Bree Evans tugged on her Michigan softball practice uniform. Nov. 4, 2009 was going to be a good day.

A little more than a month after a freak accident in a game left her worried that she’d never walk again, Evans stood.

She shuffled out to Oosterbaan Field house. No crutches. No cane. Just a wobbly Bree.

She played catch. As the team worked out, she stood next to her coach, Carol Hutchins, and made an off-hand comment.

“When I get back, the running is going to be horrible.”

For the first time, she acknowledged she wanted to play softball again.

“I’m like, ‘She’s back,’” Hutchins said. “… I get goose bumps remembering it. There was a question, and I knew she had fears and all those things.

“That’s when I’m like, ‘She’s going to come back.’” A play at the plate How different this was than Oct. 1, 2009, when no one was sure whether Evans would walk again, let alone be able to run and play softball.

Michigan State was facing Michigan at Wilpon Softball Complex in a fall exhibition. Sophomore outfielder Bree Evans was running toward home plate, where Michigan State catcher Brett Williams was lined up to the left side of the plate. Evans slid headfirst.

“I didn’t think it was going to be bad,” Evans said. “I ran into a lot of catchers before.”

They collided. Evans ended up face down in front of home plate. She stared, blankly, into the Michigan dugout.

Molly Bausher, who hit the ball that started the play, rounded first and saw Evans on the ground. Bausher figured Evans, then 19 years old, would be all right.

“I tapped her on the shoulder and she still didn’t move,” Hutchins said. “I remember thinking, ‘Get. Up.’ Then I looked up, and I think she’s out. By that, I mean out.”

Michigan softball trainer Wil Turner instructed no one to move Evans and to call an ambulance.

Evans wasn’t moving her lips, barely mumbling. The words she forced out in a whisper hung in the air.

“I can’t feel my legs.” A tough phone call to California Michigan assistant coach Bonnie Tholl rode with Evans in the Huron Valley ambulance for the short drive to University of Michigan Hospital. Evans’ fingers moved slightly as she was loaded in. Evans remembers lights above her and the emergency medical technician talking.

“He started putting a needle in my arm,” Evans said. “I remember crying, like pouring my eyes out. I remember they were just saying, ‘We’re going to the hospital.’

“It was the longest ride ever.”

Through the pain, Evans slightly moved her hands and fingers.

“My thought in the first five minutes, that all her life she wanted to be a teacher and will she ever be able to run around with her students,” Tholl said. “Or her own children.”

Hutchins gathered her team in the small hallway behind the Michigan dugout and instructed them to not go to the hospital. First baseman Dorian Shaw led them in prayer.

“We all just went behind and just stood there for a while,” catcher Brooke Ward said.

Hutchins collected her emotions and dialed Stephanie and Brian Evans, who declined interview requests for this story through their daughter, in Bloomington, Calif. It was the hardest phone call of her life.

“I didn’t want to call them and say, ‘Gee, I think your kid’s paralyzed,’” Hutchins said. “But I needed to let them know it could be fairly serious.” The important question

At the hospital, doctors ordered MRIs, CAT scans, X-rays and scissored her white No. 5 jersey off her - pieces of which would lay off to her side her entire first night in the hospital.

Tholl stayed by Evans as doctors attached a halo. She could barely speak. Her eyes darted back and forth, staring at the emergency room ceiling.

The hospital reached Stephanie Evans and put a phone to Bree Evans’ ear. Evans tried to talk. All she could say was the same thing.

“I can’t feel my legs.”

Evans waited to go into a two-hour long MRI and started to move her arms.

“It was really slow,” Evans said. “Like they felt like, have you ever been on the ride that goes around and around and around, the Grav-I-Tron, yeah, it feels like that.

“Your arms feel like they are 100 pounds.”

Evans tried to be tough. She declined pain pills. Then she started to get headaches. The pain became unbearable. She took morphine. She wanted to roll on her side and vomit, but she couldn’t. She had to lay still and not move her head or neck.

“That first night, I would never want that first night to happen again,” Evans said. “It was horrible.”

In the MRI, doctors scanned from her head to hip. She had so many blankets on her body she started to scream because she sweated so much. Doctors asked her to squeeze a ball. She couldn’t.

