This Athens-area athlete overcomes birth defects to land SEC scholarship

North Oconee girls basketball senior Rin Drudge was told she'd have a hard life.

Well, her mother Katherine was told as much, 18 years ago in the hospital room after newborn Rin, their rainbow baby, was taken away to be examined by doctors. Rin was born with a birth defect called fibular hemimelia post axial hypoplasia — when bones don't fully develop in the baby's lower extremities and the patient is often left with half of or no fibula at all. She also has only nine toes, no ACL in her affected leg and leg length discrepancies.

Katherine Drudge and her husband Jay Drudge refused to believe the doctor's words. There was no way their little girl was going to struggle — they'd make sure of it. When Rin reached walking age and had a noticeable wobble with one leg being about two inches shorter than the other, they scouted for options.

"My parents always pushed me to be the best I can be," Rin said. "Even when I'm tired, they're telling me you know what you want, you want to be a collegiate diver and you like to play basketball, you're going to do that the best you can. They always push me to be the best and keep working."

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At the age of 10, Rin began having surgeries. Her parents had opted to stop the growth of the good leg, so that the bad leg could catch up. This is the reverse of what usually happens in these corrective scenarios, Katherine noted, usually people opt to lengthen.

So, once a year for five years, Atlanta-based doctor Albert Pendleton put plates and screws into Rin's good knee. In year six, she had double leg surgery and was wheelchair bound. She also had lifts placed on the bottoms of her shoes. They had to move around the logistics of the house, allowing Rin to sleep next to her mom on the ground floor because she couldn't make it up stairs.

"It was absolutely horrible," Katherine said. "The pain was just really unbearable. After the first surgery, she'd never felt pain (like that) before. This was a new thing. ... We really had a hard time finding medications that were helping with her pain. After the surgery, they released us and sent us home and we actually had to be checked back into the hospital because the pain was just unbearable. She screamed nonstop, morning, noon and night."

"Feeling that pain at a young age, it was terrifying," Rin said. "And mentally, it was hard too because I would see all of my friends and all of my teammates getting better (at our sport) and I couldn't. I just had to sit there and watch them get better, and that took a toll because I knew that I had to work even harder than I already was so I could catch up with everyone."

Now, eight years later, she's a three-sport athlete at North Oconee High School, graduating this spring with a scholarship to the University of Alabama's swim and dive team.

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If you would've told Katherine and Jay that 18 years ago, they wouldn't have believed it.

"I knew she wasn't going to struggle; I knew she wasn't," Katherine said. "But if you said, 'Hey, she's going to be a D1 athlete and sign with the University of Alabama,' in that hospital room I would've been like 'Um, really? Is that even a thing?' I probably would have been really surprised if I had heard that that day.

"I knew she wasn't going to have a hard life, but a D1 scholarship?! There are perfectly healthy kids who have straight legs and really strong, solid knees and feet that don't go D1, so the fact that she is just shows you how hard she has worked to overcome all this."

The journey hasn't been easy, but Rin managed to jump hurdles of adversity in her path with a smile on her face. Being a kid in this day and age of social media is a lot, but Rin has never let anyone make her feel bad for the way she was born or the way she has to live. She's not embarrassed, Katherine said, she doesn't hide from it and she's always been a confident, positive girl.

Growing up, Rin's shoes were special. Not only did they have to buy pairs of shoes in different sizes, because her "monkey foot," as Katherine lovingly called it, is a lot smaller, but they also had to be customized to have a three-inch lift built on the sole.

"It kind of made me uncomfortable at a young age, trying to explain (the situation) to people," Rin said. "I finally realized my life was going to be different from (everyone else's), but I knew I was still going to do what I do and still be the best at what I can do. So, when they'd ask me questions, I would tell them, and they'd be like 'Oh that's so weird' or 'I've never seen that before' and I'm like 'Yeah, but I can still do everything that you can do and I'm still going to love myself and push myself.'"

This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: North Oconee's Rin Drudge overcomes birth defects as star athlete