It’s safe to assume that Dave Serrano’s initial fall agenda didn’t include an injury update on a key component of his 2015 pitching staff.
But on Tuesday, the fourth-year Tennessee head baseball coach issued a promising report on his sophomore hurler and son Kyle Serrano, who suffered a fracture left ankle on July 27 after an all-terrain vehicle rolled over on him.
“Kyle’s recovered completely,” Dave Serrano said. “He’s out of the boot now. He’s actually throwing off flat ground. He won’t be released to throw off the mound for probably a couple of weeks, but I don’t think he’ll miss a day of fall ball once we get going on September 29.”
The injury, which occurred while Kyle Serrano was playing summer ball in Alaska for the Matsu Miners, caused three broken bones in his left foot but didn’t require any type of reconstructive surgery.
Even so, the 19-year-old Serrano said there was a bit of a shock factor with the crash, admitting that took him a moment to realize the severity of what had just transpired.
“At the time when it flipped and landed on my foot, I kind of got up right away,” Kyle Serrano said. “I had like a lot of adrenaline, and it wasn’t really until the next morning that I thought ‘okay there’s something wrong with my foot’ because I couldn’t walk and it was pretty swollen.”
“I thought it would be a lot worse when he got off the plane in Atlanta, and I saw him walking off with two boots and crutches,” Dave Serrano said. “But he was very lucky the damage to the bones in the body were not that bad.”
For the elder Serrano, who’s once again pulling double duty as coach and father, there was no hesitation as to which of the two hats to wear in the midst of his son’s troubling situation.
“When I took that phone call, I wasn’t his coach at that moment — I was his dad,” Dave Serrano said. “When I first heard that an ATV-like machine had rolled over on top of him, I didn’t know what to think. I actually thought he was in a car, but it was boys out being boys and they rolled the thing.
“Just lucky it landed on his legs where those things can be replaced. Who knows what would’ve happened had it landed anywhere else on his body.”
Before the injury, Kyle Serrano — one of three current UT players who spent the summer months in the Alaska Baseball League — was thriving for the Palmer, Alaska-based Miners. In only seven appearances, 6-foot-2, 205-pounder racked up 35 strikeouts, while tossing 23 2/3 innings — good for second among all ABL hurlers.
And coming off an up-and-down freshman season — he went 3-3 with a 4.55 ERA but did end his inaugural campaign with four scoreless innings against eventual College World Series champion Vanderbilt — the Knoxville native felt monumental progress was still achieved despite this summer’s frightening accident.
“I definitely matured a lot out there,” Kyle Serrano said. “I think I learned a lot about myself. I wouldn’t say I had the type of summer that I wanted to overall pitching wise, but it goes further than that. I think I learned a lot about myself and the way I need to pitch and what I need to bring into the fall and what’s going to carry over to the spring this year.”