Eventually, Bausher and teammate Amanda Chidester showed up at the hospital. They brought clothes, her cell phone and Evans’ favorite stuffed animal - a zebra.

“She was laying completely still, completely straight, head in lock, everything,” Chidester said. “Just there.”

Before the coaches left around 3 a.m., Hutchins wiped dirt, still on Evans from when she slid into home, off her forehead. As they left, doctors and nurses moved Evans into a bed.

“We had seen her move her leg a little bit,” Tholl said. “In our minds, at least in my mind, we left with some good news.”

Still, the most important question remained.

“You’re like, ‘Is she going to walk?’” Hutchins said. Physical therapy and team support Tholl woke up Oct. 2, heard rain outside her home and for the first time in her coaching career didn’t think about coaching or recruiting or softball.

She thought about Bree.

At the hospital, Evans also woke and realized what happened.

“I was awake,” Evans said. “And no one was there.”

Hutchins, Tholl and Chidester made it to the hospital that morning. Doctors placed Evans in a wheelchair and started the first of countless physical therapy sessions.

“Those (physical therapy) sessions were what you and I as normal, physically functioning people, would be easy,” Tholl said. “Like stand up from the chair, sit down. Take one step on the stairs, step down. Shuffle along the bar a little at a time. With crutches, try to walk around the room. Those things really tired her out.

“She, you know, the legs weren’t firing, the nerves weren’t firing to her legs. She had to constantly think about lifting her knee up.”

Meanwhile, teammates brought food. Former Michigan football coach Lloyd Carr visited. Evans made progress in the hospital. She pushed herself. She became proficient at one part of her therapy, Nintendo Wii bowling.

Five days after the accident, Hutchins said Dr. Jeffrey Kutcher, a neurologist at the hospital, made the diagnosis.

They couldn’t find any damage to the spinal cord, which meant she would eventually make a full recovery.

“I’m like ‘Really? Really?’” Hutchins said. “I couldn’t understand why, if there was no damage this was how her body was reacting. It was in shock.

“He said, ‘I think she’ll fully recover, but I don’t know when.’ I’m like, ‘Oh.’ He said, ‘Everybody responds differently. It could take days, it could take months, it could take years.’”

On Oct. 8, 2009, Evans signed out of the hospital on a day pass. In a wheelchair, her parents took her to Briarwood Mall and breakfast before the fall finale against Michigan State where Michigan players received Big Ten championship rings.

Michigan State coach Jacquie Joseph hugged Evans and gave her flowers. It was so cold at the game her blanket-covered legs turned purple. After the game, her teammates started trying to push her fast down hills.

“It really sucked even knowing I had to go back,” Evans said. “But I had to go back. I didn’t even want to go back. But I had no one taking care of me.”

It’d be another week, Oct. 14, before Evans left the hospital. Back on campus Reality hit when she arrived at the house she shared with Michigan’s senior softball players. Unable to go to her basement bedroom, she briefly traded rooms with senior Maggie Viefhaus, who lived on the main floor.

For days she sat curled up on the left side of the blue-and-red plaid couch in their living room. Going to the bathroom took 15 minutes. Showering required a special bench.

Trips to class required a bus to pick her up at home and drop her off in front of the building.

“It was so awkward,” Evans said. “I came a little late because the bus got me late, so they were already in their little circles because we always sat in a circle. I had to roll up to my circle.

“They were just staring at me and I’m like, ‘Hello, I’m back.’”

She wanted to go home. Her parents were in California. Her fiancé, Ryan Moruzzi, was in college out there. She wanted comfort.

“I never thought like I’m never going to come back here and finish,” Evans said, her voice cracking slightly at the memory. “Like maybe I could take off the semester and just go home for a little bit.”

Hutchins sensed Evans’ frustration. She heard the pleas from Moruzzi, who stayed in Ann Arbor for a couple weeks. She spoke with Evans’ mother often. The message was the same to all of them.

Hutchins was concerned if Evans left, she wouldn’t return and the care in California wouldn’t be as good as in Michigan.

