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How much do you think you could accomplish in 55 weeks?

For Towson wide receiver Sam Reynolds, that’s the amount of time between going into cardiac arrest and almost losing his life, to strapping up to play in the first game of the 2024 season. 

August 14th, 2023, started as a normal day for Reynolds. Fall practice with his team, spent some time with his girlfriend, prepared for the next day and went to sleep. During the night, he went into ventricular fibrillation, or v-fib, which is a type of irregular heartbeat that stops the heart from pumping blood to the rest of the body. It’s the most frequent cause of sudden cardiac death. It wasn’t until days later he woke up in a hospital bed in St. Jospeh’s Medical Center. 

“I woke up just thinking I had a great sleep, tried to get up and use the restroom and there were tubes holding my arm down and I see my parents. I knew something’s not right,” Reynolds recapped with a smile on his face.

He listened as his parents and the medical staff explained what happened, and how he’d been in a medically induced coma to protect his brain from severe damage. But as he was taking it all in, the competitor in him took over.

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“My first thought was, okay, so how long am I out?”

Towson Head Coach Pete Shinnick and the rest of the Tiger coaching staff were supportive of Reynolds’ desire to get back to the playing field, but everyone involved wanted to make sure the necessary steps were taken to make that a real, and safe, possibility. Those steps included a 3-day visit to the Mayo Clinic in January of 2024 and a meeting with the Towson Sports Medicine Team to discuss the extensive rehab process ahead of them.

“It was a very strict protocol of ramp up of walking, jogging, running, introducing lifting. The main thing was being able to control what his percent of heartrate was and to watch and see how he recovered,” explained Nathan Wilder, the Director of Sports Medicine.

Reynolds was back to the basics in the weightroom for the next 3 months. He was only allowed to work on lower body and slowly got to the point where he could extend his arms and use weights on his upper body. 

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“It was definitely slow and painful because I’ve always been one of the ones to push the limit. We bumped heads a lot, but I appreciate them for helping me get to where I am,” Reynolds said through a laugh.

After months of slow and painful hard work, he got the green light to join the team for the start of fall camp. And on August 31st, 2024, Sam Reynolds took the field with his team to take on the Cincinnati Bearcats.

“Even though we didn’t get the win…I wanted to win my first game back but just being out there was a win within itself.”

Just a week later, with his parents in the stands and friends from home watching on livestream, he scored the first touchdown of his career against Morgan State. 

“Morgan was a perfect way to end the storm. Touching the end zone was just a huge weight lifted of [my] shoulders.”

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This experience not only changed Reynolds’ outlook on the game of football…

“Practice is fun to me now! Some practices I would dread it, like if it’s raining, but now everyday I’m out there smiling and jumping around, enjoying my teammates, enjoying the atmosphere. Good or bad day, you’ve just gotta smile through it.”

…but also, on life in general.

“It just taught me to appreciate the little things more. I go on walks a lot more…just making somebody’s day, like a stranger, holding the door. Anything really. It all matters but you don’t notice it until you don’t have it.”

And with that same smile on his face that was plastered there throughout the entire time we sat down together, Reynolds offered some advice on how he made it through what was one of the toughest years of his young life. 

“I actually had this quote on my mirror, so I saw it every day. It was ‘those rainy days help the grass grow’. That alone spoke volumes to me…don’t think about the rain, think about the next day when that grass is growing and everything is greener, and you see the flowers blossoming. But also remember, you needed the rain. That’s what kept me going.”