NEW PALESTINE — Grayson Thomas has accepted challenges and passed tough tests before.
As a freshman, he earned the spot to be New Palestine’s primary running back.
The Dragons were coming off back-to-back state championships led by a number of talented players including Charlie Spegal, the 2019 Indiana Mr. Football and the state’s career leader in rushing yardage (10,867).
Thomas answered that call with 1,101 yards and 14 touchdowns as a freshman for a school with a 4A enrollment playing a 5A schedule. He’s been better each season, rushing for 1,288 yards and 19 touchdowns as a sophomore and 1,509 yards and 26 touchdowns last season, when the Dragons returned to Class 4A and spent most of the season ranked No. 1 in the state.
He is ranked No. 3 on the school’s all-time rushing list with 3,898 yards, just 65 behind Jeff Miles (1985-87). His 59 rushing touchdowns are second only to Spegal.
He was well on his way to passing Miles last year before his season ended prematurely with a significant knee injury.
On Nov. 4, against Greenfield-Central in a sectional semifinal game at Kelso Stadium, shortly after he put the Dragons ahead 7-0 with an 11-yard touchdown run, Thomas suffered a right leg injury that would need two surgeries to repair a medial collateral ligament (MCL) and anterior cruciate ligament (ACL).
“I’ve seen enough, I knew what had happened,” New Palestine coach Kyle Ralph said about Thomas, who went down with his injury right by the team’s sideline. “It made me sick to my stomach.”
Ralph said, as a coach, you have to stay in the game, call the next play and move on, but he said he didn’t sleep at all that Friday night and it had nothing to do with thinking about playing Connersville the next week for the sectional championship.
“After you sit down and decompress (from the game),” Ralph recalled, “He may have lost the whole season and maybe the next season. When you care about the kids the way I do and our coaches do … If I slept for 5 minutes that Friday night, I’d be surprised. I don’t think I went to bed, I just couldn’t.
“I remember thinking, we’ll be lucky if he’s even back for the playoffs of his senior year, being realistic with the position he plays and the severity of the injury. I felt sick to my stomach for the kid because he lost his senior year before it ever started and there’s nothing you could do about it.”
Thomas wasn’t going to let that happen.
Typical recovery time for those type of injuries can range from nine to 12 months, but the challenge and motivation to be able to return for a senior season of football has the star running back ready to go and 100 percent cleared to begin full practice with the Dragons when they open official workouts Monday.
“(Missing my senior season) never crossed my mind. Football has always been such a big part of my life and such an important thing to me, I was really willing to do whatever it took to get back to where I was in a position to where I could play,” Thomas said.
He had to have two surgeries. One in November repaired the MCL. After recovering from it, he had ACL surgery at the end of December.
“A large part of it was just trusting my physical therapists and doctors and not doing too much,” the speedy running back said on his speedy return. “A big motivator for me to work hard at it was getting back in time for my senior season. It’s an important season to me. It’s been listening to my physical therapists when they give me a list of workouts to do and doing the required reps and stuff like that. With my nature, and with the nature of football, it was easy to let my mind run a little bit and want to progress faster than I could, that’s where it was important to really just trust the people around me to do what I was able to do.”
Ralph said one of the first things he told Thomas was how the mental part of the recovery could possibly be as tough as the physical.
He watched Thomas on the sidelines as his teammates went through the rest of last season and worked in the weight room during the offseason.
“Rehabilitating an injury as large as that one is a lot more mental than it is physical,” Ralph said. “He’s a team captain caliber kid, he’s been an off-season captain multiple times, voted on by his teammates. I knew what would hurt him the most wasn’t the injury, it was the fact he wasn’t going to be able to do stuff with his friends. He wasn’t going to be down there on the floor in the weightroom working out with his buddies, being a leader, going through the conditioning.”
“The mental part of it was just as hard as the physical,” Thomas agreed. “I would still go to lifting every day during the back end of last football season after the injury happened. Having to sit around at practice and feeling like I wasn’t contributing was very difficult. I talked with coaches and realized I could still be a big part of the team and be there for the players that had to step in. Through the course of rehab, doing the same thing, being there to encourage the guys, coach them up a little bit to the degree that I could. Finding purpose that way was a big thing for me.”
Thomas was able to do some things with the team in the offseason. In May he was cleared to be a part of the team’s IronMan Challenge, a weightlifting competition New Palestine hosts that includes other schools.
Doctors cleared Thomas to participate and he didn’t disappoint.
“He power-cleaned 265-270 pounds at our weightlifting competition in May,” Ralph said. “It was insane just the amount of work he had to put in and the doctors, physical therapists did an incredible job. I’ve never seen anything like it before. A lot of the doctors and rehab specialist said the same thing, they hadn’t seen anybody come back so quickly from all that and be in the spot he was at.”
Thomas had done some lighter drills in March and April, but the weightlifting competition let him know that he was getting closer and closer to being back to where he wanted to be, and it was competition with teammates.
“It was awesome. It was a huge weight off my shoulders being back contributing as an objective as a team, rather than physical therapy where it is all about getting myself somewhere,” Thomas said. “To be back in a team setting and working for an objective as a group was awesome.”
Ralph said it was Thomas’s way to show, he’s still the guy, too.
“He had one of his top lifts, almost back to his personal best-ever in a lift. It was unbelievable and one of my prouder moments as a coach in the weight room because it just shouldn’t physically been able to happen,” Ralph said. “It’s the middle of May and he’s just 5 1/2 months off surgery.”
Thomas continued through summer workouts, on a limited basis and got the all-clear at the end of June, right before the IHSAA moratorium and he’s ready to go for his final high school season.
It’s another challenge accepted and another challenge met by the Dragon standout.
Thomas said he got through it with great support from, especially, his parents, along with teammates, coaches and medical team.
Plus, he’s confident, never doubting his capabilities.
“Stepping up to those challenges is definitely a difficult thing, but I have always been competitive by nature,” Thomas said. “I can always find a motivator to go into positions like that and prove who I am as an athlete and as a person. It’s something I’ve always liked doing. Just being fairly confident about who I am helps a ton when you go into (challenges like that). It’s a fine line of being too confident and wanting to get back before I could. At that point, you have to be able to take a step back, and not do too much.”
