By the time most teenagers decide they want to compete in a World Championship, Olympics, or Paralympics, they are usually years away from fulfilling those dreams and goals.
In one way, 17-year-old Maddy Eberhard is like that too. In many other ways, she is not.
Eberhard does have a goal to row in the Paralympics next year in Tokyo; still, if she does, it won’t be the fulfillment of a childhood dream. Eberhard has been rowing for less than two years, and really only learned about Paralympic rowing - and her potential - this winter. That was when she began to think about rowing in the Paralympics next year.
But about dreaming of a career in international sports - well, Eberhard doesn't have to dream about it. She has been an international level athlete for going on four years now since attending a tryout for the US women's national sled hockey team and making the squad as a 13-year-old.
"Madison made the team when she was 13, and was the youngest player to ever make it," said her father, Mike Eberhard. "I think one other 13-year-old has made the team since. But right now, Madison is one of the team's veterans."
In her time with the US sled hockey team, and before she was even a high school senior at Buffalo Academy of the Sacred Heart, Eberhard was already traveling the country and the world playing sled hockey.
She was on the team that won the gold medal at the Women's Sled Hockey World Championship in the Czech Republic last winter, and when this year's roster was released a few weeks ago, her name was on it again.
But her name is also on another roster as well, the one that lists the athletes and crews that will be competing at the 2019 World Rowing Championships this month.
Maddy's Story
To tell Eberhard's story - her full story - requires looking back to before she was born with Larsen Syndrome, a disorder that affects the development of bones and joints throughout the body.
According to her father, Mike, Madison developed the rare genetic condition at conception, and when she was born, every joint from her waist down was dislocated, her feet were facing backward and her kneecaps were on the back or her legs.
The Erberhards knew they were in for a long battle from the moment the couple went to their doctor for a routine first ultrasound examination. The exam drew concern from her doctor. There were developmental issues, but the problem could not be pinpointed. A second examination confirmed that there was a serious problem, but because Larsen Syndrome is so rare, it continued to be undiagnosed right up until birth.
"We were fortunate because after she was born, a doctor at (Oishei Children's Hospital, Buffalo) who had just moved up from Texas and had worked on Larsen Syndrome a case there, looked at Madison and identified it."
Identifying the syndrome was just the first step in a long journey that would see Erberhard's mother Julie quit her young career as a paralegal to take charge of the treatments Maddy would need, which during her first year meant trips every three days to Oishei Children's Hospital.
While Maddy's bones and joints were malformed, they were also as pliable and soft as an any newborn's skeletal makeup, and they could be repositioned. "What they did was move her feet an eighth of an inch, and then cast them. Then they would take the cast off every third day, move them another eighth of an inch, and recast them until Madison's feet were facing the right way."
The treatments did not end there, and Maddy eventually required a double hip replacement, putting her in a body cast and wheelchair for six months at six years old. After that, Eberhard's body was corrected as much as was possible.
She was certainly significantly healthier than the day she was born, but traditional sports were out. They tried enrolling Maddy on a T-ball team and other traditional sports children participate in. "But it was apparent as the kids started to grow and take the sport seriously she was not going to be able to keep up and compete," her father said.
Maddy, apparently, had other ideas. Not ideas that would allow her to run and be as flexible as the other kids, but she had a drive that, once embraced, would lead her to sled hockey.
"My father and my brother played, and I always wanted to play," Maddy said. "When I was eight, my father was playing in a charity hockey tournament to raise money for diabetes and there was a sled hockey team there."
The team was part of the Buffalo Sabres Sled Hockey organization, and one of the organizers took an interest in Maddy. "He asked me if I had ever tried adaptive sports, but I was only 8-years-old and didn't know what he was talking about, so he asked if I wanted to try sled hockey," she said. "I went out on the ice with them over the next few weeks and fell in love with it."
Since then Maddy has kept her parents busy in much the same way she did when they needed to take her to the hospital for treatments, only now she has them keeping her company in rinks around the country and the world.
"I played on a team in the Buffalo Sabres sled hockey program, and I just kept getting better, and practicing, and made it up to our A level team. After a few years, I tried out for the women's national team when I was 13 and made the team."
Eberhard has not lost her love for the game, or her desire to keep playing with the US team, but at the moment women's sled hockey is not a Paralympic sport. It is moving in that direction and Eberhard hopes to be with them when that happens.
But just as happened in sled hockey, she was invited to explore rowing at Buffalo's West Side Rowing Club. At first, she tried rowing with the rest of the girls her age, in eights. But not long after getting started, it became too painful, and she could not bend her knees enough to participate.
That's when the subject of adaptive rowing came up again.
West Side has an adaptive program and the club's director of rowing, Mike Cute, steered Eberhard in that direction. She went to Philadelphia to attend a classification clinic in January, and was officially classified a PR2 (trunk and arms) para rower. It was not long after that Eberhard was racing at the C.R.A.S.H. - B Sprints and attending the CRI Paralympic ID camp.
At the ID camp, Eberhard caught the attention of Ellen Minzner, USRowing's para rowing high performance director, who suggested Eberhard come to trials and try for a spot on the national team.
"I saw her for the first time at development camp," Minzner said. "I heard about her, and I wanted her to come down because we really need to grow the athlete pool, and we really need kids in the pipeline at a younger age, so by the time they get to the international level, they've already got some good international experience under their belt.
"She's a strong kid, she comes from a strong sport background, from a different para sport, and just to have somebody who is so early in her career be able to hold her own among some of the veterans here at the development camp is just super exciting," Minzner said.
"Maddy is the kid of young athlete we want in the system because it's not just 2020, it's LA 2028 on our home soil. We want to have a very strong athlete pool in order to build for LA 2028. We want to start building from the high school level and maybe even earlier we we can so she is on the first wave of high school athletes that will be taking up para rowing."
And this is where Eberhard's story comes full circle. She went back to Buffalo, and told Cute what Minzner had said. Cute connected her with Sasha Bailey, the assistant women's rowing coach at Canisius College, who became Eberhard's rowing coach.
Bailey introduced Eberhard to sculling and they set her sights on this spring's national team para rowing trials. At first Eberhard began working on and off in an adaptive program at Saratoga Rowing Association in a double with Isaac French, who was on the 2017 US team and rowed PR2 double.
"We didn't have enough time together, so we lost in that race, but we both went for the single and we both won," Eberhard said. Both Isaac and Eberhard will race the PR2 singles in Linz, Austria, and then they will make a plan to train and go for the 2020 Paralympics in the PR2 double.
"Tokyo is definitely the goal for next year," Eberhard said. "I only started rowing in 2017. At first, I was hesitant because hockey was my number one sport, but when I tried rowing, I fell in love with it, just like I did with hockey.
"I'm going to keep playing hockey, but the difference is, sled hockey is not a Paralympic sport for women, and rowing is a Paralympic sport for men and women. So, I am focusing on rowing, and my goal is to get to the Paralympics in 2020, and to see where I can go after that.
"I love competing in the sport, and one thing I have learned from hockey that I hopefully want to continue to do in rowing is teaching young athletes, especially the females. That's one of the most fun parts for me is watching the female athletes develop in the sport of sled hockey, and I want to do that in rowing to."
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