Inside HOKIE SPORTS | Vol. 14 No. 3 | December 2021

inside.hokiesports.com 19 Back when sophomore Brandon Green was wrestling as a 170-pounder at Paulsboro High School in Southern New Jersey, he pictured himself suiting up in a Virginia Tech singlet. Instead, he found himself lying on what could’ve been his deathbed, unaware of his surroundings after being placed in a medically- induced coma. Green was just on a casual run to his local Chick-fil-A with a friend from high school, when the next thing he knew, he was laying in a hospital bed at Cooper University Hospital in Camden in denial of what just took place. The Swedesboro, New Jersey native was just an 18-year-old kid that just happened to wrestle, and he was pretty dang good at it, too. A New Jersey state champion, the 2019 South Jersey Wrestler of the Year was certainly proof, but that was all quickly ripped away from him on that dreadful car ride that was supposed to end with presumably a No. 1 combo and a vanilla milkshake. “The week it happened I was kind of like a zombie,” said the now- 174-pounder when talking about what led up to the incident. “I had no emotion to me, I was off, I wasn’t my normal self. I looked beat up.” Strange for sure. Green had been coming off some of the best performances of his wrestling career having just won the infamous Escape the Rock Tournament at 170 pounds, a highly prestigious high school tournament in Pennsylvania that recurs annually. “I just was on a roll,” Green continued. “My confidence was at an all-time high.” It all came to a screeching halt. Just like the car one of Green’s friends was driving when he looked over and saw how pale the wrestling star was. “He got me out and started doing chest compressions,” Green recalled. “He said he was just like punching me in the chest. I really couldn’t tell you what happened. I kind of blacked out.” “They (EMS) took me to the hospital and put me in a medically-induced coma. They didn’t even know if I was going to make it out,”Green shared. “I wasn’t breathing for 10 minutes, I wasn’t getting any oxygen. They thought I wasn’t going to make it, they thought I’d be brain dead.” It didn’t stop there. “I remember waking up (from the coma), and my Mom was just hovering over me, like smiling,” he remembered. “I was like ‘what happened?’ and she told me I died. I thought they were playing a joke on me. I thought it was a prank. She kept on saying I had died, and I was just in disbelief. Everything she was saying I was totally denying.” Already committed to wrestle at Virginia Tech, Green’s high school coach Paul Morina, a good friend of head coach Tony Robie, was the first to call Tech’s fifth-year head coach. “He called me and filled me in on what happened,” Robie said. “There was a lot of uncertainty initially in terms of understanding what happened and how severe and significant it was. I found out within the day it happened for sure. I was in touch with Brandon’s mom and was in touch with Brandon as soon as we were able to.” Doctors initially thought Green had suffered a seizure, which wouldn’t have been foreign to the New Jersey native. Then it was thought that he had been born with a heart disease, a genetic disorder. Scar tissue around his heart then seemed like the conclusion, so Green underwent surgery to have an ICD (implantable cardioverter- defibrillator) installed. But when they went in, there was no scar tissue that had originally been presumed to be the case. “That’s when the unknown started coming in, it’s a never ending mystery. “I just started worrying and stressing, all I could think about was wrestling,” Green continued. “I was just hoping nothing happened to the point where I couldn’t come back.” That’s when the heartbreaking news came. The news that Green and his entire family, friends, and coaches had been hoping not to receive. The doctor came in to meet with the Virginia Tech commit and uttered the five words Green’s large group of supporters begged not to hear: “Your wrestling career is over.” “Hearing those words as an athlete is kind of like losing a loved one,” Green communicated. “It was your life, it’s all you do, it’s what you love, it was your purpose, or you think was your purpose. “It really hurts, too, when it’s someone you don’t know. Someone you’ve never met before, someone who has no effect on your life,” he said when referring to the doctors delivering the news. “It just feels like some random person taking all of these goals and dreams away from you just in an instant.” Green, who was seen as a future impact piece in Blacksburg, had it all stripped away in a heartbeat. A state champion wrestler in one of the country’s hotspots for high school wrestling, a special athlete that nearly pinned his way through the Escape the Rock Tournament, saw his entire athletic career just collapse right in front of him. “The best way I can explain it is when you go to get your doctorate degree, you spend eight years on it, you put in all the time, all the hard work to be successful,” he said. “Then right as you’re about to get that degree, someone tells you who you don’t know, comes up to you and says ‘you can’t do this anymore.’” He was so close to the finish line, his end goal was to wrestle at Virginia Tech, to win a national championship, to wrestle in front of the Cassell Coliseum crowd, and to put on a Tech singlet. He was stopped at the goaline, and now all attention turns to what’s next. “We just talked about his future,” Robie said about his conversation with Green after it became clear that his career was over. “We talked about channeling that drive he had on the mat, and extending it into other areas of his life, to his academics, and just to becoming the best Brandon Green brings inspirational story to Virginia Tech Wrestling By Carter Hill Continued on page 20