Blessed, even with a broken neck: How is Ryan Hollingshead still standing?

June 08, 2024

Ryan Hollingshead lay on the pavement, unable to move his arms or legs.

As the initial shock wore off, there were a number of uncertainties to consider: His wife had been sitting in the car down the highway — was she OK? Would his body be in one piece after all this? Would he ever play soccer again?

Moments earlier, Hollingshead had sprinted down the road to aid a stranded motorist. And now, after a long tumble through the dark night, there he lay. Helpless, he sought solace in the same place he always has.

Hollingshead said a silent prayer and waited for the ambulance to arrive.

Earlier on the night of Jan. 6, 2017, Hollingshead had received a call from a buddy, asking for help. Dallas was experiencing a rare ice storm, and his friend had gotten in a fender-bender on the highway. Now his car wouldn’t start. Could Hollingshead come pick him up?

There were plenty of reasons to say no. Hollingshead and his wife, Taylor, had a four-month-old baby at home, and the conditions outside were nasty.

Yet turning down a call for help has never been the FC Dallas defender’s way. He and Taylor enlisted friends to babysit and set off on their rescue mission.

There weren’t many cars on the road, but Hollingshead wasn’t worried. He’d grown up in Northern California, going up to Lake Tahoe for ski trips, and he knew how to drive in a freeze. That doesn’t necessarily apply to all Texans — the Hollingsheads had almost made it to the scene of the accident when the car in front of theirs fishtailed, overcorrected and slid across several lanes before smashing into the median.

The impact knocked out both of the headlights, and even as Ryan swerved around the accident, he could barely make out the stranger’s car sitting stalled and perpendicular in the fast lane.

Ryan pulled over in front of the wreck, turned to Taylor and said, “I think I need to help him.”

Taylor nodded. Hollingshead got out and dashed back up the nearly deserted highway. He pulled the stranger out of his car and onto the safety of the median.

“How do you feel? Are you ok?” Hollingshead asked. “Can you get yourself to the hospit—”

That’s when it happened. Another vehicle came flying around the wrecked car and angled toward the median, missing the stranger but hitting Hollingshead straight on. He slammed onto the hood, shattered the windshield and went flying, landing what he guesses was about 40 yards down the road.

“I just got crushed,” said Hollingshead, who remembers it more as a blur than a sequence of specific details. “I don’t know how fast they were going, but the only way I make it from here to way down there was getting drilled.”

Soccer has occupied a secondary place in Hollingshead’s life, going all the way back to the beginning of his pro career. It’s not as though he didn’t love the game, or that he lacked a competitive streak; it’s more that his priorities have always been clearly defined, and his profession simply didn’t come first.

He was a projected first-round SuperDraft pick coming out of UCLA in 2013, at least until he told every team who inquired the same, perplexing thing: “Please don’t draft me.”

For as long as he could remember, Hollingshead had dreamed of starting his own church with his older brother, Scott, who had also played for the Bruins before quitting midway through college to become a pastor. The winter before Ryan graduated, the siblings made a pact: they would devote the following year to building their own parish from the ground up in their hometown of Sacramento, Calif.

Despite the warning, FC Dallas took a flier on Hollingshead anyway, selecting him in the second round at No. 20 overall, figuring he was a bargain if they could bring him around.

But the sales pitch would have to wait. Hollingshead didn’t even learn he had been drafted until weeks later. He’d been in Haiti, where he and Taylor were volunteering at an orphanage, in a rural part of the country not exactly teeming with cell service or Wifi.

“When I came back into the States, my phone just blew up as soon as I landed,” he said, with hundreds of missed calls and voicemails not just from FCD officials but also confused friends and family.

Dallas sporting director Fernando Clavijo attempted to change Hollingshead’s mind, to no avail. The player was flattered by the team’s persistence, but adamant about his decision. He held no illusions about the choice he was making.

“I thought when I said ‘no’ to playing soccer that my contract was going to be pulled off the table, and that they wouldn’t wait around for me,” Hollingshead said.

He and Taylor moved to Sacramento in February, founding a church that started out with all of four members — the brothers and their wives.

