I had this article from Mark Snyder of the Free Press passed along to me and wanted to share. Several significant points of persistence and the relationship between a coach and a recruit.
On June 24, a plane piloted by his father, which left Ft. Wayne, Ind., carrying Austin, his stepmother and two family dogs, crashed trying to land at the Charlevoix airport, not far from their Lake Michigan summer home.
Stephen and Kimberly Hatch died. One of the dogs died, one incredibly survived.
Austin, then 16, was in terrible shape, with a severe brain injury, a punctured lung and rib injuries.
He was less than two weeks removed from the greatest day of his life, when he committed to the Michigan basketball team for the Class of 2013. Suddenly, that was a footnote for a junior-to-be at Ft. Wayne's Canterbury High.
As bad as all of that, it was nearly déjà vu. Hatch and his father had been in another crash eight years earlier, also with his father flying the plane, which killed his mother and two siblings.
On Monday, in an extended phone interview with the Free Press, Hatch promised he would be on the court with the Wolverines in 2013, using his scholarship to live the life he and his father always had imagined.
To hear Hatch now, miraculous is the only way to describe his journey. The past 10 months have been extremely painful and slow -- to be released from the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago last fall, his key test actually was walking up and down stairs -- yet Hatch's doctors have told him he's as successful as anyone they have seen.
There are good days and bad days, Hatch said, but simply that there are days has him living with unrestrained optimism.
"The most difficult thing is just missing my biological family, because I'm the only one left," he said, in a bit of a slower speech pattern than before the crash but still extremely sharp. "I wish there was an instructional manual in how to deal with this kind of loss."
He's living life as the ultimate survivor, in which he thinks no one else can relate.
"No one that I know of," he said. "If there is someone, I haven't met them yet."
On the road back
After the crash, Hatch was put in a medically induced coma to control his brain's swelling. He was uncertain what shape he would be in on the side. When he started to emerge from the coma -- he constantly explains there wasn't a flashpoint moment, where suddenly his eyes popped open -- adjusting to life took time."At first I couldn't remember, if you asked me then who are you talking to, I'd say I really don't know," Hatch recalled. "A reporter from the Detroit Free Press? I'd say that's odd, why am I talking to him? I couldn't put two and two together.
"I just became more aware of things over time. My brain got to the point where it had developed back to almost as sharp as it was. Recovering from a brain injury takes a lot of time. I have doctors now, and they said there's no way you can make the brain heal overnight. It's going to take time. They said I'm doing as good a job as they've ever seen at making the process go faster, but there's not a way you can just make a brain recover overnight."
As Hatch works his way through Monday's phone conversation, nothing trips him up, and he's quick to react. He has a calm and measured answer for every situation, a sign of that progress.
"My speech is a little bit slower because I had a traumatic brain injury," he said. "In my mind, that's the worst kind of injury because the brain is every bit as valuable as every other organ.
"I still have all the intelligence, it just takes me a little more work to access it. All the knowledge is still in my brain, but it's just kind of hiding. It's taken every bit of the last 10 months to learn it."
Day by day, it was a few steps forward, one back -- as described on the CaringBridge update page his family made to share the early days of his recovery. Patience was key.
The most difficult part remained the loss of his father, a doctor specializing in pain management who attended Michigan. When Austin committed, he told the Free Press he eventually planned to enter medical school. By all accounts, Stephen and Austin were inseparable. The pair had an intense bond having survived the first family tragedy and leaning on each other as the years went by.
This time, Hatch is doing it without his father, while battling through his own rehab.
"My dad's dad, my grandpa Jim Hatch, he's as close a thing to my dad as there is," Austin said. "So he's been very instrumental in helping me with the recovery process."
Looking ahead
Hatch's path to U-M has been detoured but not scuttled. Basketball remains a priority, and coach John Beilein remains a lifeline.An NCAA waiver allows Beilein to talk to Hatch more frequently than other recruits -- Hatch said they talked "a couple times a month." He said Beilein's support reminded him of the support that awaited him in Ann Arbor.
(Under NCAA rules, Beilein cannot discuss Hatch publicly until he signs his letter-of-intent this fall.)
Hatch has yet to be cleared to play and said he didn't care, trusting his doctors will tell him when it's appropriate. He has every intention of playing for the Wolverines in 17 months, and a lot of that is because of Beilein.
"He is one of the best guys that I know, he's unbelievable," Hatch said. "He says you're not going to be as good at basketball -- not yet. It takes time. He understands my road to recovery is not going to be an easy one. It's going to take a lot of work. He's still supportive of me and everything. It's pretty cool.
"I'm still going on a full basketball scholarship. I'll still be on the team and all of that and go to practice and everything. But I just don't know if I'll be quite as good as I was before. But I still have over a year until then, so a lot can happen."
As a 6-foot-6 sophomore wing, Hatch shot 45% on three-pointers and was versatile enough to get to the basket. He also considered Notre Dame and Virginia.
He's stunningly optimistic, barely flinching at limits, shown by his reapproach to dunking, which he says is coming soon, and his passion for the game, which his teammates felt as he sat nicely dressed on the bench, burning inside when they struggled, thinking, "I just want to go out there and shoot and everything and do it for them."
He attended a handful of U-M games -- "if you've got seats reserved for you, you might as well take them," he said -- further sealing his college decision.
And every time he'd pause and miss his father, he'd realize the life ahead of him, and how many people his recovery had inspired. That's where the signed jerseys from Magic Johnson and Larry Bird on his wall come in, as they admired his will. There's the letter from legendary businessman Warren Buffett telling Hatch he was amazing and offering an invite to Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in Omaha, Neb., next year.
Considering how far he has come, much of which he attributes to a passionate Christian faith, the next steps should be easier than the last.
"Some days are more difficult than others as weird as that sounds," Hatch said. "Some days things just kind of hit me. I don't know why, they just do. It's kind of tough because I'm the only one left out of my immediate family. That makes things kind of difficult.
"But just because tragic stuff happened to me, my life's not over. I've got all kinds of positive things working in my favor. I'm going to Michigan, I've got a great family, great parents, and I get to go to a great (high) school. If you just focus on the negative things, you shouldn't let that outweigh the positive things in your life."
Contact Mark Snyder: msnyder@freepress.com .
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