The wait is over: Lex Hilliard returns to the football field

By: Bill Oram
GameDay Kaimin

It was just a routine drill. Something he’d done probably 20,000 times. Certainly nothing as tough as any one of his rushes en route to the 2,884 career yards next to his name in the record books.
Three powerful steps and he’d be in the end zone, past linebacker Shawn Lebsock, and back on the sideline waiting for the next drill. But Lex Hilliard didn’t make a single step.
As he pushed off his left leg, the Montana Grizzlies’ offensive workhorse felt his leg buckle. His first thought was that a prankster teammate stepped on his heel. But as he looked back from the ground he saw no one.
A hot pain shot up his calf, like it had been seared by a blowtorch. He likens the initial pop to being thwacked by a Barry Bonds swing.
Lebsock, who had the closest view of the incident, called the series of events “really weird and creepy.” The linebacker, who will sit out this season with his own injury, never touched Hilliard – he just watched him collapse. Then he noticed a lump protruding from the running back’s lower calf.
Lying on the ground, Hilliard reached to where his Achilles tendon should have been, and felt only mush.
“I wish somebody had stepped on me or something,” Hilliard says, the scowl that seems permanently chiseled into his face softening, “so it could have been that instead.”
On the second day of 2006 fall practice, Lex Hilliard’s senior season was already over, the result of a ruptured Achilles.
The nasty injury is that of weekend warriors; of beer-swilling, middle-aged, pot-bellied slow-pitch softball players. Not of finely tuned physical specimens. Not of 21-year-old star athletes. Not of Lex Hilliard.
The perennial Walter Payton Award candidate never complained of tendonitis in his Achilles before the injury, and showed no other standard preemptive signs associated with a ruptured tendon.
“When it happens to someone that’s in as good as shape as he is, it’s kind of the same chance as getting hit by a lightning bolt” says Chad Kay of Northern Rockies Rehabilitation and Athletic Training Center, who worked as Hilliard’s primary physical therapist during the recovery.
Reconstructive surgery was the day after the injury and rehab was the next eight months.
“From what I know about it, there’s really no reason it should have blown,” says Kay, a Big Sky Conference running back from 1993-94. “It just did. Just unlucky.”
Though he was supposed to be a senior last year, the 6-foot, 240-pound Hilliard turned to the medical red-shirt he had available, which granted him a second chance. It also gave him a reason to work for 2007.
“Probably the first couple of weeks of rehab was probably the worst pain,” Hilliard says now. “It was probably worse than the actual injury itself because you had to get therapeutic massages into the Achilles after it had been ruptured just to start the healing process.”
Initially, Hilliard’s therapy focused on letting the reconnected Achilles heal, and then slowly the exercises progressed to calf raises, and exercises to test how much weight the Achilles could support.
“It just all goes so slow,” Hilliard says. “You’re just waiting and waiting and waiting, just until the day you can even hop or skip. I mean, every little inch you just get more excited, more excited, just until you’re able to run again.”
There was no chance he would return for any of the 2006 season. Hilliard, who had never before suffered a serious injury, knew it from the moment he felt that pop in his leg. His goals going into the season focused on a national championship and, though he won’t admit it, likely Montana’s career rushing record. After the injury, his goal was more elementary.
“I was going to be able to run out of the tunnel,” he says. And he did. It was before the team’s last game, a heartbreaking playoff defeat at the hands of the University of Massachusetts, and the crowd roared.
“It took a long time to get to that point,” Hilliard says, “but it’s worth it now.”
Everyone who was around Hilliard last year says he remained optimistic and focused, determined to come back stronger and better.
“Battling significant injury is hard mentally,” head coach Bobby Hauck says. “It’s always interesting to see how guys will respond and react. As expected, he has come back like a champion.”
In fall camp Hilliard appeared to be in top form.
He ran with the power and intelligence of someone who hadn’t missed any time at all, or maybe like someone for whom playing football is a sixth sense.
That he maintained a positive outlook throughout the ordeal is almost incomprehensible to some.
“I can’t imagine,” says junior center Colin Dow, who injured his leg in a motorcycle accident over the summer. “I was only out for half of fall camp and I couldn’t keep my head up.”
It wasn’t hard to remain upbeat, Hilliard says now. Being sidelined on crutches was motivation enough, he says, “watching games, realizing you want to be out there.”
Despite Hilliard not being in the huddle last season, teammates rallied around him.
“I think it spoke volumes about the kind of person he is, that after he was injured, his teammates still voted him a captain,” Hauck says. “So he was actively involved in the team in the locker room, he just wasn’t on the field.”
Wide receiver Rob Schulte says having Hilliard back on the team this year makes everyone’s job a little easier.
“Any time you’ve got a stud at a position like that,” he says, “whether it’s an offensive lineman or whatever, it just takes tension off the other parts of the offense.”
At practices this season Hilliard saw players on the field anxious to run off for a drink of water, or a quick breather. He’s quick to remind teammates they should stay on the field as much as they can.
“Just now you’re like, ‘Whatever.’ I’ve stood on the sideline for a year, it’s not any fun over there,” Hilliard says. “It’s nothing you want to be a part of.”
The rushing record, however, is something his teammates want to be a part of. It’s not the team’s main focus, but players acknowledge it would be nice to send Hilliard out on top.
“There’s 1,186 yards until he gets that record,” Dow says. “We (the offensive line) have a goal in mind for him to get that. Obviously some of that is on our shoulders, actually a lot of it is. I have no doubt that he’s going to make it.”
The ever-positive Hilliard maintains he isn’t concerned about the rushing record. He is just happy to be able to take things in stride again.