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After missing entire Boston College season with Achilles injury, Chibueze Onwuka is on a mission
“Life is not about what happens, it’s about how you react.”
Seven months after the incident, the details of the injury that abruptly ended Chibueze Onwuka’s season before it began are still fresh in his mind.
It was Monday, Aug. 9, the first day of pads, and Onwuka and his Boston College teammates were sweating through the 80-degree heat. The Eagles were on a simple first and second down drill when the defensive tackle Onwuka went in for a chop club and his arm got hooked. A center fell on top of him, putting significant pressure on his leg, and Onwuka felt the pop that every athlete dreads.
“I knew something was really bad,” Onwuka said, “but I was trying to stay optimistic.”
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Onwuka always sees the glass half full, but this was objectively a brutal situation that he could only spin so much. Once he was ruled out for the entire 2021 season with an Achilles injury on his left leg, though, Onwuka stopped pitying himself and quickly shifted his focus toward mentoring his replacements. Though he was “obviously devastated,” he tried to help the team any way he could.
“Life is not about what happens, it’s about how you react to things,” Onwuka said. “After it happened, and I knew I was out for the season, I just tried to move on, you know what I’m saying? You can’t go back in time and change it, so why waste life energy sulking or being sad over something you can’t change? I focused on the next step.”
Now, as he speaks with reporters on an early March day, Onwuka (5-foot-11, 286 pounds) is thrilled to be back doing what he loves with the Eagles. While he’s still getting situated, and easing into it, he’s working his way up with the goal of entering the season fully healthy.
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He’s “still got it,” as he puts it, and that muscle memory never vanishes. Just because he was away from the game physically, he said, that didn’t mean he had to detach himself mentally. Now it’s about catching his body up to his mind.
Onwuka has always been somewhat of an underdog, and this climb back toward a starting role is simply his latest challenge. Once a wrestler at Niagara County Community College, he transferred to the Univeristy of Buffalo and walked onto the football team.
He made 19 starts in 36 games for the Bulls over three seasons and was named to the Mid-American Conference third-team in 2019. Onwuka then found a new home as a graduate student at Boston College, where he started five games, played in 10, and finished with 19 tackles, 1.5 sacks, and two forced fumbles in 2020.
Last offseason, BC head coach Jeff Hafley said Onwuka made arguably the biggest jump of any player on the roster and blossomed into one of the team’s elite defensive players.
“He was kind of the leader and the veteran voice in that room,” Hafley said. “It was almost like, wow, to see the transformation of him from when he first got here to training camp last year, and then to get that taken away, that was a tough one. It was a really tough one. Now, to see him and feel him around those guys, especially with all the young guys we have at that position, it’s huge.”
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Hafley said Onwuka has a chance to be one of the better players in the ACC, and he can’t wait to see what he does when he’s fully healthy.
Onwuka said Hafley told him early on that he wanted him to stay if he felt it was right, and Onwuka had his waiver approved in December. The journey back is well underway, and he feels incredibly grateful to be doing what he loves again.
“It’s good to be out there,” he said with a grin. “I missed it a lot.”
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