How childhood challenges helped BEA athlete Gage McClenahan overcome injury, find stability
It doesn’t take long for Gage McClenahan to remember the date — Oct. 12, 2018.
The 18-year-old Bald Eagle Area football and wrestling standout remembers that day vividly. He took a toss from quarterback Jaden Jones and turned downfield. Then he felt it. A cut downfield brought him quickly to the earth.
McClenahan stayed on the ground. His usual response after going down, a quick step back to his feet, no longer a possibility. The then-junior knew immediately something was wrong.
“I got scared, so I screamed, even though it didn’t hurt much,” McClenahan said. “I started to cry. Everything was going through my head. I could see everyone start walking away and getting down on one knee.”
The Bald Eagle Area football home crowd fell silent.
The injury was as bad as he’d anticipated. McClenahan tore his ACL, MCL, PCL and meniscus, while breaking his femur. In layman’s terms, he broke his leg and and blew out every ligament keeping his knee stable, bringing his junior football and wrestling seasons to an end.
For McClenahan, however, instability was nothing new.
But he utilized the instability to his advantage, learning from each experience along the way, whether it was a life-threatening medical emergency or a tumultuous childhood consumed with moves from home to home. McClenahan says those experiences forced him to mature quickly, and helped him push through what one doctor said could have been a career-ending injury.
Life-threatening experience
When McClenahan was just 5 years old, he was in a fight for his life. The young McClenahan had been sick and was experiencing breathing difficulty, so his father, David McClenahan brought him to the hospital. Not long after Gage was released, his father noticed his breathing became more shallow, so he loaded him into the car and brought him right back.
His father spoke to him to keep him awake, but Gage said he passed out during the drive and has no recollection of the next few days.
Once they arrived at the hospital, fear began to consume David. Gage was gray and limp, according to David, and he could sense the urgency from the doctors and nurses. Soon after, the decision was made to put Gage into a medically induced coma and fly him by medical helicopter to Geisinger Medical Center in Danville.
Gage’s parents sped to the hospital, trying to overcome the crippling fear they faced. Once they arrived, the scene overwhelmed David and the fear took over. Gage had tubes down his throat and up his nose in an attempt to stabilize his breathing.
After three days without answers or explanations, David was informed that Gage would have the tubes removed and be woken up the next day. Once he was awake, it was as if nothing was wrong. The doctors later told the young McClenahan’s parents that Gage had a bout with parainfluenza and respiratory syncytial virus, a mild issue for those with strong immune systems, but potentially dangerous for a child.
For Gage, however, that was just the beginning of the instability in his life.
Tumultuous childhood
He would move from house to house, living with both his mother and father after they split up before he turned 9 years old. From drug abuse to mental illness, Gage would come to understand at a young age some of the struggles his family members dealt with that facilitated the constant need to move.
“I think my family’s struggles were always there,” Gage said. “But I started to mature at a young age, so I started noticing problems. Then when I hit my teens, I really became aware of them.”
He continued, “I knew I wasn’t the only one in this situation, so I just had to mature more quickly and push through it.”
Gage came face to face with one of those particular struggles — his parents’ battle with drug addiction — when he was just 12 years old.
“I’ve seen a lot of things on TV,” he said. “I was shocked. As things moved forward I got used to seeing it. I didn’t want to go right up to them and ask about it. Then I saw it transcend into something worse, and a worse situation. I knew that I had to grow up and talk about it.”
Eventually, Gage moved in full time with his father at age 15.
All the while, Gage performed prolifically on the mat and on the football field. In his sophomore year, he finished second in the 2018 PIAA Wrestling Championships in the 152-pound weight class and totaled 1,078 all-purpose yards for the Bald Eagle football team. He’d long prepared for a year like his sophomore year, beginning wrestling at three years old and football at seven years old.
Even with his athletic success, Gage began to grow frustrated with his home life. His frustration stayed internal for several years, slowly building upon itself like a house of cards, waiting for the right swath of air to blow it over. Then, in the summer before his junior year of high school, Gage had seen enough. The cards collapsed. The 16-year-old Gage poured his heart out to his father.
“I went face-to-face with him,” Gage said. “I told him everything that was a problem.”
Then, he left. Gage packed his belongings, loaded them into his car with the help of a friend, and walked out of his father’s house with no intention of returning until changes were made.
