Outlet: The Virginian-Pilot

IT ALL CAME DOWN to penalty kicks.

When the Woodrow Wilson girls soccer team took to the field against Nor-folk’s Maury High School during the Eastern District playoffs last month, the battle went into double overtime.

Then Kara Jones stepped up and scored the winning goal.

The win would have been a highlight for any player, especially a graduating senior and team captain. But for Jones and her family, the moment carried extra significance.  

Born several weeks early and with a serious birth injury, Jones’ doctors told the family she would never grow up to be normal, that she’d be lucky to graduate from high school.

Her condition, Erb’s palsy, resulted in nerve damage affecting the shoulder and arm. Jones began professional physical and occupational therapy at 18 months.

Later, doctors suggested a risky surgery that had equal chances of fixing the arm or causing paralysis. The family didn’t like those odds and opted to continue therapy.

Now, 18 years later, Jones is Wilson’s salutatorian. Medals celebrating her athletic and academic accolades hang on a wall at home. Her right arm, once severely bent, appears normal.

But getting to that point wasn’t easy.

Elementary school classmates teased Jones, calling her names like “crowbar arm.” She couldn’t use a door knob until she was 9 or 10. She was finally able to brush her hair at age 13

At home, her parents came up with creative physical therapy activities, pushing Jones to use and strengthen her right arm. That’s when “slipper fights” were born.

Using only her injured arm, Jones was allowed to use a slipper to wallop her father, Dave, in the living room of their house. She got so strong the family had to switch to softer slippers, he said.

Jones also began playing club soccer. Despite some initial balance problems – Jones is naturally left-sided – she was able to excel at a sport that required more from players’ legs than their arms.

Jones said her limited mobility pushed her to work harder on the field and in the classroom.

Despite requests in elementary school, she never qualified for special education. Looking back, that was a good thing, said Jones’ mother, Dori. The teen’s parents pushed her to work hard and get good grades. She earned college credit through the division’s First College program with Tidewater Community College. But it wasn’t until the end of her senior year that Jones’ parents realized maybe they had pushed her too much, Dori said.

Still, Dave Jones said, the teen “put even more pressure on herself. She wouldn’t let herself get anything less than A’s.”

Jones received a scholarship from Wheelabrator Technologies and the Cradock Civic League to attend Bridgewater College, near Harrisonburg. She plans on studying biology with the goal of becoming a pediatrician. It’s a job that will allow her to help others the way doctors helped her, she said. For Jones’ parents, watching their daughter walk at graduation second in her class is a feeling that’s hard to describe, said Dori Jones, who lost two babies before having Kara.

“I didn’t believe we’d be where we are today,” she said.