By Rick Pedone
Sports Editor

Even if Harmony’s softball team had completely whiffed at the Class 4A state tournament, no biggie.

Breezy was there.

She was slightly bruised, but she seemed happy Monday, perched under a multi-colored beach umbrella to ward off the fierce afternoon sun at the National Training Center at Clermont.

Breann “Breezy” Vanderzyl, a junior who under normal circumstances would have been pacing the pitching circle for her Lady Longhorns, was relegated to crutches.

Her teammates were thrilled.

“We love you, Breezy!” they yelled to her, just before the first pitch of Harmony’s 2-1 state semifinal victory over Braden River.

Almost two hours later, after their post-game huddle, they shouted it again: “We love you, Breezy!”

The Lady Longhorns, like Breezy’s family, are thankful that she is alive, let alone going to softball games, just two weeks after a horrific auto accident made a shocking bid on her young life.

“I don’t remember anything about it,” Breezy, a junior, said. “I don’t remember anything about that night at all. Not the accident, not the game, nothing about that whole day.”

Breezy and her friend, Harmony baseball pitcher A.J. Stevens, were leaving the high school in her Honda Civic shortly after Harmony’s victory against Dunnellon April 27.

It rained during the game, delaying it for one-half hour. It was a little after 10 p.m.

“I went home,” said Derek Vanderzyl, Breann’s dad. “I thought with the rain delay, they wouldn’t finish it.”

The collision was awful, the worst-case scenario. The Civic was broadsided on the driver’s side, Breezy’s side, as it pulled onto U.S. Highway 192. Maybe a foot, the width of a door, separated her from the explosive impact.

“Ten years ago, I don’t think it would have turned out the same,” Harmony Athletic Director Chuck Hitt said. “Fortunately, the airbags worked.”

Osceola High football coach Doug Nichols raced to the scene from his St. Cloud home when his daughter, Harmony outfielder Maddie Nichols, received an ominous text.

“You could tell it was bad,” he said. “There was nothing left of the car. You can’t see how anyone came out of it alive.”

Vanderzyl broke her femur, two ribs and her pelvis. Stevens, on the passenger side, fared better: a partially collapsed lung and a concussion.

Vanderzyl was airlifted to Orlando Regional Medical Center.

Derek Vanderzyl and his wife, Lynn, took the late-night call all parents dread.

“They told us that it would be better if we went straight to ORMC and met her there,” Derek Vanderzyl said. “At first, all they could tell us was that they had to cut her out, and that she was being transported.”

Lynn Vanderzyl, a Harmony High faculty member, said the first evaluation they heard of their daughter’s condition was, mercifully, encouraging.

“By that time they had a good idea of what her injuries were and they were confident that it wasn’t life-threatening,” she said.

Their sigh of relief echoed all over the county. Breezy is a special player not only at Harmony, but everywhere the Longhorns play.

Monday, players from Class 6A state runner-up Winter Springs chatted with Breezy. She’s competitive and intense on the diamond, but good-natured and friendly after the game.

“She’s a great kid,” Coach Nichols said. “It’s a great family. You can’t be happier about the way it turned out.”

A rod was surgically inserted into Breezy’s femur about 12 hours after the accident. “We had to give permission for them to make a hole in her shin for that,” Derek Vanderzyl said.

Whatever works, right?

Breezy was in the hospital four days.

“I feel pretty good as long as the pills are working,” she said with a grin, looking remarkably healthy for someone with a big piece of metal in her leg and seven more fractures.

Stevens, who spent one day at ORMC, said he feels better and expects to start playing baseball soon. He pitched the Longhorns to a  victory over Tavares the day of the accident.

Breezy went to Harmony High May 3, just two days after being discharged from ORMC, to urge her team on as they boarded the bus to Dade City Pasco.

“I wanted to go and see them, if I could,” she said. “My dad was able to take me.”

Is that the reason the Lady Longhorns won in nine innings that night, 4-3? Who knows? A lot of Breezy’s talented teammates had to make big plays to earn that win.

“Breezy’s such an important part of our team,” senior outfielder Brittany Bruns said. “Seeing her made us feel a lot better.”

Amazingly, Breezy was on the field for pregame introductions at Tuesday’s championship game, and again for the post-game ceremony. She received, with her teammates, the state runner-up medal.

Next year, she will be back in the middle of the action.

“(The doctors) expect a full recovery,” her dad said.

Breezy said there’s no doubt about it.

“I’ll be playing as soon as I can,” she said.