“It was breaking her mom’s heart,” Hutchins said. “Because she knew how bad her kid wanted to go home. And I’m like, ‘This is where the therapy is, this is where the care is.’ To be removed from that environment, I was scared she would give up and leave. I wasn’t ready to give up on her being a player again or give up on anything.

“I knew we just had to get through it.”

At home, Viefhaus and Bausher alternately cared for her by carrying her up and down stairs and pushed her by making her join in making meals. They celebrated when she made a bowl of Lucky Charms, even if it took 40 minutes and dragging the bowl across the counter.

“We had to show her tough love,” Viefhaus said. “Like she’d be like ‘Hey, can you make me this?’ We’d be like ‘Well, we’ll do it together, Bree, get your walker.’ We had to make her do things, like, ‘Get your crutches or get up into your wheelchair.’

“She would hate it.”

It also helped. As she worked to reclaim the normal parts of her life, she spent every day between classes in therapy.

Bausher videotaped sessions to show Evans’ progress. She’d send the videos to the Michigan coaching staff, to teammates, to anyone who wondered.

Evans eventually moved from a wheelchair to a walker and a walker to crutches. Eventually, therapy got easier. And Evans, who doubted in the hospital if she even wanted to play softball again, regained her competitiveness.

“I treated it the best I could because I just wanted to walk,” Evans said. “Whatever they said, I did it.”

She practiced walking in the Natatorium and took her first steps there.

The first week of November, a month after her accident, she showed up at Michigan practice on crutches holding her glove and started to play catch. The next day, she showed up using a cane.

Then came Nov. 4., the emotional and physical turning point. Tholl videotaped it. From there, everything would be OK. Back on the field Hutchins wasn’t convinced Evans would play last season. Neither were some teammates.

Neither was Evans. She practiced when she went to California over Thanksgiving, but this was different.

“That first practice I worried, was I even going to be the same player,” Evans said. “What am I going to do when I have to dive? Am I going to dive? Do I remember how to crow-hop?

“Are my legs going to know what to do?”

Two weeks in, Evans got her answer. Working with her teammates in Oosterbaan Field House, Evans did the unthinkable.

She dove for a pop fly. Teammates ran to tell coaches.

“It scared the crap out of us,” Chidester said. “It’s like, ‘What are you doing?’”

Soon, Evans started to run. In November, she learned to walk. In December and early January, she outran Michigan first baseman Dorian Shaw. Her first workout back, she was supposed to run every third sprint.

Shaw said Evans completed the entire thing.

“It’s still something I can’t wrap my mind around,” Shaw said.

Evans’ speed still wasn’t at its pre-injury peak, but by the end of January, Hutchins realized not only would Evans return, she’d start the first game on Feb. 13, 2010.

“Everybody on our team and in the stands and even the opposing team was in shock and amazed,” Bausher said. “It was kind of one of those moments that could have been documented and made into a movie because it was just incredible.”

Evans started 56 of 57 games for Michigan and hit .358, stole 10 bases and scored 52 runs. The only game she missed was the last of the Wolverines’ season when a freak accident in the dugout fractured her left arm. One year later, another game against MSU As Hutchins put together this year’s fall schedule, she called Michigan State’s Joseph about setting up another home-and-home. The coaches agreed and picked dates.

Only afterward did it hit Hutchins.

Michigan State at Michigan - Oct. 1, 2010.

Evans planned on her mother coming out to see her play in Ann Arbor for the first time this fall. They booked the plane ticket.

Then Evans looked at the date.

“It was Oct. 1,” Evans said. “I’m like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I was like, it’s the same team and everything.

“It’s been a year, and here we go again.”

Evans anticipates Friday will be normal for her. So much has happened in a year. Her closest friends thought she might be paralyzed. She taught herself to walk for the second time in her life. She played. She earned the Lloyd Carr endowed scholarship for a female athlete.

She is healthy enough that no one, Evans included, believes it’s been a year.

“It seems like forever ago,” Bausher said. “… It’s strange to think that literally it was a year ago that happened, that ambulance rolling out on the field and picking her up and carting her off while everyone else watched in horror in the stands.

“That’s crazy it was only a year ago.”

Michael Rothstein covers University of Michigan basketball for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558, by e-mail at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein