Nov. 19, 2009

By Kevin Scheitrum
NCAA.com

The news was buried that day in late October, 2005, tucked away as a bullet in an otherwise commonplace St. Louis Dispatch story about area wrestlers garnering national attention.

Mike Roach, a Chaminade junior and one of the top soccer players in the region, will miss the rest of the season because of a neck injury he suffered in a one-car accident late Saturday night in St. Charles, the story read.

Meanwhile, Roach lay in a hospital bed, given the choice between a screw in his spine or 20 pounds of metal and a fading scrap of hope.

"I was two millimeters away from being paralyzed or dead," Roach said on Wednesday. "It was the same break as Superman."

Now, four years later, consider this time the denouement, the resolution of a story that was a single toothpick's width away from ending in tragedy. From ending altogether. After a full recovery that earned him NSCAA Missouri Player of the Year honors as a prep senior in 2006, a spot on the Indiana men's soccer team and then a transfer to his hometown team at Saint Louis U, Roach and his Billiken team open up NCAA Tournament play on Thursday night against Missouri State (7 p.m.).

To read the rest of the story, click here.