Her Body Was Broken Into Pieces. How One Woman Survived And Thrived.

Her "rebound" complete, Paula finds her name on the list of attendees at the 2023 National Senior Games in Pittsburgh. Now 69 and all smiles, she has some messages about recovery from injury you should soak up below. 

By Ray Glier

The red light runner totaled Paula Franetti’s car and nearly totaled Paula Franetti.

The crash in 2016 was gruesome.

The rebound the last nine years has been enthralling. 

Call it a rebound and not a recovery, or comeback, because the 69-year old Franetti’s passion is 3-on-3 basketball, specifically the delight she gets at a mere 5-foot-6 of “boxing out” taller players for rebounds. It takes more than a big butt and sharp elbows to stay between your opponent and the ball as it bounces off the rim as a missed shot.

It takes savvy and a single-minded fortitude which, among things, helped her survive the crash in Pittsburgh that left her with seven pelvic fractures, five spinal fractures, a collapsed lung caused by a ruptured diaphragm, a punctured bladder, internal bleeding, and a concussion. Paula did not stand up for 57 days.

And now look.

Franetti and her hoops team, The Steel City Pursuit, will be at The National Senior Games in Des Moines, Iowa, July 24-August 4. Women’s basketball was huge in Iowa, even before the phenomenon that is Caitlin Clark took over the University of Iowa.

Iowa is about to get a look at another basketball phenom.

Read this quote below. All of it. This is what Franetti believes. It is useful to Geezer Jocks:

“I look at it from the basketball perspective. The bottom line is for anyone that's going through a recovery, that in order to box out and rebound, you have to position yourself for success,” Paula said. “If you know how to position yourself to succeed, you're going to get the rebound and you're going to have the opportunity to score again. 

“And so when you're going through a recovery, you have to find ways to set yourself up to succeed, rather than setting yourself up to fail. And if you do more successful boxing out and getting rebounds, you're going to come out of this with a whole new perspective of your capability to control how your outcomes occur.”

It's why the name of Franetti’s business is The Rebound Planner. 

**

There is no crash rubber necking here. I did not use the photograph of Paula's demolished car. I did not use the picture of her wrapped in gauze in the hospital bed. We need to turn this story upside down and inside out and get to the basketball and the recovery. 

**

Franetti, who lives southwest of Pittsburgh, played basketball two years at Penn State. She is more of a gym rat at 69 than she was at 19.

“When I learned about the Senior Games and I realized I could play again, I have been developing my own skills,” Paula said. “And to this day, I watch videos, especially on Facebook where there are some really great coaches for shooting. I'm trying to develop more distance and a quicker release on my shot.”

Franetti takes it deeper than videos. Geezer Jocks who play golf and run track and who are as equally obsessed as Paula will smile and nod affirmative at this next quote.

“I bought a software system where it trains your eyes how to see peripherally, especially on the court,” she said. “In the 65-plus age bracket, people aren't moving as fast as they are in the WNBA, but you still need to be able to see who's open. 

“The advantage with three-on-three is that you can spread your defense out, but you have to be able to see who's starting to cut and anticipate where your defender is coming from.”
 
The accident spurred Franetti to see just how good she could be. She was a point guard in college and now she is a point guard, shooting guard, forward, and … ball hawk.

“I'm quick and it's inspiring to know that I can steal the ball if I time it right,” Paula said. “You get the ball and now you make something happen. If I can get something going on offense for our team that's thrilling to me.”

She has turned into a relentless rebounder and defender and her cardiovascular training keeps her on the court where others might wilt.

“When I had my automobile accident that offered a great motivation to see whether or not I was even going to be able to play,” Franetti said. “I was 60 when that occurred, and it was in the off year between two nationals and I wasn't even sure I was ever going to be able to play, but once I started recovering and I knew I could.

“I've taken on an even deeper motivating factor of developing my skills, my agility, my cardiovascular, all of those types of aspects because I want to play something in the Senior Games for as long as I can.”

**

The doctors who saved her life would not dare offer odds on her recovery. Heck, Las Vegas wise guys wouldn’t have touched this.

But Paula had something not in a medical textbook that increased her odds of recovery. It was along the lines of this Winston Churchill quote:

“The positive thinker sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.” 

She is not sure if her mother was calling her “Pauly-anna” or “Pollyanna”, the word that references an always sunny disposition. That was Franetti’s intangible Churchill was referring to. Her mother noticed her positive frame of mind when Paula was a girl.
 
“I've always been the type of person that if I see something I want, I'm going to do my best to try and get it, and if I get it, that's wonderful,” Paula said. “That was my attitude when it came to this accident. I just fell into into a positive mindset from the get go, like ‘I'm gonna be the one to come back’.”

For months after the crash every time Franetti tried to get vertical “something new would show up.” It might be pain in her left knee, or her neck, or lower back. Her body was in pieces, like a hundred Legos dumped into a box.

“I couldn't even find my starting place,” Paula said.

Her positive demeanor was one of the pillars she used as a fundamental, but one other thing was key: she maintained her agency. That is, Paula did not hand over her body to health care professionals.

It helped that she has a Masters degree in Exercise Physiology from the University of Pittsburgh, which backed up her undergraduate degree in Health & Physical Education from Penn State.

For instance, early on in physical therapy, Franetti was matched up with an enthusiastic therapist. He tugged on her leg. The guy said he had to get the mobility back in her hip.

“I told him, ‘Look, you can't pull my leg in that direction. I can feel my bones grinding., you know, the ones that were broken. They aren’t healed yet’.”

The therapist backed off. Those occurrences where Paula had to show her knowledge and be forceful were limited. She is grateful for the help.

“God Bless the medical professionals," Franetti said. "They saved me.”

Paula saved Paula. Start with that.

“As an exercise physiologist, every day that I'm inactive I'm losing cardiovascular fitness, I'm losing muscle mass, my metabolic rate is starting to slow down.

“I knew too much,” she said. “It was starting to screw with my head."

She paused a moment. Franetti was not a robot to be glued back together. She was human, like the rest of us.

“I had my moments (of despair), but you finally say, ‘Oh, my God, this is serious’. You have to get your head wrapped around it.”

Gradually, her body, which had more holes than a yard sale blanket from the wreck, started to knit itself back together. She swam, walked, and stood and shot a basketball standing still. She felt exhilarated.

That is what a Comeback/Recovery/Rebound looks like for someone on life’s brink.

Everything in her body seemed to be broken, except her willpower. Paula Franetti's rebound started with that. 

It's not a sharp image, but you can see the confidence with the ball and the physique of a basketball player. It took two years to get back to this after a horrific car crash.

Paula is interviewed by Ryan Shazier of the Pittsburgh Steelers whose career ended because of a spinal chord injury in a Monday Night Football Game on December 4, 2017. Paula (in pink) shows her skills. She was the driver in the comeback/recovery.