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Forest Lake junior eyes return to team after serious car accident
Amanda Paulson holds pictures of two defining parts of her life – cheerleading and the Aug. 6 car crash that left her with a broken vertebrae in her neck.
(Photo by Clint Riese)
Clint Riese
Sports Editor
Three millimeters.
For years, Amanda Paulson has spent countless hours in the gym, perfecting complex cheerleading moves down to a matter of inches. This fall, the Forest Lake High School junior found out that the game of life can have even narrower margins.
The 16-year-old is on the road to recovery after breaking her neck in a car accident. Had her C-5 vertebrae slid three more millimeters, it would have severed her spinal cord. Instead, she is eyeing a return to her cheer squad and clinging to her dreams of flipping her way to a collegiate scholarship.
Charting a Course
From the day in fifth grade when she tagged along at her younger sister’s practice at the Cheer Factory, Amanda was hooked on cheerleading.
“I played basketball and soccer, but I was never really big into those,” she says.
Instead, her passion lay in tumbling, stunting and smiling. She quickly bonded with new friends and coach Dane Campbell. Her sixth-grade team went to nationals in Florida, and they repeated the feat a year later in Minneapolis. In eighth grade, she followed Campbell to a new cheer company, Northern Elite in White Bear Lake, now in Eagan.
Amanda’s skills progressed with her passion, and she formed an All-American dream – to become a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader. But first, she would have to secure a scholarship to a big-time college program. This spring, she made her first level-four cheer team. In August, she was hand-picked for the first-ever All-State Performance Team, a select group recognizing the best cheerleaders in Minnesota. It is a level-five squad, the highest mark possible.
“It felt pretty cool,” she says.
Detour
The sixth of August seemed just like any other Wednesday as Amanda drove a Northern Elite teammate back to Forest Lake from a vacation. The weather was fine. The road was clear. Amanda was wide awake.
But somewhere along the left lane of Highway 35W, between Centennial and Highway 23, the new Saturn caught gravel. Amanda hit the brakes to stop the cruise control, and turned sharply to the right.
Too far to the right. The overcorrection skidded the girls in a 180 so they faced oncoming traffic. Then, the car flipped over three times, landing rightside-up in the right-hand ditch.
What followed is only a patchwork of flashbacks to Amanda.
“I looked over at [my friend] because I didn’t know what happened,” she says. “She was brushing broken glass off of her lap. A guy told us to get out of the car because it was smoking. I don’t remember, but we climbed out of the back window.”
Amanda remembers waking up in the rain and being lifted onto a board, fit with a neck brace and loaded onto an ambulance.
“I was still in shock,” she recalls. “It felt like I was in a dream or something.”
The girls had bruises from their seat belts, and minor cuts from glass shards, but at first it was thought they had amazingly avoided further damage. However, an x-ray taken at Mercy Hospital in Coon Rapids soon revealed a fracture in Amanda’s neck.
Upon getting off work, Linda Paulson noticed that she had missed a call from her daughter. Soon, she heard the news from the doctors.
“I saw that she called and figured that it was to let me know she got back,” Linda says. “I couldn’t believe [she was all right when] they were telling me the car was totaled. Once I saw her in the hospital and she had all these things hooked up to her I was like, ‘Oh, my god.’”
Linda felt fortunate that her daughter avoided a worse outcome after seeing what remained of the car.
“I was just blown away,” she says. “I wasn’t expecting that. How could someone ever come out of this with no blood or anything?”
Amid the chaos, Amanda showed poise beyond her years.
“When they first told me, I didn’t cry or anything,” she says. “After my friend started to, then I did, or when people would come and see me. It didn’t really faze me at that point.”
Amanda underwent surgery on Friday, began physical therapy on Saturday and left the hospital on Sunday.
Road to Recovery
Coping with the injury also proved difficult when high school began weeks after the crash. Amanda had to wear a protective collar for two months, and rumors had swirled that she was paralyzed or even on her deathbed.
But her hardest moments since the accident have regarded cheerleading.
On Nov. 1, the All-Star Performance Team opened the season at Lakeville North. Amanda attended, intending to support her friends from the sidelines. But the scene proved too much to bear.
“I couldn’t even watch them compete,” she says. “I couldn’t even do it. I guess it’s too hard.”
From the beginning, the Northern Elite team has rallied around their teammate. Coach Campbell barely left Amanda’s side in the hospital. The care her cheerleading family has shown has made her miss participating even more.
“It was hard, because people told me that when coach went back to practice [after the accident], he started to cry,” Amanda says.
She has attended several practices, though even those proved too tough to watch. Still, she plans to travel with the team to nationals at Disney World next spring. From there, Amanda hopes to rejoining the team towards the beginning of next season.
Before surgery, doctors estimated that Amanda would need up to a year to recover before she could attempt a comeback. But her determination is showing through, and as she continues physical therapy, doctors are targeting early May. If it were up to Amanda, she would likely be bouncing around the gym already.
“I will kind of go slow, but if I do something right, I’m not going to do it over again,” she says.
She may never regain the full range of motion in her neck, but the long-term prognosis is bright. For a teenager who has come this far, that long-sought scholarship is still very attainable.
“The coaches are very positive,” says Linda. “They think it’s going to still be possible. As long as they keep having this positive attitude and she keeps having this positive attitude, she will be able to achieve her goals.”
Through it all, Amanda has kept her spirits high, choosing not to feel sorry for herself.
“Now I am trying to look at it as something good that happened, I guess,” she says. “It’s a life-changing experience.”
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