by Riley Bauling
Daily Lobo
The next six months were supposed to be a dream come true for Jeff Rowland.
They were supposed to be what he spent four years working for when he played for the UNM men's soccer team.
They were supposed to be the payoff for all the hard work he put in rehabilitating the torn anterior cruciate ligament he suffered in high school.
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That was until things fell apart.
At a routine practice for the Real Salt Lake forward, who was picked second in the Major League Soccer Supplemental Draft on Jan. 26, Rowland's foot got caught in the turf. That half a second decided Rowland's fate for the next six or seven months.
The diagnosis was a torn right ACL and six months of rehabilitation. He had surgery five weeks ago, and when it seemed things couldn't have gotten worse, the knee got infected. Rowland had another surgery complete with another setback of a month or more.
The worst part wasn't the pain, though. It's that he was so close to his goal. He had made the final cut for the team. The guy who walked onto his college soccer team after tearing his left ACL his senior year of high school was about to start playing professional soccer.
"This has been the most discouraging time in my life," Rowland said. "I finally got what I wanted. I finally felt like I started getting what I wanted in my life, what I wanted to do. And just like that, it was all over."
Real waived Rowland after the injury and told him to come back next year to try and get his spot on the roster back. He said he plans to enroll in summer school and then the fall semester to try to finish his degree in business at UNM.
The rehabilitation isn't going to be as difficult this time around for Rowland because he's been down that path before.
"I know what I have to do, going out there and busting my ass as hard as I can," he said. "Hopefully I can come back stronger."
That's going to be quite the task for Rowland because he was just getting adjusted to playing at a professional level. Now he's going to spend next semester training with the Lobos in preparation to make Real's final team again.
There's a big difference between a team that gets paid to play soccer and one that only plays in college, he said.
"I wasn't adjusted to that level yet, but I was getting there," he said. "Now I've got to start over and get used to it again."
Rowland has watched the muscles in his legs slowly shrink. He's lost 20 pounds. He puts in three hours at the training room every day and then has the thankless task of trudging around with a cumbersome knee brace all day.
But he made his dream a reality once, and he said he can do it again.
"That goal is always in the back of my mind," he said.
