes, she was starting at center forward.

The stands buzzed with parents from both teams, including Sentnor’s parents — Lee and Rich Sentnor — and her two younger siblings. This moment was one for the entire family. To play at the highest level of competitive soccer, everyone in a player’s family makes sacrifices. The soccer tournaments that were made into family trips, the days standing in sweltering heat or down pouring rain, the nights sleeping on hotel floors.

In the first 15 minutes of her first game, Sentnor went down. 

Sentnor had done pre-hab for years to prevent exactly this moment.  But when she took a step back and felt her knee over extend, none of that mattered. She had torn her ACL. 

“Every female soccer player’s worst nightmare,” her mom says.

Her parents’ first thought: she’s out for the season. Their second thought: how is she going to take this?  Most of her life had been defined between the white out of bound lines and two soccer goals.

What if it was all taken away now from Sentnor  for good?

There is not an honest culture around athletic injuries. Athletes often hide their vulnerabilities during recovery, to preserve their image and hopefully their career. Because being hurt means more than just rehab: it means having to restart, from square one and not knowing if full recovery is possible.

Sports psychologist at UNC Jeni Shannon says the emotion she feels injured athletes resonate with the most is grief. ACL tears are especially tedious and can be overwhelmingly long, she says. 

“There tends to be a lot of fear about coming back: both in terms of trusting the knee again and about wondering if you’ll be the athlete you were,” Shannon says.

One night, about a month after her ACL surgery, Sentnor sat in her dorm room bed willing her leg to do something — anything — to show her it was going to be OK. She started crying, staring at what once was the leg that was lightening on the field that now wouldn’t lift up. 

Wiping tears from her face, she opened her phone and decided she wanted to share what she was going to with others — to build an honest community around collegiate injuries and the toll they take on athletes.

“I was thinking: I want this injury to be for a purpose,” Sentnor says.

Since then, Sentnor has posted monthly updates with videos showing her rehab and improvements. In a series of Instagram slides, she’ll highlight different recovery drills and what she calls her small victories. 

She includes movements she still feels insecure about because her goal is to be vulnerable and honest with her social media community. Sentnor is attacking her injury the way she did on the field. She’s trailblazing, changing the game even during the most vulnerable time of her life.

“The vulnerability part is super important because I’ve seen recovery videos, and it looks like everything is going perfect: every touch is great, every shot is great. But, I’m showing the mess ups, showing the fails, showing the hard days,” she says.

Shannon agrees. In her practice, she sees that athletes find it easy to talk about the physical parts of their injury: what ligament tore, what it feels like, what pain they are in. But, often, quietly, they sit with the intangible struggles. In a culture brimming with ‘walk it offs’ and ‘get back ups’, athletes fall silent about the emotional pain they feel after injuries.

“The grief, the frustration, the sadness, the loneliness, and isolation. The fear. They fear that teammates or coaches will see them as weak or might not trust them when they come back if they’ve been honest about their struggles,” Shannon says.

Sentnor is spreading this support to others around the state and the world. She is starting dialogues about how long and difficult this process is while knowing she could face those very repercussions athletes commonly fear.

To her, it’s worth taking that risk.

Sentnor has more than 6,000 followers on Instagram. Her past rivals on the field who have also torn their ACLs have reached out to her via direct message and thanked her for her story. She has complete strangers find her account, message her and express their gratitude for her honesty.

“There have been some people who have reached out who I don’t know. I hate that they’re going through it, but it makes me happy that they feel like they can reach out because that’s the reason I’m doing it. It’s not for me,” Sentnor says.

While this bravery and authenticity is not common on social media, ACL injuries for women’s soccer players are. Dr. Jeffery Spang is an Orthopedic surgeon who specializes in sports medicine and an associate professor for orthopedics in the UNC School of Medicine. 

He says that female athletes in certain sports, like soccer, have a greater chance of tearing their ACLs than male players, and that there are a variety of factors that could contribute to why women athletes are more likely to endure this injury.

While the initial injury and surgery are tough, the rehabilitation process is harder, Spang says.

“[Physical therapy] is very very difficult to go through the process physically. There are a lot of moments where it’s going to be painful, and there’s a lot of boring moments. It’s a long process to work supremely hard six or seven days a week for nine months. It is difficult for anybody, let alone someone who is between the ages of 15 and 22,” Spang says. 