To Hollingshead’s surprise, Clavijo would still call him every so often throughout that first year, asking about the state of things and just checking in. The church, meanwhile, flourished. It grew to more than 150 members by October — enough to be fully sustainable, and enough for Scott to hire a second pastor to take over for Ryan.

Ryan prayed about it and came to a realization that somewhat surprised even himself. First he called Clavijo to give him the good news, then phoned his wife. Taylor was at work when she got the call.

“I want to play soccer,” he told her. “I think this is the right time to do it.”

Taylor was surprised.

“I’m just like, you know, I had to walk out in the parking lot,” she said. “What does this mean?”

It meant another act of blind faith. They’d started the church having no idea if it was economically feasible, and now he was asking her to do it again. They moved from California to Dallas that winter, ahead of Ryan’s first MLS preseason in 2014.

“We had no money,” Taylor remembered. “Like, we were maxing out our credit cards just to get our car from Sacramento to Dallas.”

That whole first season, both of them kind of expected him to get cut. In a way, they would have welcomed an obvious sign they were meant to return to the more orderly world of their church. Who takes an entire year off by choice, and how must that diminish your skills? Ryan sat on the bench until late May and didn’t make his first start until August of 2014.

But gradually, Hollingshead established himself as a reliable, lock-down defender. He played in almost every game of the 2015 and ’16 seasons as Dallas won the U.S. Open Cup and the Supporters’ Shield. The couple embraced their new life in North Texas, trusting that they were on the right path. They joined a new church, where Ryan started leading a men’s Bible study.

Then came the ice storm, and the accident, and Ryan flat on his back as feeling slowly returned to his limbs.

Taylor was facing away when it happened, which she describes as “the greatest kindness of my life.” She didn’t see her husband hurtling through the air; in fact, he was already sitting upright by the time she realized that something bad had happened.

As feeling returned to his extremities, Ryan became convinced that his arms were broken.

“I’m an athlete; I know what pain is,” he told the EMTs when they arrived on the scene. “Everything else feels good, but my arms are broken. I have a good pain tolerance. I know what’s broken and not broken.”

As soon as Hollingshead got to the hospital, however, he was given a different, scarier diagnosis. He had broken his neck when he landed — he’d only thought it was his arms because of pinched nerves caused by broken vertebrae. The physicians immediately strapped him down onto a body board with a neck brace and told him not to move, warning him that doing so could leave him paralyzed.

Thus began one of the longest nights of the Hollingsheads’ lives. Taylor got in touch with the friends watching their baby and then kept vigil beside Ryan’s bed. Ryan stayed as still as possible and leaned again on his faith.

“In those moments, you’re so helpless that, for me, it makes me even more reliant upon God, and what I believe about God,” Ryan said. “When you’re sitting there in the hospital room, and you’re not able to move any part of your body, and doctors are telling you that if you move the wrong way, you could be paralyzed for life — and even if not, if you don’t heal correctly, you’ll never play soccer again — in those moments, I have no control.

“There’s nothing I can do, other than trying not to move, obviously. I’m not a doctor. I can’t help myself heal. I’m reliant on the Lord to do what he’s gonna do. He’s in charge of everything. He can act in miraculous ways if he chooses to. So, I’m just trusting him, because he has plans for me that are beyond what I can possibly know.”

Hollingshead made it through the night, and in the morning he was forced to make a crucial decision. Doctors were offering him the option to undergo surgery in order to fuse together the bones in his neck. This sounded like the right move to Ryan. As an athlete, in his past experience, that’s just how injuries were treated: surgery, rehab, back on the field in no time.

An FC Dallas team doctor advised him otherwise. Although he kept the worst-case scenario from Ryan at first, he gently cautioned him to try rehab first and see if he started to recover. The doctor explained his rationale a few weeks later, after Ryan started to improve: If they’d fused together his neck in surgery and inserted the necessary rods, he would have had a limited range of motion for the rest of his life.

“Which is fine for an everyday person,” Hollingshead said. “But for a defender who is constantly trying to scan and look, he’s like, it would be almost impossible to keep playing.”

