The Ian Shank sprinting down Arundel’s grass with a black Wildcats penny, a green lacrosse helmet and his stick raised for a drill still can’t believe he exists. He pats the hard shell shielding his chest with a smile. His own personal teammate, an automatic electronic defibrillator, sits quietly on the sidelines.
Passion for his sport radiates off the Arundel junior every time he steps onto the field. Even if it nearly killed him.
“I don’t think about it too much,” Shank said. “You’d probably think I would.”
A week into his freshman lacrosse season, Shank suffered cardiac arrest after practice that sent him to the intensive care unit. He took home a hospital wristband, a harsh restriction on physical activity that would increase his heart rate and the knowledge that his days of football, basketball and lacrosse were over.
To clear the cobwebs over his lifelong dedication to competing, Shank picked up golf last fall, even clinched a spot in the county championship and came within a few strokes of qualifying for the District V tournament. He made plans to avenge himself his senior season, while facing the possibility that he’d be a single-sport athlete through his next two years.
But he never accepted it.
Shank underwent a second procedure just before the fall season. So long as he continued to feel “fine,” he knew his doctors would clear him. Fortunately, nothing came up, and on March 22 against Severna Park, Shank lined up beside his teammates. As the National Anthem swelled, his heart went with it.
“I really couldn’t believe it. It was like a dream coming true,” Shank said. “I missed it so much.”
But the choice was not only Shank’s, or his doctors’. But just before the spring season tryouts, coach James McGill said the Arundel administration came to him for one last check: “Are you comfortable with this?”
Opposing coaches, McGill said, sometimes can’t believe that sending out someone whose internal organ already failed him once during lacrosse doesn’t bother him. But they hadn’t been standing next to the Arundel coach in the weight room during three months of offseason workouts.
“And honestly, at times, I’d just forget that anything was going on with him,” McGill said. “He pushed himself as hard as he possibly could for three months. He never asked for help.
“Some kids might look for an excuse, but it’s never that guy.”
But still, even after McGill assigned Shank a number and doled out the jerseys, “terror” dogged him, flinched through him every time he’d see Shank get hit in a drill. What if it happened again?
“I think that faded. Now, it’s just normal, everyday business, standard operating procedure for us,” McGill said.
There’s nothing normal about an AED sharing space on the bench. An athletic trainer usually possesses one, and there’s typically two more in the gym and the stadium. But Arundel issued one specifically for boys lacrosse, to be carried in a waterproof bag practice to practice, game to game. That, too, has become “normal” for the players, McGill said — “Who has the ball bucket? Who has the water? Who has the AED?”
His teammates know what their junior back-up defender fought through to compete alongside them — all of it. Before the first game, McGill has his players put their reason for playing in a “Why Box.”
“I’m doing it to prove to myself that I can come back and do this,” Shank said. “It’s something I really wanted to do. And, I’m doing it for Dad, too.”
Bruce Shank coached his son in basketball for eight years, instilling a love for it that’s driving Ian back to try out for it next winter, too. He never played lacrosse, but he loved that his son did. Through Ian’s recovery process, his father pushed for medical clearance to do something, anything physical that would lift his son’s spirits.
He would never see that day come where Shank would be able to don an Arundel jersey again. Bruce Shank passed from an infection last spring. But he could go in the Why Box.
“Ian had 60 kids and four grown men in tears,” McGill said in March. “I felt terrible for the kid who had to go after him.”
There isn’t a single day that McGill forgets what one of his players survived to be there, streaking after an opposing attacker on a Tuesday or Friday night.
“Every time I think I’m having a bad day, or I’m too tired, or had a rough day at work, I see Ian one time, and I’m good to go,” McGill said. “It’s inspirational, man. It sounds so cheesy, so Disney movie-ish, but it is. Just seeing him out there, getting to put him in a game, I literally think to myself: this is amazing.”
