Foster fights all the way back to the pitch

Rylee Foster is lucky to be alive. She’s known that since surviving a harrowing car accident almost two years ago.

The Canadian goalkeeper has had to overcome the kind of obstacles most professional athletes couldn’t imagine facing over the course of their career, let alone simultaneously.

Fractures to her vertebrae. Lingering concussion symptoms. Damage to her knee, quad, hip, and shoulder.

She has fought to repair her broken body for two years, wondering if she would ever be able to return to the game she loves. As setbacks mounted, doubts flooded her mind.

“I’m a washed-out pro,” she would think to herself on some of the darker days.

Now, Foster is back on the pitch and ready for a new journey in New Zealand.

“I'm just excited for the opportunity to play again, honestly. I just want to play,” Foster told TSN. “There were a lot of times that I thought maybe it's not going to happen.”

Perhaps fittingly, Foster is resurrecting her career with Wellington Phoenix in the A League Women, based primarily in Australia. Foster, a native of Cambridge, Ont., had played for parts of three seasons with Liverpool before her accident, and is ready to start a new chapter when the A League season starts this weekend.

“Being able to go over there and play in a well-developed league that has a lot of hype around it right now, a lot of talent within it – it's exciting,” Foster said. “The club has been amazing, super understanding, super professional – probably the most professional environment I have been dealing with since I've become a pro.”

Her new coach is excited about what Foster can bring on and off the pitch.

“She’s going to be really good to have in the squad this season,” Phoenix head coach Paul Temple said on the team’s website. “Her different outlook on life will be really good for a lot of the younger players.”

That outlook has come from almost two years of arduous work, and Foster, 25, believes she is now a better goalkeeper because of it.

“The resilience that I had, the hard work, the effort – it all paid off in the end. I became this robust athlete that I never anticipated myself ever being in my career that can withstand anything,” she said.

Foster’s incredible journey began in Oct. 2021, when she was involved in a serious car accident while visiting friends in Finland. Foster was a passenger in the backseat and was thrown through the front windshield after her seatbelt somehow became unfastened. She suffered multiple injuries, with the most serious being fractures to her C1 and C2 vertebrae, which are located at the base of the skull.

Those fractures, which left her vertebrae in multiple pieces, were unstable, and she needed to be fitted with a halo device to immobilize her neck and alleviate the weight of her head.

After a little more than four months adapting to life with the halo, such as learning to sleep upright, Foster had the device removed at the beginning of March 2022.

“It was the biggest relief ever. I can't explain the feeling of the release of pressure,” she said.

After four months in a neck brace, Foster started therapy at Rehab 4 Performance (R4P), a physiotherapy, sports injury, rehabilitation and performance centre in Liverpool that has helped other professional footballers like Lucy Bronze, Chloe Kelly, and Jordan Henderson.

“It was just an overall rebuild of the body because I was sedentary for so long,” Foster said. “It was complete reconstruction.”

Matt Konopinski, the director of physio and performance at R4P, said the uniqueness of Foster’s situation was the level of her injury. While other areas, like her knee, hip and shoulder needed to be rebuilt, the main area of concern was her neck.

“Rylee was struggling to hold her head up on her neck when she first came in,” Konopinski told TSN. “When I think of her then, I always think of the analogy of an olive on a toothpick. That was her head on her neck.”

Konopinski started Foster on low-level exercises aimed at regaining movement in her neck, while also starting to load her muscles to support her ligaments. He said there wasn’t much data available to help determine how strong Foster’s neck needed to be to play as a professional goalkeeper, since neck injuries and subsequent rehabs aren’t very common for soccer players. He was able to get data from a colleague that worked in rugby, and also looked to Formula 1.

F1 drivers have to work a lot more on head and neck control as a result of the G-forces that they’re subjected to in the cars. Konopinski would use F1’s dynamometry, or the measurement of force expended, to assess what forces were getting produced around the neck. Foster was outfitted with a harness and would either resist or produce force.

“That gave us some data that we could use,” Konopinski said. “Then we could use that to benchmark Rylee’s progress against other athletes.”

Rylee Foster

Dr. Nigel Jones, R4P’s medical director and sports medicine consultant, said he and Konopinski worked closely with Foster’s neurosurgeon for the initial management of her rehab, and preached patience to the goalkeeper.

“The time in a way is almost irrelevant. We knew it was going to be a long job. Rylee knew it was going to be a long job,” he told TSN. “Her neck injury was life-threatening… And had it not been life-threatening, it was then potentially [spinal] cord-threatening in terms of her ending up in a wheelchair or that kind of scenario.”

Dr. Jones, who is also chief medical officer for British Cycling, said another complication was Foster’s ongoing concussion symptoms. It was difficult to know if her symptoms were directly concussion-related, or if they were a result of her poor head and neck control.

“Your ability to resist whiplash-type forces that can cause concussion – there are messages. Your functional neck strength is really, really important there,” Dr. Jones said.

He explained that if a person loses that feedback of messages between the brain and neck, and the ability to recognize where the head is, then that can upset other functions, such as vision, hearing, and balance.

“Picking exactly how to manage each component of that, when she was still having symptoms so far down the line from her original injury – that was another challenge,” he said.

Dr. Jones said the main goal was to give Foster quality in her day-to-day life. When it came to returning to her career on the pitch, he and Konopinski deliberately did not make any promises.

“It was really important for Rylee’s psychological well-being that we didn't over promise and under deliver,” he said. “We promised her that we would work as hard as we could to make her as good as she could possibly be. But it's testament to her that she never lost that belief that one day she could return to being a professional goalkeeper.”

