The Toughest Out

The medical record of Georgia outfielder Kendall Burton is formidable. Her will to play softball? Even more so.

- Wayne Drehs

As Kendall Burton stared into the bathroom mirror, her goal was simple: to put her hair up. If she could accomplish the everyday task, she knew she was fine. But every time she tried to raise her left arm, it fell to her side. The day had begun some 300 miles away at her grandfather’s funeral. Now it was ending in her college apartment with a paralyzing fear she might be next. 

She called her dad, who was staying at a hotel nearby. She tried to explain what was happening, but she couldn’t speak. 

“All I heard was heavy breathing and mumbling,” Jay Burton recalls. “I just told her, ‘Kendall, whatever it is, I’m on my way.’” 

Kendall Burton was 18. Six days earlier, she had played her first college softball game for the University of Texas at San Antonio, overcoming so much to get there. The 23 surgeries. Failed bone grafts. The ruthless kids poking fun at her appearance. Now she was having a stroke. 

As her dad raced her to the hospital, no one knew what that night eventually would mean. How she would struggle to read preschool picture books. How her softball career would nearly come to an end. Or how it would take her from San Antonio to Stillwater, Oklahoma, to Athens, Georgia, where she would become the emotional heartbeat of a top team eyeing a spot in the Women’s College World Series.

 Burton’s story is one of love and resiliency, and it raises the question: How far would you go to protect the one thing that brought the greatest joy in your life?

“The process getting to this point sucked,” Burton says. “But I don’t wish it would have happened any differently. That’s what life is. You can’t have do-overs.”