BY NATE KOTISSO | THE MONITOR
MERCEDES — Roger Adame III had a lot riding on the 2017 football season.
After racking up 27 sacks in 2015, Adame followed with a 21-sack campaign in 2016, earning him The Monitor’s All-Area Defensive Player of the Year honors. Adame’s senior season was meant to be the cherry on top of a career stacked with gaudy numbers and, most importantly, a college football scholarship.
In the third quarter of Mercedes’ season opener against Corpus Christi Calallen, Adame went in for a tackle, but the Calallen runner tried to spin away from him. The ball carrier did not escape Adame’s clutches, but the runner’s momentum awkwardly pulled Adame’s right arm backward as they hit the turf.
Adame was transported by ambulance to a Corpus Christi hospital for emergency surgery on his broken arm. He knew he would be out for a while.
“Missing my first game (against McAllen Rowe on Sept. 8) was a tough one,” Adame said. “When you’ve been on varsity the past three years — being a starter all three years — and then having to take a step back and being a coach on the sideline was the hardest part. I had the adrenaline rush like I do before every game, but I couldn’t do anything with it.”
“Roger had never missed a practice in his whole career going back to the seventh grade and even into his TYFA (Texas Youth Football Associatoin) days,” Adame’s father and Mercedes coach Roger Adame Jr. said. “This was something new for him and something new for me as a parent to be on the other side of an injury. We see the athlete who rehabs here on a day-to-day, but then they go home. This was different for us.”
While the injury kept Adame III off the field, it also changed the minutia of a normal day. He had to do things like find clothes that fit over his arm brace.
“I carry my backpack over my left arm now,” Adame III said. “I could carry on it my right arm, but I don’t, just in case. I was home the first two weeks from school, and the teachers were still sending homework. My right hand is my writing hand, so I couldn’t write any of it, because I could barely move it. My mom did a great job helping me with the homework. She’d stay home with me and helped me rehab.
“It was the little things. You don’t really appreciate them when you have them. Once you get setback like that, you start appreciating things like writing and walking.”
Adame III officially holds two offers at the next level: from Kentucky Christian University, an NAIA school, and from Division III Southwestern University located in Georgetown, northeast of Austin. He visited Texas A&M-Kingsville over the weekend.
“Right now, we’re trying to concentrate on the weeks ahead and focus more on colleges after football season,” Adame III said. “The injury told me that I had to earn everything. Not that I didn’t know that before, but it reminded me that you’re going to have to work for everything in life.”
Adame III’s initial diagnosis called for him to sit out for six to eight weeks. However, 29 days after suffering the injury, he was back at practice participating in limited contact drills. On Oct. 14, Adame III made his return to the field in a convincing 61-21 win against Brownsville Pace.
“Working is how I got back on the field,” Adame III said. “I could have easily packed it in and given up.”
In the five games since returning injury, Adame III has recorded 35 tackles, six tackles for loss and two sacks. While his numbers aren’t where they typically are, he set a personal first, scoring his first touchdown of his career on a 30-yard fumble recovery versus Brownsville Porter on Nov. 3.
As Mercedes (8-2) faces off against Sharyland Pioneer (6-4) at home on Friday night, Adame Jr. will relish coaching his son through the playoffs for the final time.
“It’ll hit you sometimes that this is it,” Adame Jr. said. “On the road back from Corpus Christi, we talked about how senior years are usually about lasts — last practices, last time you play against certain opponents. For Roger, it’s a lot of firsts. First time you get cleared, first practice back, first tackle you make, and so on. Him being able to play in the playoffs will be exciting for me, as a father, to watch.”