A Westlock wrestler is back in the ring after a knee injury shelved her for 15 months.
Twenty-year old Haley Heffel wrapped up her second year at the University of Alberta and ninth wrestling season with two golds, a silver and fifth-place ranking in her comeback season.
“It was pretty heavy to step in after two years, having done well at the previous tournaments and I had finished a successful season before my knee injury,” she said. “So for me to come back after two years and doing a year of not wrestling, I was so stressed.”
Despite the pressure, Heffel’s performance at her first tournament in 15 months earned her gold at the Cascades Classic Wrestling Tournament, with zero points scored against her.
“That was a confidence booster because it was a small tournament,” she said. “I only had six other girls in my weight class, but that being said, they were all girls who were already in for CanWest, which is our university conference tournament.”
Heffel had finished a successful wrestling season the year of her injury, placing bronze at the 2015 Junior Pan Am games a few months prior. Then in August, Heffel tore her ACL and damaged the meniscus in her knee during a provincial rugby game with her club team. She underwent surgery that November and took a year off from wrestling to recover.
Recovery was supposed to take one year, but with the unpredictable nature of wrestling, her surgeon wanted her to wait until January of this year to get back in it.
“It was a pretty tough year,” she said. “It was tough being told you have to take a year off. It was my first year as a university student, as a varsity athlete representing the university. I didn’t even get an opportunity to wear our Panda singlet.”
While the recovery was not easy, the time off did give her a chance to discover where she was at mentally with the sport.
“Wrestling had consumed every aspect of my life before my injury. I had moved to Edmonton, I was training all the time; it was wrestling. I was there to succeed. With that year off, it gave me an opportunity to learn a lot about myself and get hobbies back.”
Heffel stepped back on the mat full-time in January.
After her first tournament that month, she had two weeks to prepare for the Canada West Championships, where she stood at the top of the podium in first place.
The women’s team took fourth overall in the tournament, which Heffel said was good achievement since they were missing two girls to injuries. The remaining wrestlers managed to rack up enough individuals scores to take the spot.
In February, Heffel competed in an intercollegiate national tournament, the U SPORTS wrestling championship, where she placed second in her weight class.
Before her injury, she wrestled in the 59-kg weight class, but during her recovery she decided not to cut weight and settled in the 72-kg weight class. Heffel won her first two matches at the championship, which took her to finals. Unfortunately, she suffered a tough loss and walked away with silver.
“The finals were definitely a learning experience,” she said. “My opponent really pushed me as an athlete. We had been on the national team together before, so I knew her and what was coming. She scored on my little mistakes and being rusty in the sport, she caught me on a lot of things that normally I shouldn’t have been caught on based off my experience.”
The next month, things took a bit of a turn at the Junior/Senior Canadian Championships, a qualifier for world teams, where she admittedly did not do well and placed in fifth.
“During that year off, there were multiple times where I was like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, there’s no way to come back from this,’ and then those thoughts had started creeping back when it came towards our Senior nationals,” she recalled.
Because she had performed at such a high level of competition prior to her injury and knew she wasn’t quite there yet, the competition intimidated her.
However, her coach encouraged her to get back out there and learn from the experience.
“For me, I only went to get back into the high-performance tournaments,” she noted. “I didn’t want to go there and lose and then lose my love of the sport. That’s what I was afraid of and I love wrestling. But when you keep losing or you realize I’m not up to it, for some it’s motivating, for others it’s devastating. For me, because I hadn’t been in that position before, I had to test it.”
The 2020 Olympics is still a goal for her so she’ll be building up to it with more international competitions in the next year. In the meantime, Heffel will be spending her summer training, improving her strength and athleticism, and attending a few tournaments.