Foster said that while her neck strength came back fairly quickly, other areas would impede her progress. The quantity of her injuries would sometimes hinder her rehab team’s treatment plan. While trying to exercise one area, she would experience issues with another.

As is typical with rehab, Foster’s journey was a rollercoaster. One of her highest moments was at the beginning of the year when she returned to diving. But the lows also came. She tore her quad in December 2022. Then in April, she needed shoulder surgery.

As the physical setbacks mounted, her mental health declined. She felt isolated. Although Foster was surrounded by people who supported her, the uniqueness of her situation made her feel like no one could truly understand what she was going through.

“I was in a very bad place. No matter how much I could smile and preach to the choir that I was okay, the reality was I was in a really bad place,” she said.

Her shoulder injury was especially frustrating because it came shortly after she had started diving again, and she was on the cusp of returning to training with Liverpool.

“It felt like my world just came down on me… It was just a catastrophe,” she said.

Another blow came shortly after, when Liverpool declined to re-sign Foster after her contract expired in June. Liverpool held a special place in Foster’s heart, as she grew up supporting the team and has the club’s anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” tattooed on her arm.

While Foster said she understands that soccer is a business and doesn’t hold any animosity towards Liverpool, she can’t help but feel stung by the decision.

“I did everything possible to support that team, that club, behind the scenes,” she said. “And then to not feel that connection for the later stages was a hard pill to swallow, because in my mind, I just never would have thought that that would happen.”

Although Foster learned to take a day-by-day approach, she said one of her best decisions was to start taking antidepressants.

“You can only do so much on your own,” she said. “Now, I'm quite stable, understanding, open mindset. I can't fix what happened yesterday… But in the moment, right now, I'm going to give 100 per cent of whatever I have. I'm going to feel what I feel. Be happy, be sad, whatever it may be – just embrace those feelings.”

She also gained a new perspective on adversity from the accident.

“I'll never experience the pain that I was in again,” she said. “And if I could go through that and come out on top, then reality is I can do anything.”

During her rehab journey, Foster prepared herself for a future without soccer. She took her LSATs (Law School Admission Tests). She is currently enrolled to get her business degree through the Professional Footballers’ Association in England.

But ultimately, she pursued a return to the pitch. She was in brief talks with Sheffield United after leaving Liverpool, but she said the club deemed her too high risk.

Shortly after, she was able to secure a trial with Celtic FC in the Scottish Women's Premier League. In July, 21 months after the accident, she returned to the pitch for her first game in a preseason match. While she described her performance as rusty, she tried not to dwell on it too much.

“I could have done this, this and this, but I don't even care. I'm playing the game again,” she said.

The trial was also a humbling experience for Foster. Before Liverpool, she had a successful collegiate career at West Virginia University, recording 39 clean sheets in 84 games as a starter. It had been a while since she had needed to showcase herself.

“I knew I needed to prove myself,” she said. “There were a lot of people doubting me, a lot of questions, a lot of hesitation from the club, naturally, because I'm a high-risk player.”

She played five games in just under three weeks with Celtic, and in a match against Partick Thistle, Foster said she finally felt like herself again.

“I just felt like I was on the ball. Everything just felt like it was flowing,” she said. “I came out and my bravery was still there.”

That game went to penalties, where Foster saved two of them. That’s when she said she knew she was back.

“Penalties [are] something that I've been known for in the professional and international game. So, to be able to do that was very, very, very exciting. And that's when I was like, ‘Yeah, I'm back. Everything's good,’” she said.

Despite a promising performance, her time with Celtic didn’t lead to a contract. She ended up failing her medical after the team doctor diagnosed her with stress fractures and bone bruises in her knee.

Foster said she was not experiencing any issues with her knee and went to see Dr. Jones for a second opinion. According to Foster, Dr. Jones told her that her knee was just responding to the added stress load from returning to game action, and that there were no underlying issues.

Dr. Jones declined to give specifics about the incident to TSN, but did confirm that he had a different opinion on the interpretation of Foster’s knee scans compared to “another colleague.” Celtic FC did not respond to TSN’s request for comment.

“Getting out of rehab and proving myself again, finding teams that trust me, finding staff that want to play with me, who will take on the risk has been the most frustrating part of all this because I know I'm healthy now. I can play. I can throw myself around the pitch,” Foster said.

Just over a month after her time with Celtic came to an end, Foster officially signed with Wellington. She hopes that her return to professional football will also lead to another comeback: one with the Canadian national team.

Foster has represented Canada at the under-17 and under-20 levels, including at the 2014 FIFA U-17 Women’s World Cup and the 2016 FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup.

While she has yet to earn a cap with the senior national team, she was part of several camps leading up to the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. Bev Priestman, head coach of the Canadian national team, coached Foster at the Canadian youth levels, and Jen Hurst, the senior team’s goalkeeper coach, was also Foster’s goalkeeper coach at Liverpool.

Foster said she has had positive conversations with both about what a pathway back to the national team looks like.

“She's obviously very keen to get back into this environment,” Priestman told TSN. “I think the first thing is obviously getting back into playing minutes in a professional football. I think she needs to put her body through that and live that.”

While Foster’s remarkable journey is a story almost too unbelievable for a movie script, those that know her all attribute her comeback to her steadfast determination.

“The fact that Rylee is even back playing, I think it speaks to her resilience and her character,” Priestman said. “You look at players that you want on your team, and you want people who are built a certain way. And she's absolutely built in that way.”

“Without a doubt, Rylee could very easily have given up at several points along her rehab journey… But she believed that one day she would return to playing in goal,” Dr. Jones said.

“Any adversity you suffer in your life, there's two ways you can go. You can choose to accept it and do your best to fight against it and come through the other side of it. Or you can accept it and give up. And certainly, she massively, massively fell into that first category.”