CLEVELAND — Almost two years since recovering from a stroke, St. Ignatius High School baseball player Robbie Boyce is still regaining his balance. 

What You Need To Know

• Robbie Boyce has been awarded the Cleveland Clinic Sports Medicine Courage Award during the 2022 Greater Cleveland Sports Awards


• Boyce suffered from a rare type of stroke


• Boyce had a small chance of playing baseball again, or even surviving from the stroke

Amid his improved health and ability to return to the baseball field, Boyce will receive the Cleveland Clinic Sports Medicine Courage Award during the 2022 Greater Cleveland Sports Awards Wednesday. 

“I don’t think it’s 100% back, but I definitely better than what I had when I started out,” He said. 

Even tying his shoes was a tall task. 

“It was all there,” he said. “I knew how to do everything. It was like trying to get my brain how to communicate everything to the rest of my body was so frustrating.”

Boyce had symptoms of suffering from a subarachnoid hemorrhage. It happened while he was preparing for his junior year of baseball at Saint Ignatius High School. 

He collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. Doctors had to perform emergency brain surgery. He then spent five days in a medically induced coma, and when he woke up, the right side of his body was paralyzed. His mother Christine says his dad took a photo of him in a hospital bed. 

“I asked him, ‘I can’t believe you took that picture,’” she said. “He said ‘I knew you’d be mad so I was just gonna wait until everything turned out OK.’ Now I’m glad we have it.”

Cleveland Clinic says about half of the people who have a subarachnoid hemorrhage die from it. Of the people who survive it, only about a third make fully recoveries. 

After two months of rehab, he came home and played catch for the first time in the yard, 40 pounds lighter than when he went in. 

“You could see in the way he was throwing the ball and catching it, that all of those skills were still in there,” Christine said. 

He says playing the piano helped his brain talk to the rest of his body.

“It really helped me make sure I was working a lot of things at once,” Robbie Boyce said. 

Robbie’s doctor Mark Bain said he also benefited from being a teenager. 

“The younger you are, the better people recover,” Bain said. “The brain has a more plastic nature to it at that point. It’s able to rewire itself and to other parts of the brain help damaged parts of the brain.”  

Robbie said returning to the game he loved was the driving force. 

“It helped provide me motivation to be able to get back to help out my teammates,” he said. “It gave me something to look forward to.”

His parents were worried his condition could have been fatal or could have put him in a nursing home the rest of his life, but he took the field last spring for the first time since the stroke. 

He was back in school and the baseball team just around five months after suffering his stroke. He’s now a junior, and he’s using his story as motivation for other athletes trying to get back on their feet. 

“I did have some doubts, but I ... would not focus on those,” he said. “I was thinking what can I do to get better and get back to where I want to be?”