Ohio State Football: From paralysis to praise, the Shaun Lane story

It wasn’t supposed to end this way, laying on the Glendale, Arizona field unable to move his leg or arm. Shaun Lane was a Buckeye legacy who fought through injuries, position changes, and then position depth battles, only to end his career playing special teams in his final game as an Ohio State football player.

Recruited out of Youngstown, Ohio as a defensive back, Lane had worked his way up the defensive back depth chart and was the second-string corner as a redshirt freshman, but was asked to move to the running back room due to a lack of options at that position.

Lane’s spot on the defense was taken by Malcolm Jenkins, who never relinquished that position back to him and was one of the best corners the Ohio State football program ever had. But like most of Shaun Lane’s life, despite the disappointments, that wasn’t what defined his story.

While playing on special teams later that season in 2005, Lane suffered his first major injury, tearing his MCL against Minnesota. Once Lane recovered and started the climb back up the depth chart after being switched to defense, he blinked and he was already in his senior season.

Fate can be cruel like that sometimes. Time doesn’t stop for anyone. Instead of being sour about the situation, he decided to make the best of it and threw himself into being the best special teams player on the team, because like I said, disappointment doesn’t define Shaun Lane’s story.

“That was the opportunity given to me to get on the field,” Lane admitted. “I gave it my all.”

Before Lane knew it, his senior season flew by and the 2009 Fiesta Bowl was his last chance to make an impact on the Ohio State football program. It was the second quarter of a close game against the Texas Longhorns. Like so many times before, Lane ran down the field and made the tackle. But unlike any other time before, this tackle felt different. Very different.

“There was a numbing sensation and there was a loud hum,” Lane recalls. “One of my teammates named Aaron Gant picked me up to celebrate because I had made the tackle, and I asked him, I said, ‘Aaron, where is my arm at?’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘Where’s my arm at?’ He said, ‘It’s there! It’s there!’ So, he laid me back down and by this time the training staff was running out. I’m laying there on the field and I couldn’t feel anything on the right side of my body. I couldn’t move my arm or my leg. By the grace of God, my leg started twitching and it came back to me while I was laying there on the field but unfortunately, my arm never did.”

Lane was rushed to the hospital where he was diagnosed with a brachial plexus injury. According to the Mayo Clinic, the brachial plexus is the network of nerves that sends signals from the spinal cord to the shoulder, arm, and hand. These injuries occur when those nerves are stretched, compressed, or ripped apart from the spinal cord. Symptoms from these injuries could range from stinging or burning feelings that create numbness or ache, all the way up to the most severe symptom of paralysis.

Lane never regained feeling or functionality in his right arm. “It was hard and still is hard. The hardest part is the nerve pain that comes with it,” Lane admitted. “That’s something that you deal with all the time and (it) literally never goes away. It’s worse sometimes than others, but I have learned to deal with it.

“I’ve had to learn how to navigate through life with one functioning arm. I have been forced to think in many different ways. That opened up my mind to different avenues that I have been able to get involved with and contribute to different movements, and different projects because I now see life differently.”

Shaun’s ability to take a devastating situation and look at it “differently” comes from two places. First would be his upbringing. Lane admitted to me in an interview on The OHIO Podcast, that he attended church while growing up. The love and support he had from his parents and his church community was a great inspiration. The other was his head coach. Jim Tressel was, is, and will always be much more than just an Ohio State football coach.

“It transcends what’s going on now,” Lane explained. “I can see it now that I am older, Coach Tressel was looking to grow men that would go beyond football. He invested in us a lot with habits and disciplines that were established during that time period that I still carry on into my life now.”

Shaun took both his upbringing along with the lessons he learned from Coach Tressel and his Winners Manuel, and he applied it to his situation, because Shaun Lane refused to let his diagnosis define what his story would become.

“My entire identity was built up in being a football player, and in a moment during my very last game at Ohio State, it was gone,” Lane stated. “Due to that injury, it caused me to dive into my relationship with Christ, and I can’t say that it would be the same if it didn’t happen. I can’t honestly say where I would be now if this wasn’t part of my story. So, strangely enough, it really brought the best out of me. It’s hard for me to say I’m grateful for the situation for what happened, but I’m grateful for the man I became because of the situation.

“This is my story. Your story is not for you. So, whatever happened to me, it’s not for me. So, I am not doing my story any justice if I am not sharing it with someone else and being a beacon of hope. We are all going through something, and no one’s situation is worse than someone else’s. We just have our own situations, but if I could just bring a little bit of hope to someone that no matter how bad it may seem, you can still bounce back.”

Lane is currently the Location Pastor at Rock City Church at their Short North location in Columbus, Ohio just a short drive from the Ohio State University Campus. He has felt a calling to give back to the community and people who once gave to him.

“I went to church a lot growing up. When I got to college I thought I had church credit, meaning I thought I didn’t have to go to church for a couple months because I went that much,” Lane joked. “I learned a lot about religion, about the rules I had to follow; what not to do, and what I should do. ‘You need to pray this much time,’ or ‘You don’t need to say this.’ But I was missing the part about relationships. It wasn’t until I got out of college that I understood the real importance of having a relationship with God as appose to just following a religion.

“I’ve been involved in really getting connected with the student body at Ohio State and having a presence there. Letting them know there is so much more to life than just what college portrays. It’s been so encouraging and fulfilling in my current role in being able to invest and give back to Gen Z and see them on fire for God. People are so important to me.”

And that’s what defines Shaun Lane – People. I’m sure that while Shaun was laying on his back unable to feel his arm 14 years ago, looking up into the star-filled Arizona sky, he had no idea that that moment would lead him to where he is today.

Life has a funny way of directing us where it wants us to be, and not necessarily where we thought we wanted to go. Along the journey called life, we will have good moments, and we will have bad. But let’s all take a page out of Shaun Lane’s story, and realize that it isn’t those moments that define us, but rather what those moments mean in helping those who we come in contact with. Just like Shaun said, “This is my story. My story is not for me. It’s for you.”