BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – For 2,416 minutes, Matthew Corcoran was just waiting.
As Birmingham Legion FC embarked on its 2024 campaign, the young midfielder could do nothing but watch his teammates from the bench or from home for 26 matches, knowing full well that he should be out there with them.
Sidelined back in February with a torn labrum in his right hip that required surgery – something he refers to as the first real injury of his life – what transpired over the next six months was a grueling rehabilitation process. Not just from the physical nature of getting back to the player he once was, but it also called for a mental recalibration.
The waiting game was absolutely brutal for an exuberant 18-year-old who is at his most comfortable headspace when he is moving around.
“I just hate being still,” he bluntly states.
So when the 76th minute ticked away on an August 24 match against Pittsburgh Riverhounds SC at Protective Stadium and Corcoran jogged onto the field to make his first appearance of the season, even with his team trailing 2-0, he couldn’t help but let off a brief grin as thoughts of everything he had gone through recently rushing back.
Not even a minute into his debut, Corcoran got his first touch, receiving a diagonal pass from Kobe Hernandez-Foster, taking a moment to settle before completing a pass into the attacking third. It was the first of his 18 passes throughout the 14-minute cameo in what would go down as a forgettable match, but certainly not a forgettable moment for the Legion FC staff and fans.
“He’s worked really hard to reach this point,” Birmingham coach Tom Soehn said. “What he went through obviously isn’t ideal, but the way he has responded from it and the work he has put it, it’s nice to see him back and getting rewarded.”
A week later at Rhode Island FC, Corcoran again came on as a second-half substitute, only this time, within the first minute, he tactically took a player down to end any threat of a potential counter-attack. That wry smile appeared again.
It was his first foul of 2024 and another benchmark in the road to recovery cleared.
From 2,416 minutes of waiting to now 35 minutes of playing, Corcoran has given Legion FC fans a subtle reminder of what made him the club’s breakout young star in 2023, as well as a glimmer of hope of what he can provide for the rest of 2024.
He’s back.
“It helps my head a lot just knowing that I’m here again and I can do it,” says Corcoran. “Now it’s all about getting back to work.”
‘The Scary Thoughts Crept In’
The road towards the August 24 return began all the way back on February 17.
Not only was Legion FC going through its final preparations for the new season with a preseason match against Chattanooga Red Wolves SC on that day, but it was also, ironically enough, Corcoran’s 18th birthday.
The plan for the day was innocent enough: get some run in at Protective Stadium and then maybe have some cake and ice cream afterwards to ring in another rotation around the world.
Unfortunately, that hit a snag midway through the first half when Corcoran tried to play a high bouncing ball.
“I was going in to win a ball that was a little less than head-high,” he recalls during a sit-down interview with bhmlegion.com. “I brought my leg up high and moved it out to move the ball away from the defender and I felt it right there. It just felt like a big, tight ball that was stuck in my hip.”
Unbeknownst to him at the time just how serious the injury was, the pain was tolerable enough that Corcoran remained in the match after the incident and played out the rest of the half.
“I actually was begging to stay in for the second half because in my mind I was thinking ‘no, this can’t be happening’,” he says. “Afterwards, the scary thoughts crept in, just the fear that I had done something bad.”
When the pain in his hip did not subside the following morning, Corcoran alerted the team staff and immediately was scheduled for an MRI, ultimately revealing the torn labrum.
Having never gone through surgery outside of a minor operation when he was an infant, Corcoran and the staff opted at first for the more conservative approach of platelet-rich plasma injections. It’s a biological therapy that has proven successful in the past for athletes with the same type of injury and it appeared to be working for Corcoran, who had returned to training roughly a month after the setback.
In fact, his first full session back with the squad went off without a hitch and spirits were high. So high in fact that Corcoran, always wanting to stay active and work on his craft, stayed behind post-training to get some extra work in to test out the hip.
“I was just doing some shooting drills and that’s when I felt the sharp pain again only this time it felt permanently stuck,” he recalls. “That’s when my head instantly dropped.”
The tear in his hip had worsened and avoiding surgery was no longer an option. Corcoran went under the knife on March 28.
“I just felt so alone and helpless, I had such big things in mind coming into the season and in just that one moment, it’s over” he says as he snaps his fingers, representing the sick instantaneous nature of it all. “From there, you never know what’s going to happen next.”
‘You Feel Like You Can Do Anything’
It’s funny to hear Corcoran admit to his frenetic energy, because when the ball is at his feet and he is surveying his options, there may not be another player on the pitch who exudes a calmness like he does.
After spending four years plying his trade in his hometown at the FC Dallas youth academy, Corcoran’s professional career began in earnest in Birmingham with Legion FC adding the two-way midfielder ahead of the 2022 campaign. Finding his footing in year one by logging 167 minutes over 11 matches exclusively as a substitute, it set the stage for a breakout year for the then-17-year-old in 2023.
“He forced our hand,” Soehn said of Corcoran’s increased minutes for the player’s second season with the club.
That drastically larger role came despite Birmingham boasting a veteran-laden roster, with Corcoran inserted into Soehn’s starting eleven 23 times across 34 total appearances last season.
His presence provided the perfect balance on each end of the pitch for a Legion FC side that experienced runs both in the USL Championship playoffs and the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup. Corcoran completed the campaign by finishing fifth amongst the team in tackles won with 25 and in chances created with 29 – 13 of those coming as one of the team’s set piece takers. Seemingly always finding himself in the thick of the things like a magnet to the run of play, he compiled an impressive 82.2% accuracy rate on 1,072 total passes and 51.7% on long passes.
Those sparks that Corcoran had shown in the past throughout his budding youth career were now becoming a fully-fledged beacon of light on a larger stage against larger players.
“When you have a season like that, it really makes you feel like you can do anything,” says Corcoran who tallied a goal and three assists in 2023. “Playing with and against grown men, it forces you to think a little faster and to be more physical. It gave me a huge boost and things really began to slow down in a good way as the season went on.”
And for Corcoran, his season extended all the way to Indonesia with the United States Youth National Team for the 2023 FIFA U-17 World Cup where he started in the midfield for the squad’s final three matches en route to a run to the Round of 16 last November.
“It was a once in a lifetime experience,” he affirms. “It was unbelievable going over there – it’s the furthest I’ve ever traveled for anything – and playing against the biggest countries of the world. It makes you hungry to accomplish so much more.”
‘Let My Body Heal’
The first 72 hours were the worst of the whole rehab for Corcoran.
In fact, the only good part early on in the process was that his family came to Birmingham to lift his spirits from below ground zero with some soul-cleansing home-cooked meals.
However, following the operation, the man always on the move was bedridden for three days. And it would’ve been longer if not for sheer stubbornness and determination to attend an outdoor Easter Sunday church service on March 31.
“I got up, put on a suit with my crutches and went to church while on medicine and I just remember sweating like crazy all through the suit,” he laughs. “After that I was in bed again for the next two days because just doing that took all the energy out of me.”
While the post-surgery scars, both mental and physical, may have gotten the best of Corcoran on that particular day, setting that baseline of defiance was a necessary starting point in the long road towards recovery. It was his way of proving to himself that, while he was down, he wasn’t out.
Still, for a surgery that had a 4-6 month timeline, which meant he would be suiting up for Legion FC in 2024 assuming no setbacks, he felt antsy from the onset.
“Just laying in bed, feeling pain anytime you moved around a little, it was just the worst,” says Corcoran who was resigned to crutches for the first two weeks after the operation. “Like I said, I can’t stand just sitting around and waiting, so it was hard for me to understand that I had to chill out and let my body heal.”
Thankfully for Corcoran, he had the full support and watch of the Legion FC medical staff to ensure that the proper measures were being taken so that he could return to his peak physical fitness.
The first seven weeks saw him go through on-table exercises that focused on core and lower leg conditioning while not aggravating the hip. Once the pain in the hip began to subside, the next task was to re-strengthen the muscles around the area that had been cut through during the surgery. Head Athletic Trainer Ali Costello was there every step of the way and came away impressed with how her star patient was handling the adversity.
“We joke sometimes that he is one most mature on the team even though he is one of the youngest,” she explains. “He has that professional mindset that he knows that the healing and following the protocol to get him healthy was now his job as opposed to playing soccer at that point. He took that and ran with it to do everything he could, plus more, to get better.”
With that ingrained in his head, the fun soccer things slowly were integrated back into Corcoran’s regimen.
At the 12-week post-surgery mark, he began light passing and by the end of June, with his hip largely free of pain, he was back out at training to start doing drills for sport-specific movements. That was when the anticipation started to kick into overdrive for Corcoran, who was finally able to break out of the lonely rehab prison and get back on the training ground with his teammates, albeit off to the sidelines doing his own drills.
But he at least began to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
“I trust our team doctors and I trust Ali,” Corcoran says, trying to encapsulate into words the whole recovery process. “I knew that it would be hard and it would be rough, but I always believed that I could do enough to get back by the end of the season and get some games under my belt. I just wanted to keep doing more and more every day, but then Ali would have to keep me in check and shut me down.”
But even though she would have to keep curtailing his time out on the training ground, the eagerness from Corcoran is exactly what Costello wanted to see.
“It’s always good when an injured athlete wants to do more,” she explains. “It makes my job easier having to hold them back as opposed to being on the other side where I’m having to hold their hand and coax them. With Matt, he was always game to try new exercises.
“He is always raring to go.”
It wasn’t all that long ago that Corcoran was cleared for takeoff to return to action for Birmingham. However, for him, it may as well have been a lifetime ago because, as fun as it may be to reminisce on the past, he has his sights set solely on what now lies ahead.
Still a neophyte in the world of professional soccer, there is much for him to accomplish and he has some lost time to make up for. One thing that he is particularly excited about is next year’s FIFA U-20 World Cup in Chile, which thankfully, will be a much more viewer-friendly experience for his family and friends with the time zone there akin to U.S. Eastern time compared to Indonesia being a full 12 hours forward.
“To get back in the picture there, that’s definitely in my head,” he says of getting another go at a youth World Cup. “That’s another experience I would love to have, but to do that, it starts here.”
And by here, he of course means Birmingham where he now has a pair of matches under his belt. But, true to his infectious energetic nature, he’s ready for more minutes and maybe even some starts for a squad that is in a quest for a sixth consecutive berth and currently in a tightly-contested USL Championship Eastern Conference race.
“There’s always more that I want to achieve,” says Corcoran. “I’ve gotten that taste, now I just want to keep moving and keep going.”
There are eight regular season matches remaining for Legion FC in 2024, which means that’s at least 720 minutes for Matthew Corcoran, who, finally, no longer has to wait.