Like Shannon, Spang says that this lonely process can feel isolating and as debilitating as the initial injury. That time alone can be overwhelmed with questions about whether or not she’ll be able to fully recover — and questions about who she’ll be if she can’t.

Sentnor has a history of being motivated by adversity since she was young. Back when she was 11, she was recruited to play in Colorado at a National Team Camp. Lee says she was excited to be “playing up” with an older group.

“She got thrust into this elite soccer world very quickly and at a very young age,” her mom says.

One of the most memorable challenges Lee remembers Sentnor facing was in Florida to try out to be picked for the U17 World Cup Team. Like on all fields, Sentnor was confident she had a chance to earn her spot, even as the youngest by two years. 

Her parents flew down to watch her three game try out. After the third one, when Sentnor still had not touched the field, she was devastated. She felt cheated of the opportunity to show what she could do. When she got home, she broke down to her parents, and for one of the only times in her soccer career, questioned if this ultra competitive world was for her.

“It was a fight or flight moment for her,” Lee says, “She was questioning ‘do I want to do this?”

Sentnor decided to fight. She worked harder than she ever had before, and her parents say she will never forget the name of that coach who refused to put her in. She was and is motivated by proving him — and anyone else who doubts her — wrong.

When it came to college recruiting, her parents had no hesitation to send her off at 17. Their family is from the Boston suburbs, so Sentnor’s been “fiercely independent,” navigating airports by herself since she was little and traveling all around the world for different team camps. In the recruitment process, Senator’s grit shone.

She was at a tournament with her club team and UNC’S head coach Anson Dorrance was coming to watch her play. Rich says Ally was up all night, anxious, and like a typical teenager, blamed her dad’s snoring for her not being able to sleep.

Her team was playing one from Virginia, and during the first half, Sentnor’s team was not performing. They were down 2-1, and Sentnor was not seeing the ball a lot. Her dad remembers her constantly being shut down by the other team, immediately sending two girls to defend her every time she got the ball.

But, something changed inside Sentnor; her dad says it’s her “flipping a switch” as she has been known to do in games. 

Sentnor begins to take over the field, despite her being fouled without calls by the ref. She scored two goals that led her team to their victory: 3-2 over the Virginia team. 

Rich points to this game as an indicator about how Sentnor can face challenges and turn it up to change the game. This resilience and commitment to perform her best for herself and her team has helped her in her ACL recovery process.

Her teammate, Kai Hayes, says while Sentnor’s soccer skills are unbelievable, the way she’s flipped the switch again to be her team’s cheerleader is just as impressive.

“She is loud, she is supportive, and she is there for us. I don’t think a lot of people realize how difficult that is. For that big of a person and player to go from playing every minute of every game she’s ever been in to being on the sideline and still having that supportive attitude, it’s something you don’t see in anyone. And she does it just as well as a person who has always been on the sideline and maybe even better.”

Despite cheering on her team every game, Sentnor says she still has hard days both physically and mentally. Physically, there are days where she shows up exhausted, sore, and feeling like her body can’t perform how it used to. Those are the days where each session feels never ending. 

“Having to go to practice, watch lift, watch all the stuff that I couldn’t do. And on top of that having my three hours of rehab. I think those days were honestly the worst because they were also lonely.”

Luckily, Sentnor says the team and her coaches have been incredibly supportive. The women on the team even have a group text for players who have torn their ACLs to be there for each other.

For Sentnor, having this team, especially this support group, has made this process a lot less lonely. 

“I feel like everyone here loves each other so much more than the game. Even after a month, two months, and it had been a while, they were still checking in on me, and I appreciate that support so much. I think that’s something special about this team,” she says.

For now, she can’t flip that switch on the field to bring her team up from a losing score, but she can take on her newest adversary — her own body — with the grit she’s always had.

“I want this to have a meaning. I want this to help other people. Because my whole goal in my college career is to have a lasting impact. I don’t think it matters how many goals I score or if I’m even on the field. I just want to have an impact on the program. So this is hopefully one of the ways that I can impact, even a very few, select amount of people.”