On Feb. 5, 2019, Dean Dordevic sat in an Atlanta cab when he received a call from his son. Dean could tell by the voice on the other end that it wasn’t good news. Hours earlier, Dordevic jumped for a loose ball in the Ensley Athletic Center during practice. A teammate simultaneously rose for the ball, and the two collided in the air, crashing down at the 30-yard line.
“I thought you guys should know,” Dordevic said into the phone. “I broke my foot again.”
The Colgate loss grounded him, but it was also his final low point. When Syracuse started to win — beating Albany and Army — the redshirt sophomore began to embrace his time off.
It may sound “nuts,” but Dordevic is thankful he hurt his foot, he said.
All Dordevic wanted was to walk five steps, to not scoot around or have his partially protected foot freeze in the Syracuse winter. He just wanted to put two shoes on. But he knew a second surgery was the right decision. Dordevic couldn’t continue to play on a broken foot like he did his entire freshman year.
It was difficult to commit to that second surgery days before his sophomore season, but Dordevic’s past recoveries ensured Dean that his son wouldn’t stop working. During a high school game, Dordevic was struck in the chin by an opponent’s stick and blood spurt everywhere as a gash opened up. Dean was sitting in the stands beside a family friend, an emergency room doctor, who went down to the field during halftime.
“Sew me up,” Dordevic said. Without an anesthetic, the doctor stitched his chin before Dordevic went back onto the field to play the second half.
“He’s the kind of person who puts a belt in his mouth, gets on the field, plays and doesn’t complain,” Dean said.
The day after Dordevic re-injured his foot, he came out of the training room and Syracuse’s former offensive coordinator, Kevin Donahue, pulled him aside. He needed to look at the offense as a coach would, Donahue told him, inspect each puzzle piece individually.
Dordevic learned not to “give a crap about the guy with the ball.” He learned to view the game from a 30,000-foot point of view, his father said. Dordevic used last season to take his game to the next level — a level above 15 games started, 15 goals and 5 assists as a freshman. He learned that beating his man doesn’t necessarily mean he had the best shot. In the offseason, Syracuse installed a new offense under Pat March, and Dordevic feels like he knows it better than the old one.
Throughout his recovery process, Dordevic and athletic trainer Troy Gerlt didn’t look at his recovery as getting back to 100%. It was a series of milestones. First, he could hobble around the house. Two weeks later, he could walk on crutches. Then one crutch, then on an underwater treadmill. Finally, Dordevic was in a boot for two weeks before returning to shoes.
Coaches used Dordevic to motivate the rest of the team, Gerlt said. The trainer said everybody in the Syracuse facility probably knows Dordevic — the guy who spent countless hours parking his scooter and throwing a lacrosse ball against the wall.
“I was away from it so long I kind of felt like I was caged,” Dordevic said. “I was almost like a caged animal.”
