Hudson, Mass., girls basketball coach Marty Murphy was attending a Hawks soccer game in September when he saw Kristina Bruce for the first time post-car accident.
Murphy watched Bruce, who he had always known as a talented two-sport athlete, struggle to get out of her mom's car and use her crutches. He told Bruce she looked like she was recovering well and joked with her about having a race. Inside, Murphy was shattered.
"Literally, it broke my heart," he said.
Ask those close to Bruce, like her mom Heather, her best friend Makenna McGuire and Murphy, and they're still in some stage of disbelief that Bruce is playing significant minutes for the Hawks. Heather and McGuire saw Bruce's life hang by a thread at Mass General Hospital, where she spent six days in critical condition following the crash. Murphy and the Hudson coaching staff watched Bruce fight through physical and mental walls in her recovery as she learned to walk, run and hoop again.
Bruce improbably returned from a broken right femur, pelvis, hip and rib, a collapsed lung and torn tendons in her left hand, plus significant cuts and lacerations, to play her first game of the season Jan. 10 — less than five months after her life-threatening accident.
