Will Taylor on Coming Back From Knee Injury

Starting center was told he'd never play again

Will Taylor was facing the possibility of never playing football again.

As a freshman, he’d suffered a brutal knee injury.

“I tore my LCL and my peroneal nerve,” he said. “I had foot drop (a problem with his step when he walked, due to nerve damage) and needed two surgeries. I was basically told it wasn’t sure if football was going to be in my future. The first goal was to be able to walk and run normally again.”

It was a scary, uncertain future for the 18-year-old Taylor to face. Fortunately, his father had some advice for him.

“I remember, the first day I got injured, he asked me how you eat an elephant,” Taylor recalled. “I told him I didn’t know. He said, ‘One bite at a time.’”

“For the past four years,” he added, “I’ve just been going one bite at a time.”

It’s worked. Taylor had to work at it, but eventually he was able to walk, then run.

“I still see stuff like that pop up on my snap chat memories,” he said. “Especially now, at the start of the season, I see a lot of those: The first time getting back on the treadmill. Getting in the pool, being able to move my legs around. It’s nice to be able to look at that and see how far I’ve come.”

Eventually, Taylor returned to the field and is now, for the second straight season, going to be Duke’s starting center.

Taylor stepped in last season, when Jack Wohlabaugh got injured late in the year. This season, Wohlabaugh suffered torn knee ligaments of his own in the preseason, so Taylor will begin the year as Duke’s starter.

“I feel comfortable,” he said. “This is my fourth year doing this. I feel like I know the offense. I know what I’m doing. I feel strong out here. With my past injury, it wasn’t something I thought about last year—you can’t think about that—but I feel like it’s the closest to my original prime as I could feel. I’ve just been pushing through it. I feel strong, mentally prepared.”

He’s also added more than 30 pounds of muscle since the start of last year.

“It’s a good weight,” he said. “I’m still moving around really well. Honestly, I’d gotten up to around 290 last year, so it prob wasn’t as big a jump as from 270 to 305, but it’s good weight. I feel like the whole quarantine served me well. I got to get my diet right and work out lot.”

And, of course, he remembers the first rule of getting your diet right: One bite at a time.