WINDING ROAD: Traumatic Brain Injury Leads Taylor Mazzafarro to Coaching and to Karns City

KARNS CITY, Pa. (EYT/D9) — Taylor Mazzafarro was sure she wasn’t hearing it right.

There was no way. It couldn’t be? Her college volleyball career couldn’t be over because of something that happened to her when she was in the fourth grade.

Impossible.

Yet, the words uttered by her doctor repeated in her thoughts.

“If you get hit in the head by another volleyball,” the doctor said, “you will no longer be on this Earth.”

And so began a path for Mazzafarro as winding and with as many peaks and valleys as the roads around her native Wintersville, Ohio.

It eventually led her to Karns City High School as the Gremlins’ volleyball coach this season.

(Pictured above, Karns City first-year volleyball coach Taylor Mazzafarro)

Mazzafarro was a star middle hitter at Indian Creek High School, where she graduated in 2017. She moved on to West Virginia Wesleyan. But as a sophomore there, the persistent and troubling headaches she had grown up with became too much for her to bear.

She knew she needed help.

She was shocked by just how much help she needed.

It started all the way back in the fourth grade. Mazzafarro was playing on her small family farm when she ran full speed into a tractor spear. Her chin took the brunt of it, but the impact threw her backward.

She was treated for whiplash. But her head injury was far more severe than anyone thought.

Even herself.

In the years that followed, every spill from the horses she rode, every tumble to the volleyball floor, every impact, no matter how slight, further exasperated her brain injury.

The signs were always there.

Before the accident, Mazzafarro was an outgoing and friendly fourth-grader.

“I hugged everyone,” she said. “I was very lovable. I wanted to be around everyone.”

After, she became withdrawn.

“I was like, ‘Stay out of my space,’” Mazzafarro said. “‘Stay out of my bubble.’ I didn’t want to be around anybody. I had level-nine headaches most days. It was very, very rough.”

The personality changes lingered throughout her childhood, even through high school.

Her parents thought she was “just a typical moody teenager,” but there was more at work, deep inside her damaged brain.

Mazzafarro had a ticking time bomb inside her skull. A traumatic brain injury that cried out for help.

It was finally diagnosed during her sophomore year in college. Suddenly, everything changed for her.

She could no longer play volleyball, no matter how hard or how long she pleaded with her doctor to let her play.

“It was definitely very hard to deal with at the time, but it led me to where I am today,” Mazzafarro said. “I begged him to let me keep playing. He was like, ‘Nope. You can never play again.’ So I was like, ‘Alright. Well, I gotta find something to do volleyball related. I started coaching my sophomore year of college. I’ve been coaching club teams and here I am.”

Meanwhile, Mazzafarro underwent treatment for the traumatic brain injury.

She spent two hours a day for a year inside a hyperbaric chamber, receiving oxygen to promote healing and to alleviate the symptoms she had simply grown to accept.

“I had 275 treatments. I got Sundays off, but every other day I was in an oxygen tank being pumped full of oxygen,” she said. “It worked. It got me better. Not where I was. But better. I’ve noticed sometimes during the season the lights and the sounds and the noises and stuff in the gym give me a slight headache.”

Mazzafarro has embraced coaching.

She’s determined to build a consistent winning program at Karns City.

“I’m the junior high coach as well, so this will be my first junior high season with them,” she said. “Then next summer we’re planning on doing a summer camp with fifth graders through eighth graders, trying to get the younger group used to the volleyball lingo.”

Mazzafarro, who is an event coordinator for individuals with disabilities in the Aliquippa school district, lives in Butler with her fiancé.

Through her ordeal, volleyball has remained a constant.

“It’s definitely best of both worlds for me getting to watch girls grow up loving the sport that I love,” she said. “That’s kind of what I’m hoping to do. Spread the love.