It would have been natural, one would think, that in those low points, doubt would have crept in. The Hollingsheads go out of their way to credit God for all of the good things in their life. Wouldn’t the opposite be true, too — questioning the hardships, wondering why it was him that was struck that night and not the stranger he stopped to help? That is to misunderstand, though, their personal interpretation of Christianity.

“The Bible is just so clear that that road is not going to be easy,” Taylor said. “There will be suffering. So we just kind of felt like, ‘Oh, Lord, if this is our bit of suffering, you are just so gracious to God. You know this is hard. This is really hard. But you’ve just shown us so much kindness.’”

“In those moments of suffering and trials, you question things more than you do when everything is going well,” added Ryan. “When things are going perfect, it’s easy to be grateful and thankful every single day. … It was a difficult time. But I think that, in so many ways, it just drove me even deeper into my relationship with him.”

Hollingshead’s recovery outpaced even the optimistic prognosis, and he was back on the practice field within four months. Three weeks after the accident, Taylor discovered that she was pregnant with the couple’s second child — and had been that night.

Sitting at a gate inside Los Angeles International Airport back in February, waiting for a team flight home from preseason camp, Hollingshead turned his head from side to side, showcasing his range of mobility. He’s still amazed at it himself.

Although he suffers occasional stiffness in his neck after a bad night’s sleep, the aftereffects are minimal compared to what might have been. With the knowledge of what happened on that January night more than three years ago — the smashed windshield, Hollingshead tumbling through the air, what must have been a sickening thud when he landed — looking at him now feels almost incongruous.

Having eased his way back into the squad in late 2017 and become a rotation guy a year later, last season Hollingshead was better than he’s ever been. He played in every league match of 2019, setting career highs in goals, assists and minutes-played and looking every bit like one of the best left backs in MLS. FC Dallas rewarded him with a two-year contract extension last September.

Beyond a stiff neck, other reminders are more jarring. He’ll notice news stories about stranded cars on the side of the highway, drivers hitting people, fatalities.

“People get hit on the side of the road, and they die,” Hollingshead said. “Not only did I not die, (but) I am not paralyzed and I’m playing the best I’ve played in my entire career and feeling stronger than I’ve ever felt. I’m super grateful.”

His uptick in performance might not be coincidental, although it is incredible, all things considered. The very real possibility of never being able to play again, and those long months of rehab, changed his relationship with the sport. It didn’t necessarily move up his overall list of priorities — if anything, he’s as strong in his faith and as devoted to his family as ever — but his point of view has shifted.

“What it used to be was: This is my job,” Hollingshead said. “It’s how I provide for my family. It’s an awesome schedule that allows me to be home with my kids for most of the day. There are so many things I love about soccer but, ultimately, it is a job. The soccer aspect was kinda on the side. I loved it, but it was on the side. Since that accident, I have been so much more like, ‘I don’t know how much longer I’ll get to play this game, but I love it, and I’m gonna do absolutely everything I can to be the best player I can.’”

Taylor remembers the first time she watched him play again after the accident, in a scrimmage with teammates about four months later. She winced the first time he went up for a header, and closed her eyes. By the time she opened them he was running again, fine as can be, as though nothing had happened.

“And I cried,” she said. “It’s kind of like, when you know how bad it can be, then everything is just pure joy. Not just to watch him play, but to thrive within (Dallas’) system, it’s just so joyful. I feel embarrassingly grateful, like how did we get to this place?”

Hollingshead describes his first game back as “surreal.” The home crowd at Toyota Stadium gave him a standing ovation. He was amazed that he could still run onto the field, let alone play. He still makes a point, before every game, to find Taylor in the stands with their two young kids, and sometimes he can’t help but wonder what might have been.

“Had something happened to me, my wife would’ve had two young babies, and I never would’ve met my daughter,” Ryan said. “I look back on it, at times, as if it was so far in the past that I don’t even think about it. And then other times, I look back on it and realize that I easily could have never played soccer again. It’s such a blessing.”

(Photo: Matthew Visinsky/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

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