Megan Takacs: The Journey From Lacrosse to Volleyball After Injury

Written by Megan Takacs

I have been an athlete since the day I could walk.  I couldn't sit still as a kid, so naturally, my parents put me in extracurriculars to tire me out.  More often than not, these extracurricular activities were sports. As I approached high school, I knew that I wanted to continue playing a sport when I went off to college, so I honed in on Lacrosse.  From traveling across the country for tournaments and going to camps to get recruited, I wound up with a scholarship to UC Berkeley.  

I spent (what I consider) the best four years of my life playing lacrosse, studying at one of the best universities in the world, and making some of my nearest and dearest friends to this day.  At the tail end of my junior year, I went down with a season ending knee injury. I blew out my right knee, and thought my playing career could have ended.  

With nine months of intense rehab and physical therapy, I was back on the field of my senior year. I can't tell you the numbers on how many bags of ice & frozen bags of vegetables I burned through in these 6 months, but I can assure you it was a lot.  Following my senior year, I went on to play in the 2013 World Cup for team Canada and won a silver medal.  As I approached my adult life, I knew that sports were going to continue being a huge part of my future.  

I moved to San Francisco following graduation and spent five years there.  I picked up some intramural sports, and even joined a competitive post-collegiate women's lacrosse team.  In the summer of 2018, I moved to Denver, Colorado for a new job, and didn’t know a whole lot of people. I did what I do best, and found a new sport’s outlet in the form of an outdoor volleyball team.  We ended up being a great team, and even won the championship.

Midway through the season however, the knee I had surgery on was starting to flare up, and I looked into ways of rehabbing it on my own so I could continue to play.  I didn’t have the patience to fill up a bag of ice and tape it to my knee like I used to, so I found Recoup’s Cryosleeve and the Cryosphere. These products have been amazing for me – no mess of cleaning up dripping water, easy-to-use and efficient. 

I bring a cooler to my games weekly now with my Cryosleeve and it has become a staple for my drive home from the field. Excited to have found something to keep my body recovered so I can keep living out my glory days.