University of Tennessee Athletics
Inside the T - A Story Left To Be Written
November 20, 2014 | Men's Tennis
By Brian RiceUTSports.com
The only story I wrote on Sean Karl was one he never wanted written.
I mean that very literally. Sean had just won the "Most Inspirational" award at the Volscars this past April and my story idea for the night was to tell his story, something that could go up on our site with the incredible video that Dani Klupenger had done for the ceremony.
But Sean didn't want any part of it. He was glad to be honored by his fellow student-athletes, but it wasn't an award he wanted to win.
Sean Karl just wanted to be a tennis player. He was a tennis player, one of the best to ever rise through the junior ranks in the state of Tennessee. Cancer slowly robbed him of that. He fought back from it once to play for the Volunteers, but in the midst of his on-court success last fall, he felt a familiar pain and didn't need the diagnosis to tell him that the cancer was back.
As part of his treatment, he stayed in Knoxville and continued to press on with his team. He practiced when he could and was around every moment. His nomination for the award was for all of that, winning was a chance for his teammates to help honor him.
But I literally had to beg him to let me write that story. He told me he would rather I wait and write about his first win when he returned from this round of treatment. I promised I would, so he agreed to do the interview.
"It's a good feeling," he told me that night of the minutes-long standing ovation he received from his peers. "It's definitely not the award I want, but it's making the best out of a situation. I'm honored."
Making the best out of the situation was Sean's thing. He supported his teammates at every step of a very successful 2014 season. He was there with them in workouts whenever he could be, refusing to let the cancer win.
"He refused, even going through this, to be any different," said strength coach Herman Demmink. "His goal was to push and make everyone around him better. As a strength coach, I have to make scaling and adjustments to each player. When Sean first got here, he was just getting back in the groove of training and sometimes you have to scale things for his needs and he refused to take that. He said he wanted to compete just like everyone else."
He was right there in the crowd, urging on Mikelis Libietis and Hunter Reese as they won the NCAA Doubles Championship.
His fight against his cancer got tougher over the summer. There were setbacks, but like he did on the court, he kept fighting.
"As a player, he was such a good fighter, he never gave up on any point," Reese said. "He was known to throw his racket a little bit."
Undoubtedly, he threw the racket at cancer more than a few times.
"Obviously, he loved the game, he was a ferocious competitor," associate head coach Chris Woodruff said. "I think the game of tennis was perfect for someone like Sean because it was mano-y-mano, he could take the fight to someone and take the punches. It was his calling to be a tennis player."
When I last saw him, he was continuing to fight and continuing to support his fellow student-athletes. He was present, flanked by his teammates, at the final home soccer match of the year. Things clearly weren't good with the progression of his disease, but he wanted to be there for his friends, to show his support for them on senior day. Mostly, though, it was to spend another day as a normal student, to not let the cancer win for one more day.
"He just had what we stand for," head coach Sam Winterbotham said. "He had great character, great toughness, just a fantastic human being."
I thought about all of that when word of his passing began to make its way through the Tennessee community Sunday night. His fight will forever inspires those that knew and those that faced him on the court.
"We will honor him in a way people can see," Winterbotham said. "But we were honored by him, by what he left us."
I wanted nothing more than to live up to my promise, to be there for that first match that he would win after defeating cancer, for people to know and to remember him for the tennis player he was born to be.
Sean, I wish we could have written that story.
Brian Rice is a writer for UTSports.com. Questions, comments and story suggestions are always welcome via Twitter at @briancrice.