With his home no longer a viable option, Gage moved in with his half-brother, Monty Rockey, and his family, finding stability at home for the first time in his young life.
“They were there every night,” Gage said. “We would have dinner together and play games together. They’re so pure. It was awesome feeling like that. At home, I hadn’t felt like that in a long time.”
Season-ending injury
Gage went into his junior year of high school with his eyes focused on his athletic goals. He was ready to build on his second-place wrestling finish and his role with the Bald Eagle football team. And through just over seven games, that’s what he did. He had already surpassed his all-purpose yard total from the year prior with 1,120 and was rolling toward a massive junior season on the football field before he was set to make a run at a state wrestling championship.
That’s when he crumbled to the ground with a scream, ending his junior season before being able to accomplish his goals. For the first time, the future of his athletic career — which had long been the one constant in his life — was now uncertain.
Once the diagnosis was laid out, Gage had a decision to make. Doctors could repair his meniscus, forcing him to miss his junior year of wrestling, but allowing him a chance to play football and wrestle his senior year, or they could wait to repair it, allowing him to wrestle on a weakened knee before getting surgery after the season, according to Bald Eagle head coach Jesse Nagle. Gage chose the former, ending his junior year.
The decision was a difficult one for Gage, with his love of football and wrestling nearly equal, but the chance to come back to compete in both sports played a major role in his choice. He wanted the chance to finish at full strength and hoped to lead the Eagles to a state championship in football, and earn his own state title in wrestling.
The process to get back was going to be long and difficult, but Gage knew he would come back better than ever. If his childhood taught him anything, it was that he knew he could overcome the odds.
“It was like the survival of the fittest,” he said. “That’s all I was thinking.”
Finding stability
From there, it was time to work. Gage wanted to be at full strength for football, which meant a long and intensive rehabilitation.
“He went to therapy five days a week until May,” Nagle said. “Even when he wasn’t doing therapy with the doctors, he was doing therapy with our training staff here.”
Throughout his therapy, Gage maintained contact with college coaches about wrestling at the next level. He struck up a relationship with one coach in particular, Cornell assistant Gabe Dean, a four-time All-American and two-time NCAA champion with the Big Red.
“We were in contact for a while,” Gage said. “He said he was going to come up to our game against Jersey Shore in my junior year, but then I had my injury.”
Filled with disappointment, Gage told Dean he wouldn’t be playing, assuming the Cornell assistant would cancel his trip. Instead, their bond was solidified.
“He said it didn’t matter,” Gage said. “He said he’d still be there.”
That gesture by Dean was one of many reasons Gage decided to end his recruitment in the summer after his junior year, before he was able to get back on the football field or wrestling mat. He committed to Cornell and head coach Rob Koll, a State High grad, on June 14, 2018.
“Gabe always told me I reminded him of himself,” Gage said. “I couldn’t see myself going anywhere else.”
Months of grueling therapy — 186 days to be exact — came and went. With his knee regaining stability and his college destination decided, Gage was ready to go for his senior year, and ready to make a change in his home life, too.
Once his son was gone from his home, Gage’s father knew he had to make changes to get him back in his life, and that’s exactly what he did.
“I think that definitely cleared his head,” Gage said. “He understood that he didn’t want me out of his life.”
Gage decided to return to his father’s home this summer, before his senior year, happy with the changes that were made.
“He even built a room for me in my house in the basement,” Gage said. “He changed.”
While change was necessary for Gage to move back in with his father, he never doubted that it would come. He knew how much his parents cared for him, and how much they wanted to do what was best for him throughout his life, even if it didn’t always come easily.
“My parents always made things work for me, even when money was an issue,” he said. “I wouldn’t change anything about my life. I know I had love like my friends did from their parents. Just not in the same form. They figured things out for me and I couldn’t be happier.”
Now, Gage lives with his father once again, and flourished on the football field all season, helping Bald Eagle Area reach the state semifinals for the first time in program history. Now that football season has ended, he’ll head straight to the mat as the fifth-ranked wrestler in the country at 160 pounds, according to InterMat. There he’ll begin another run to Hershey with the hope of winning a state wrestling title.
Until then, Gage has found stability. After 17.5 years without it, what more could he ask for?
This story was originally published December 1, 2019 at 8:43 AM.
