Shippensburg's Dull makes unlikely baseball comeback from crash

It isn't easy to shake up Bobby Shannon. The manager of Shippensburg Post 223 has a tough exterior that's hard to crack.

A late-inning double in a practically-decided game shouldn't have done it.

But, "That brought a tear to the corner of my eye," Shannon said.

It meant so, so much.

Just six days shy of a year earlier, Brock Dull lay on the ground of South Mountain, hoping against hope that someone would find him.

On June 19, 2015, Dull crashed his street-legal Enduro dirt bike one day after his 16th birthday. He tried rising under his own power to get back to his bike, which suffered a mere scratch when Dull hit a tree and was thrown from it.

"I wasn't even 10 minutes from home, but in the mountains, you see maybe a car or two when you're up there," said Dull, who left his phone at home that day when he went for a quick ride on his new bike. "I laid on the horn to see if anyone heard me, and then I was just hoping someone was going to come and get me soon."

For more than 30 minutes, Dull was stranded, pain shooting through his legs, before his father Chris picked him up.

"I don't know how he found me. My mom (Elaine) was trying to figure out where I was. I don't know. He guessed really good," Brock said.

Dull had broken his left femur and torn his right anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). He was in a wheelchair for two months, and used a crutch for a week after that.

"To be honest, he's lucky to even be walking," Shannon said.

With a promising future in baseball on the line, Dull didn't accept the accident as fate. He went through a series of surgeries, including one on his femur during his initial hospital visit and one in December on his ACL. Although Dull originally had a goal of playing for Shippensburg's high school team, he was still in intensive therapy during the spring season.

But when the Legion baseball season rolled around, Dull wanted his chance and Shannon was ready to give it to him.

In the first game of the year, against Waynesboro, Post 223 built up a comfortable lead, and in came Dull to pinch hit.

"We didn't have him in the starting lineup, and he accepted that role," Shannon said. "Once we got that lead on Waynesboro, that was the time I thought, 'Let's just do it. And not just let's see what he can do, but let's just boost his confidence, knowing that he was given the opportunity.'"

Dull made contact. The ball hung in the air for a tick too long for Dull's liking, but eventually fell into the right-centerfield gap.

"It was hanging in the air for a long time, and I wasn't sure if one the outfielders was going to run out and get it," Dull said. "They kept closing in, but I knew it was going to drop. I guess Trever (O'Donnell on second base) didn't realize it, and he kind of hesitated.

"I was going down past first base, and I remember yelling, 'Go Trever, go!' I'm not going to let this kid not let me get my double."

O'Donnell listened, and Dull reached second base.

Mission accomplished.

"As I stand here, goosebumps still go down my back," Shannon said. "You could see the joy that was brought back in his face, the pure excitement. Not only for him, but it was the perfect feeling for his family to get back. They lost that feeling for a year, so that was huge for him, his dad and his mom."

Despite the very real threat of not being able to play baseball again, Dull has overcome a lot of odds in just one year, and his ultimate goals have never wavered.

"It was just a setback," Dull said. "OK, so I don't play for a year ... so what? Yeah, I might be a junior, but I just gotta work twice as hard to get where I want to go. It really irks me when I see kids out there that look like they don't want to be there, because it can be gone in a second. It just makes me take every chance, 100 percent."

Shannon said, "Sometimes just having a kid join and be part of a team again, that's almost a way of therapy for them. I keep hope that from now until February, when he hits the high school field, he's another step ahead.

"He'll be a senior; time is running out. But I don't think he's satisfied with where he's at right now. He still thinks there's more left that he can get to, and that's a great attitude to have."

It's gotten him this far.