ESPN College Sports

It sometimes feels like every pitch in the postseason means the world. Iowa junior Brittany Weil knows better as she prepares to lead her team into the NCAA tournament.

Things would probably be easier if Weil didn't remember the pitch that provided the initial momentum for a line drive that could have killed her -- a line drive that did leave her unable to communicate with the outside world for a time and forced her to relearn basic speech and language skills. But she does remember the pitch, a hanging drop that came back at her during a practice a few days before the start of her sophomore season.

"I remember exactly the pitch," Weil recalled. "I remember the ball releasing my hand, and I really don't remember it hitting me. I do remember trying to stand up on my own and telling them I was fine -- and they were trying to get me to sit down. And then once they started asking me questions, I was responding -- I was talking -- but I wasn't answering their questions."

Although there was no blood and Weil remained conscious, something was clearly seriously wrong. At one point, as coach Gayle Blevins recalled, the support staff asked Weil her name and she replied, "Thursday." A trip to the emergency room eventually revealed a fracture of her left temporal bone, but during the days that followed, more visible evidence of the head injuries drove home the extent of the damage.

"I think it was over the next several days, just when she was in the hospital," Blevins said. "You were there with her and you were observing what she wasn't able to do. Her cognitive abilities were, well, they were nonexistent probably at that point."

Things made sense inside Weil's head, but she couldn't transfer those words and thoughts to the outside world. A constant headache she described as something like an ice pick lingered for days. Simply put, she wasn't herself. She wasn't the grinning kid who, even as she later dealt with the repercussions of the injury, joked that she had simply taken a bullet for her coach, who had been standing behind her during the practice drill.

"Brit's always kind of a fun-loving, easygoing personality," Blevins said. "[She's] not a very opinionated person … just easygoing and supportive of pretty much everybody around her."

As a freshman, she supported the Hawkeyes by spending most of the season in the circle. She went 27-16 that first year, and her 34 complete games and 296 innings pitched both ranked as second-best for a single season in the program's long and rather storied history. And even as she sat in a hospital bed, unable to say many familiar words and forced to stare intently at a speaker's lips in an effort to translate the sounds coming out of their mouths into words and sentences, she told teammate Erin Riemersma she wasn't going to redshirt her sophomore season. She would be back.

"I didn't want to have to put it all on Zusty's shoulders as a freshman," Weil said of teammate Amanda Zust, the team's other primary pitcher. "I knew how that was. I didn't want to have her be under that pressure."

Weil was released after almost a week in the hospital, although she still needed help from her mom and friends like Zust and Reimersma for activities ranging from driving to showering. She began speech therapy almost immediately and returned to classes less than four weeks after the injury, although her written words still had a tendency to come out backwards. She couldn't travel with the team for an early road trip to Florida -- and struggled to put together text messages to get score updates from the games -- but the sport that brought her to Iowa remained front and center in her recovery efforts.

"I was pretty determined, and I knew there was nothing that was going to stop me," Weil said. "And especially since I was so far from my family, this is what I had."

Softball also offered help in a practical fashion. Once she was cleared to resume practicing -- initially while wearing a helmet at all times -- the on-field drills not only helped her physically but also stretched her mentally as she tried to process and execute multiple layers of instructions. Bus rides offered extended hours for Blevins and others to quiz her with the flashcards that gradually rebuilt her vocabulary.

Five weeks after the injury, wearing the heavily padded protective headband that remains a permanent part of her uniform, Weil returned to the circle against Colorado State and struck out 12 batters. Two days later, she struck out a career-high 15 in a four-hit shutout win against BYU.

Returning wasn't the final hurdle -- a line drive up the middle by a Northwestern player last season came too close for comfort and a line drive off the bat of a Michigan State player this season hit her in the knee and momentarily left her too shaken to continue. But through it all, she remains a cornerstone of Iowa's success. So far this season, she ranks among national leaders with 264 strikeouts in 250.1 innings, and she is 25-12 with a 1.09 ERA for a team that has aspirations of making a run at a super regional or beyond.

Fear has largely subsided, replaced by appreciation of both the opportunity she reclaimed and the swiftness with which it -- and everything -- could be taken away again.

"I think her outlook on life changed dramatically," Blevins said. "I kind of call her my 30-year-old on the team. She has a whole different sense of appreciation for her life and what she's doing. Things a lot of college students might think is really fun to do, personally and socially, she has very little interest in doing anymore. It's a lot more about caring about the quality of her life and not giving days away."

Weil rolled her eyes upon hearing that she had already hit 30 in her coach's mind -- "She would say that," Weil laughed -- but she didn't argue the point.

"It kind of changed my perspective on a lot of things," Weil said. "It's just a game. You can't let it rule you; that's for sure."

Which is not the same thing as saying it doesn't matter. Weil's determination to return to the field and her subsequent success offer all the evidence needed of how seriously she takes her craft and how much she wants to get Iowa back to the College World Series.

"If things are tough, she would say give me the ball," Blevins said. "She's one who wants to be out there when things are on the line. She'll take that, even if it means she fails. She's not afraid to fail, because she's been there so many times. And I think for a lot of athletes, it's understanding that failure is part of sport and you can't be afraid of it, because the other side of failure is success."

It might equally be said that neither success nor failure is permanent and achieving one merely opens the door to the other. Only the opportunity to succeed or fail ever really ends, most often at a time and place over which none of us have much control.

Graham Hays is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. E-mail him at Graham.Hays@espn3.com.