FORT WHITE — One was in a car accident.
The other had a lingering injury with no solution in sight.
Both feared they’d never play baseball again.
Fort White’s Jacob Sosa and Caleb Mathews recently beat the odds, not only returning to the field for their senior seasons but also signing letters of intent to play college baseball at Faulkner University. But signing day didn’t look feasible just a year earlier when they were just juniors, stricken with injuries that casted doubt on their careers.
Sosa was in a car accident driving home from preseason practice when a woman ran a red light and flipped his truck multiple times. Mathews, meanwhile, had mircotears in his patella tendon in his left knee that wouldn’t heal for weeks, no matter what doctors tried or prescribed.
Both players missed three quarters of the season and their dreams of playing in college were cloudy at best. Now, they’ll be teammates with the Eagles this fall.
Their stories are different yet very similar, intersecting throughout with the aid of Fort White head coach Rick Julius.
“Coach Julius pushed us a lot. He helped us a lot,” Sosa said. “He was always there by our side keeping us on the right path in life. He was always telling us, ‘if you put the work in you’ll get better.’ ”
Sosa remembers only bits and pieces of the accident as his truck flipped “two or three times” before finally coming to a standstill. He says the woman was probably going 60 to 70 miles per hour when she hit him, causing him to black out at one point as his truck stood in the middle of the street.
Luckily for Sosa, his friend Kyle Davis was following him and saw the whole thing happen. Davis pulled Sosa from the truck and brought him back to reality.
“As my light turned green I looked to my right because you know how you kind of look left and right, and I saw her face and I saw her put her hands up. She knew she messed up and then I blacked out,” Sosa said.
“(Davis) pulled me out of my truck and that’s when I woke up. I was just in shock.”
Somehow, Sosa didn’t go to the hospital, at least not right away. Paramedics looked him over but Sosa said he felt fine, mostly due to adrenaline.
But once he got home and the adrenaline wore off, he felt the pain. And a lot of it.
That’s when Sosa went to the emergency room and a CAT scan showed two torn discs in his lower back. Doctors also had to put him in a neck brace for a couple of weeks.
All of that led to a whole month of physical therapy and Sosa missed the first three-fourths of the season.
“The doctors didn’t think I’d play again,” Sosa said.
While Sosa missed opening day dealing with multiple injuries from his car accident, Mathews was in action from the start, but not for long. Mathews suffered a knee injury while rounding first base early in the season in a game against Mayo and had no idea what was wrong.
Not knowing the extent of his injury, Mathews continued playing. He was determined not to let his teammates down while going to different doctors to try and find a solution to the pain in his knee, which showed up as torn patella tendons on an MRI.
“It was kind of just one of those things where you never want to get hurt but when it happens you kind of have to get gritty and step up and make things happen,” Mathews said. “I went to different doctors and tried different procedures and nothing really worked so it was kind of a nagging injury.”
Mathews eventually got a PRP injection for the pain, forcing him the dugout for the final three-fourths of the season. His frustration level was high and the question entered his mind — is this it? Will I ever play baseball again?
“I just needed something to work. I was going to physical therapy and I was like ‘why isn’t this working?’ ” Matthews said.
While Mathews took a seat for the rest of the season, Sosa was determined to prove his doctors wrong. He didn’t even wait until his senior season to try and make his return, picking his story back up before the doctors could close the book.
Sosa returned to Fort White’s starting lineup for the final quarter of the regular season. In his first game back, he went 3 for 4 with four RBI, seemingly never missing a beat despite experiencing the scariest moment of his life.
Heading into his senior season, Sosa knew his dream of playing college baseball could still become a reality.
“I just kept pushing because I really wanted to play. I’d been working hard since I was four years old,” Sosa said.
As Sosa excelled in his season debut, Mathews started feeling pain free. That doubt about his career being over quickly dissipated and Mathews went back to work in the offseason, determined to lay it all on the line in his senior year.
“When I finally got the injection I felt really confident with it. I was having a lot of mobility issues but after that I felt really good,” Mathews said. “After that I just put it in the back of my head and didn’t really think about it. I just went back to playing hard.”
The duo says Julius is responsible for helping them end up at Faulkner. Julius recommended that they both go to a showcase at the school earlier this year and the two Indians heeded his advice.
Sosa and Mathews both showed out at the showcase and Faulkner couldn’t help but offer them scholarships on the spot.
“I knew it was buckle up and go time because I didn’t have any offers,” Mathews said. “College was my goal so I just had to work hard to accomplish it.”
Both players also performed at a high level in their senior seasons. Their numbers were nearly identical, with both players driving in a team-high 16 runs while Sosa hit .345 and Mathews batted .343.
Sosa points back to the words of his doctors and the doubt that clouded his future as his motivation for what turned out to be a whirlwind of a year.
“Once they said my career may be over, I wasn’t going to let that happen,” Sosa said. “I couldn’t let that happen. I had worked too hard and came all this way for it to be for nothing.”
The two Indians instead turned their stories into something, stories that will continue for at least four more years at one of the top NAIA baseball programs in the country, a program that went 53-7 and was the top-seed in this year’s tournament. Sosa says he expects to play middle infield for the Eagles while Mathews will man his usual spot behind the plate at catcher.
After everything the two men had been through — from hospital rooms to doctor’s offices to pain killers to injections — Mathews summed up their feelings pretty simply as they walked away from their signing ceremony back on May 11.
“It’s just a huge blessing to be able to play at a great university like Faulkner,” Mathews said.
Sosa didn’t need to say anything else. The two players’ smiles said the rest.