Don Hartgeden’s thoughts immediately went back about 25 years.
Watching his son, Matt, on the ground after catching a screen pass while competing in his last game for his eighth grade team at Granger Middle School, Joe Theismann came to the forefront of the elder Hartgeden’s mind.
Tackled awkwardly right before halftime on the Metea Valley High School turf, Matt would later be diagnosed with a broken left leg after a clean break in a couple places, an injury that reminded Don Hartgeden, at first glance, of the gruesome injury Theismann, the former Washington Redskins quarterback, suffered at the hands of Lawrence Taylor and the New York Giants on Monday Night Football in 1985.
“He had a compound fracture and (the doctors) offered us a chance to put (Matt’s leg) in a cast and put a titanium rod in there and the funny thing about it is putting him in a cast, they would never have seen the complications that he had,” Don said.
Requiring a titanium rod to be placed inside the leg to help stabilize while dealing with nerve damage in the process, Matt’s football future was very much in question while preparing to enter high school at the very place where he suffered the injury less than a year later.
“My tibia and fibula both snapped in half, inches from breaking the surface of my skin. I had devolved compartment syndrome, had a fasciotomy, went through six months of physical therapy, and suffered three surgeries to get my leg back,” Matt wrote in an essay about the injury and the rehabilitation process. “After going through all of that, the last thing I wanted to hear is my physical therapists tell me, “There is a good chance you will not be able to play football again, Matt.’”
Devolved compartment syndrome occurs sometimes with severe injuries when massive swelling of muscles occurs, which Matt and his parents found out after having surgery to fix the broken leg.
Undeterred, Matt progressed through the rehabilitation process with reckless abandon while deciding to go out for the freshman football team.
As Matt and the rest of his teammates have brought Metea Valley to postseason eligibility for the first time in the program’s history, he’ll do so knowing he’ll leave the program as a four-year starter on the defensive line within the program’s various levels.
Through the Mustangs’ first eight games this season, the 6-foot-2, 200-pound Hartdegen had recorded 25 tackles and two tackles-for-loss.
“As a football player, he works hard. He’s fought through injuries kind of and he had the serious injury when he was in eighth grade, but he’s always kind of had nagging injuries and he’s just a real tough kid that kind of fights through them,” Metea Valley coach Ben Kleinhans said. “Even this year, he’s had some nagging leg injuries and just different muscle-type things and he hasn’t missed a game, hasn’t missed any snaps.
“He just kind of fights through it and does his rehab and toughs it out, so you got to be (proud of him). Those are the types of kids you want.”
Close friend and Metea Valley quarterback Kyle Mooney agreed.
“He’s a really hard worker. I know he worked very hard to get back and all of us, all of our friends, all of our football team—we actually didn’t expect him to come out freshman year for football,” said Mooney, who played with Matt at Granger and for three years at Metea Valley. “I mean, personally, to be honest with you, if it was me—I’d be kind of a little scared, a little timid to play. But he has a different personality from me, different mindset. So he came out freshman year. He wasn’t scared at all.”
Classifying his friend as a “goofy” guy and someone who likes to have fun, Mooney said Matt turns into a completely different person on the field, a trait that may have the most to do with his ability to deal with the devolved compartment syndrome and recover to be a four-year member of the Mustang football program.
With designs on becoming a special education teacher to help those with disabilities and the less fortunate, Matt’s looking into some Division III schools should he decide to pursue his football career in college, which is something his father said he’d like to do.
But before he starts to worry about his future, Matt has some business to take care of.
“I think, right now, obviously, he’s pretty excited about what’s going on with the team,” Don said.
