Hannah Solano: Persevering Through Injuries

Overcoming a serious knee injury is tough for any student-athlete. Recovering from two such injuries takes a great deal of hard work and perseverance.

That is what Hannah Solano had to go through in her four-year Texas State soccer career.

Born in Brentwood, California, Solano began playing soccer as soon as she could walk.

“My whole family plays [soccer] and my Dad still plays two or three times a week in a couple of different leagues,” said Solano. “It was just knowing once I started walking, I was going to be a soccer player.”

She entered the club soccer scene when she was 11 in California. When her family moved to Austin when she was in the seventh grade, Solano joined Lonestar SC based out of the capital city of Texas.

Her performance on the club circuit got her noticed by several programs including Texas State.

Solano put pen to paper and inked with the Bobcats on National Signing Day on February 8, 2018.

Throughout her club career, Solano suffered a couple concussions but that was the extent of her major injuries. That would all change her first season in a Texas State uniform.

She played in the first 10 matches of her freshman campaign in 2018 and made her first career start on Aug. 24 at McNeese. After starting the first two conference matches, her third consecutive Sun Belt start – in a big match at South Alabama – ended up being her final time on the field that season.

Just over seven minutes into the match, Solano was near midfield and had no one around her. She made a cut and suddenly collapsed. The ominous sound of a pop immediately told her something was wrong.

An MRI after the team returned to San Marcos confirmed the worst for Solano. Her season was finished with a tear of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in her right knee.

She would miss out on competing with her teammates as the Bobcats went on to win the program’s first Sun Belt regular season title and advance to the finals of the conference tournament.

The rehab to get back to playing from an ACL surgery is very strenuous. The program’s athletic trainers oversaw the process. For Solano, that was Amanda Martinez and Courtney Steele.

For Martinez, it was the ninth time to bring back a student-athlete from an ACL injury. With that experience, she already had a rehab plan for Solano's recovery over the next eight months.

“I told Hannah at the beginning not to worry, we will hit all the milestones and get you back to the field play,” said Martinez. “She was very quick to correct me that she wasn’t just going to come back and play but had a starting position to come back to. That was the tone of her rehab.”

Activities that Solano did during her rehab included hamstring curls and weight work, swimming laps, and treading water at the pool in the Student Recreation Center adjacent to the Bobcat Soccer Complex. The midfielder started out with bodyweight activities to get back her flexion and extension while also learning how to walk again.

Solano crushed her rehab throughout the process by doing extra work outside of her scheduled times. She knew the earlier she reached the milestones during her rehab, the closer she was to returning to the pitch and a chance to reclaim her starting spot.

During Solano’s time rehabbing, she was an asset to the team by helping her teammates who also sustained injuries. She always had an upbeat attitude, encouraged them and set the tone for rehab work by leading by example.

For Martinez, Solano was one of the top two hardest workers during rehabs she has ever had. The midfielder showed up every day even if she wasn’t feeling it, refocused her energy and just zoned into the work.

Solano worked her way back to return to the pitch for preseason training and eventually earned a start in the 2019 season opener against Incarnate Word.

While playing only the first 16 minutes of the contest against the Cardinals, she would come off the bench against Prairie View A&M and eventually start four of the next six non-conference matches before solidifying her spot in the starting lineup at the start of Sun Belt play.

In conference action, she recorded four assists which also paced the team for the entire season. Solano played all 19 matches of the season and was on the pitch for 886 minutes.

The spring started well for Solano but she noticed a little bit of pain in her right knee. She initially thought it could be due to practicing in the cold early mornings of the spring semester. The Bobcats played their first spring match at Incarnate Word at the end of February where she received treatment on her knee prior to playing in the contest. Waking up the next day, it was evident that it was not the cold weather causing her knee pain.

“I swear it was the size of a basketball and I could barely bend it,” said Solano. “My knee had swelled up so much that I had to wait a really long time to get an MRI to figure out what was wrong.”

The results of the MRI revealed that Solano had a trochlear chondral lesion. It is a break in the bone that requires microfracturing, a surgical technique of drilling small holes in the bone to increase blood flow which encourages healing. Add in she was also missing cartilage underneath her patella, the performing surgeon Dr. Joshua Crum inserted a plate to help stabilize her knee.

When Solano called her parents to tell them the news, she told them “You know what, I’ve done this once before and this is a shorter rehab. If I could do the ACL [rehab], I can do anything.”

The surgery for her could not have happened at a better time when it came to soccer training. The surgery occurred on the first day of spring break on March 16, 2020 and a few days after Texas State University announced that the break was extended an extra week along with the start of remote delivery of classes due to the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I wasn’t having to miss out on anything because everyone was already home,” Solano stated. “I was able to stay with my parents and let them tend to me when I couldn’t bear weight on my leg for a month, and I wasn’t having to go anywhere.”

Because of the pandemic, Solano’s five-month rehab was conducted mostly through Zoom calls with the team’s athletic trainers and by improvising workouts without access to the school’s equipment. The length of her rehab saw her miss out on participating in preseason practices.

Solano was cleared to participate in matches the third weekend of September that coincided with the opening of conference play. 

The two-semester season saw her limited to nine of a possible 17 matches with seven of her appearances coming in the fall. She also played over 20 minutes four times with the most being 31 against Arkansas State on Oct. 10.

Solano’s knee was fully recovered heading into her senior season in 2021. However, she would miss most of the preseason practices again after testing positive for COVID-19.

“I came in again with another setback and behind the team, but I didn’t let that get to me in the sense that our starting lineup was pretty much already set,” Solano said. “I trusted all my teammates to go out there and I had faith in each and every one of them. It was different having to be on the sidelines a little bit more but I just tried to make the most positive impact on my teammates while I was still there.”

This past season saw her play in all 17 matches. She came off the bench in the first 14 contests and recorded an assist on the opening goal of a 4-0 win over Texas A&M-Corpus Christi on Sept. 12.

Solano moved into the starting lineup on Oct. 17 at Louisiana following an injury that kept Kiara Gonzales from playing. That afternoon saw Solano play a season-high 76 minutes while making her biggest impact almost 13 minutes into the match. A curling shot from Zoe Junior hit off the crossbar and Solano was there to knock in the rebound for her first career goal to tie the match that ended in a 1-1 draw.

The next contest also saw Solano start along with her fellow seniors Addison Gaetano, Gabie Jones and Ally Kewish on Senior Night against ULM. 

With her playing days over, Solano will graduate this May with a bachelor’s degree in management and a concentration in entrepreneurial sales. After graduating she will head into sales of technology securities.