Runner Struck by deer listed in results

THE NEWS-ENTERPRISE Tuesday, November 13, 2007

GIRLS' PREP CROSS COUNTRY: Elizabethtown's Buck has coped well with fame after being hit by a doe during regional race

By NATHANIEL BRYAN

ELIZABETHTOWN — Shawn Buck has seen his 14-year-old daughter Emily accomplish many things in the athletic world, but it’s doubtful that anything could prepare father nor daughter for what they endured a little more than a week ago and are still feeling the aftershock from.

While competing in the Class 2-A, Region 2 Championship meet on Nov. 3 at Marion County Middle School, Emily was knocked down and injured by a doe which appeared to have been spooked from out of the bushes when the Gator guiding the lead pack of runners buzzed by.

You read that right: A girl, with the last name Buck was injured by a deer in a high school cross country race.

Go ahead and insert any of the following jokes (which she’s well aware of):

-- The Buck stops here.

-- Oh, Deer.

-- Buck meets Doe during race.

“It’s been embarrassing when people make fun of me because of my last name,” said Emily, an Elizabethtown High School freshman. “I have a lot of words I could use to describe the situation, but it’s weird because I’ve never heard of anyone getting hit by a deer. It’s really been strange.”

Only a handful of such instances of weird collisions at a cross country race are on record.

In the late 1990s, a male runner at a meet at the University of Southern Indiana had to be carted off after colliding with a spooked deer.

In 2004, a runner at the BNL Indiana semi-state meet ran into a pole marking the course.

And according to a posting on HoosierAuthority.com n which developed after Emily’s incident n the poster saw a Harrison, Ind., runner collide with a birdhouse while running up the course’s final hill.

“She understands the irony and you can’t make up the fact that our last name is Buck,” Shawn said. “Now if the person who hit the birdhouse was named Sparrow or something that would have been ironic as well.”

The incident has been highlighted on both of the state’s ABC affiliates as well as MSNBC.com, CNN.com, several notable blogs and even earned Emily and some of her teammates an appearance Sunday on “The Today Show.”

Although “The Today Show” appearance wasn’t really five minutes of fame for Emily.

“Not really. The interview was only like a minute,” she said. “It was a little more than a minute, but it wasn’t that long.”

Emily felt bad about the situation because it took attention away from Elizabethtown standout eighth-grader Whitney Maurer, who rolled to her first region championship.

During Saturday’s KHSAA Cross Country State Championships at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, Maurer finished second in Class 2-A and notched the highest finish, in terms of place, for any area runner of either gender.

Yet the focus of many media members was still on Emily, the girl running a week after colliding with a wild animal.

“Emily was like, ‘Whitney just finished second. Why aren’t you talking to her?’” Shawn said.

The performance was gutsy for Emily, who finished third on her team and 57th overall out of 197 runners. She covered the 3.1-mile course in 21 minutes, 26.48 seconds.

However, Emily, in her first year of running last year, finished 44th at State in 21:38.42. It could be safe to say had Emily not been running hurt, she would have improved her time and helped the Lady Panthers, who finished four points out of third place out of 24 teams, to an even better performance.

Emily, all of 78 pounds, trains in martial arts, so coming down with a few bumps and bruises isn’t anything new.

“She was screaming. We thought she was really hurt,” Shawn said. “She does tae kwon do. She’s taken a lot of beatdowns.”

Shawn wasn’t sure she could bounce back quickly from this injury via doe.

“It was painful for her. We were using a spoon to push down the swelling. She had a tough time walking on Sunday,” Shawn said. “Even in the emergency room, she told her coaches, ‘If it’s not broken, I’m running.’ It was an aggressive comeback. She’s got a lot of drive.”

A lot of drive to come back from something she thought would surely end her season.

“I thought I had broken my legs because they hurt so bad,” she said. “And I was upset because if I had broken them, then I wouldn’t be able to run at State.”

The regional run was an unfortunate end to what had started off as a promising weekend.

Usually a slow starter, Emily was in the process of working her way past the sixth-place performer from Breckinridge County when the doe hit her, knocking her out of the race and ending her bid at setting a personal-record time as well as earning an individual medal.

“I was feeling really good up until it happened,” she said. “I was making my way into sixth place and I was about to pass her. I felt it would be my best race … It wasn’t.”

Emily also plays soccer for an under-14 girls’ recreation team, which won the Commonwealth Cup state championship in its division the next day after a win on Saturday night. But due to her injuries, Emily wasn’t able to take part in her team’s gold-medal run.

“We were going to haul butt back that Saturday afternoon so she could play, but obviously she couldn’t,” Shawn said.

Something else lost in the mix was the sportsmanship of junior teammate Deanna Maurer.

Maurer, just a few seconds behind Emily, was one of the only people to notice the doe hit Emily. And instead of continuing to work her way through the pack to earn much-needed team points as Elizabethtown was trying to secure the team title, Maurer left the course and went for help.

The move was risky for Maurer because, according to rules, runners are forbidden from leaving the course and returning during the race.

“I was so glad that she did that. She gave up a lot of time and a lot of places to help me,” Emily said. “I heard they were thinking about disqualifying her. Had they done that, I would have been really mad.”

Shawn was pleased that a teenager had the willpower to put humanity first instead of a stopwatch.

“We’re really proud of Deanna. She put a teammate before herself. She didn’t gain any advantage,” said Shawn, referring to why the no-off-course is in place. “And if she didn’t go back, who would have? It possibly would have been several more minutes before someone would have found her. And when you’re hurt, you don’t want to be left alone.”

Being left alone is something Emily would like to get back to. She was recently contacted by “The Ellen Show” for an appearance. And Shawn said his daughter should consider herself lucky that there’s a writers’ strike in Hollywood right now.

“That’s something we’ve joked about. She could very well have been contacted by ‘The Late Show With David Letterman’ to read off the top 10 ways to avoid a deer or something like that,” Shawn said.

So although the situation has caused her some personal and emotional bruising and caused her to be the punch line of jokes nationwide, Shawn is proud of how his daughter has hung in there.

“She’s handled it like a mature young lady,” Shawn said. “But it was no laughing matter that day. We’re all really fortunate she wasn’t hurt worse.”

Nathaniel Bryan can be reached at 505-1758 or at

that's probably the funniest set of pictures i've ever seen. It kinda looked like that kid and the deer became best friends by the end of it...he's got his hand around its shoulders

i think he was molested by that deer.

No those pictures start at slide 3. He appeared to be friends with him at slide 2. Therefore, it was after that friendly pic that the deer chased him down and jumped on his shoulders, i was actually thinking he was about to be molested as well. lol. but then the slide show came to a sudden stop.