By Harry Minium
NORFOLK, Va. – The final race of the day was about to begin in what had been a long weekend for the Old Dominion swimming team at the West Virginia Invitational.
It was the early evening of Nov. 18, 2023, and that’s a date that Ally Hilbrich will never forget.
As competitors lined up for the 200 backstroke, eight swimmers grabbed the top of their backstroke wedges, which provide a non-stick surface for swimmers to begin the race.
For whatever reason, Ally’s foot slipped and she banged her foot against the side of the pool as she pushed off. She finished the race, but was in obvious pain.
“I swam purely on adrenaline and when I got out of the pool, I realized that something was wrong,” she said.
It was the beginning of a long, arduous odyssey for Ally.
Her lower leg ached the whole way home to Norfolk and at one point, when she tried to take her shoe off, her foot had swollen so much that it would not come off.
After a week or so of treatment, it was diagnosed as a severely strained calf muscle.
Oh, if it had only been so simple.
“It seemed like a simple muscle strain,” said Scott Johnson, then ODU’s associate athletic director for sports medicine and athletic training. “But we treated it and it wasn’t getting better. I felt so bad for her. She was in such pain and there was nothing I could do for her. She would come in some days and her foot was completely blue. And we had no answers for her.”
Johnson sent her to specialists for a battery of tests and the answers were elusive. It took five months for her to get a diagnosis.
And the news wasn’t good. She had Complex Regional Pain Syndrome, a disease of the nervous system whose cause is not understood. And while it can be treated, it can’t be cured.
It usually causes a continuous burning or throbbing pain, swelling, sensitivity to touch or cold, joint stiffness, muscle spasms, tremors and weakness in the limbs. For reasons unknown, the body sends signals to the brain that excruciating pain is occurring where there is none.
And doctors don’t know why.
“It is one of the most painful conditions out there,” Ally said. “It’s lifelong. It’s not going to go away. It can go into remission, but it can also spread. My leg, sometimes it feels like it’s on fire.”
Ally would twice have extensive hospital stays. She would endure painful treatments that promised nothing more than perhaps some easing of her symptoms.
Her story does not have a Hollywood ending, and, in fact, is a long way from over. Her disease is not cured, and unfortunately, has progressed.
But hers is a story of immense courage and hope and of triumph, when, 685 days after her initial injury, Ally got back in the pool and competed for the ODU swim team.
Ally was raised just outside of Houston, Texas, which, while far different than Norfolk, has one thing in common – it’s a bustling seaport. She loved watching ships, mostly oil tankers, head into the Gulf of Mexico.
“I grew up on the ship channel in Houston,” she said. “I was intrigued with the port and how complicated it is, the logistics of moving so much from one place to another.”
Her family had moved to suburban Austin, Texas by the time she was a high school senior, but her heart was still in commerce via the sea. She was attracted to ODU because of its School of Supply Chain, Logistics, and Maritime Operations and especially because of Head Coach Jess Livsey’s swim program.
Ally was an outstanding swimmer as well as an outstanding student.
“Jess was just so honest and such a good person,” she said. “She convinced me that ODU was the place for me. I couldn’t have gotten through all I’ve been through without her.”
Ally’s story first became public when she spoke at the Old Dominion Athletic Foundation’s endowed scholarship luncheon on Feb. 12, 2026. Her six-minute speech left most in the audience choked with emotion.
CLICK HERE to see Ally Hilbrich's speech at the ODAF Endowed Scholarship Luncheon
“When I arrived on campus from Texas in August of 2023, I thought I would earn my degree, compete at a high level and eventually call the East Coast home,” she said.
After her diagnosis, she continued conventional rehabilitation through the fall of 2024 before realizing she wasn’t making a ton of progress.
At times she would suffer tremors.
“I had a 24-hour tremor where my toes would shake,” she said. “My toes completely curled up one time for 14 days.”
So, she spent the spring of 2025 away from campus, and during her time away spent 11 days at the Johns Hopkins Hospital for children in Sarasota, Florida.
Doctors surgically placed a catheter that delivered local anesthetic into her left leg. The idea was to tell the body there’s nothing wrong with the leg, to, in a sense, reset things.
The support she received from family, teammates, coaches and friends kept her going, she said. Her roommates and swim teammates Mallory MacKay, Sophia Kapla and Lauren Masters were especially supportive.
But the two most important people in her life are her parents, Lucas and Lacy, who although they now live in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, have been to Norfolk many times and followed their daughter through all of her treatments.
They have always supported their daughter, and her love of swimming.
For the longest time, her parents didn’t let on how much her struggle was affecting them. As she was preparing for her first surgery, a doctor looked at her parents and said, “Are we ready for this?”
“My Mom said if Ally is ready, we’re ready,” Ally said.
“But my Dad, he couldn’t say anything. He just started crying.”
“It occurred to me then that I can’t imagine what it is like for my parents to watch their daughter go through this, to hold their breath every time I get in the pool because it’s a risky business. They know everything is a risk. They didn’t let me swim a home meet without one of them here.”
They arrived for her first meet in CRPS matching shoes, white with accents that are orange, the color for CRPS.
Ally went through months of painful physical therapy after her stay in St. Petersburg.
“I had to relearn to walk,” she said. “I had to relearn how to pick up things from the ground without toppling over because I had no sense of balance.
“As I laid in that hospital bed, not thinking I would walk again, much less ever swim, I wasn’t thinking about getting back in the pool. I wanted to walk again.
“It was a gradual progression for me to believe I could compete again. I thought for a while, ‘Maybe I’ll get back in the water.’ But I was fighting for my life. It wasn’t a fight for sport. It was a fight for my life.
“That belief from my coaches, and my teammates, meant everything. I know without a doubt that this journey would have looked very different somewhere else. The culture at ODU was special here. I never felt rushed, forgotten or replaceable. I was supported as a student-athlete and a person.”
She began swimming again in the Scrap Chandler pool late last summer. On good days she practiced. On bad days, she got PT or went home to rest.
She finally returned to the pool as a competitive swimmer when ODU visited George Mason on Oct. 3, 2025, 685 days after her injury.
Her teammates and family members mobbed her afterwards.
“It was an incredible experience to see her back in the water,” Livsey said. “It meant so much to her teammates. I don’t think there’s a single member of our team who hasn’t in their own way gone through this with her. We’ve all watched her struggle. But even on her worst days, she was always positive. She was never down, never negative. What she’s done is just amazing.”
Last February, in the Atlantic Sun meet in Orlando, Florida, she finished 10th in the 100 backstroke with a time of 56.01.
Her parents were there, dabbing tears from their eyes.
“We’re in awe of her,” Lucas said. “I think her story speaks for itself. She’s probably the strongest person that I know. I don’t know if I could have done what she did.
“We’d have been happy if she’d just gotten back in the pool. But in the ASUN meet, she swam her personal best (in the 100 backstroke). That’s something none of us expected.
“She’s managed to do all of this with pure grit and determination.”
“I would,” he added, his voice choked with emotion, “give her my left foot if I could.”
Ally is now working with Liz Jones, who succeeded Johnson as ODU’s associate athletics director for sports medicine, and with the same teams of doctors she worked with in Norfolk, Baton Rouge and St. Petersburg.
Her experience with the medical community changed her career path. She no longer will become a supply chain expert. Instead, she is majoring in health services administration.
“Being in the hospital surrounded by physicians, nurses, physical therapists and psychologists, I saw healthcare in a way I had never seen before,” she said.
“I experienced what it means to treat the whole person, not just a diagnosis. I saw how advocacy, patience and compassion can change someone’s outcome.
In spite of all of the obstacles she’s faced, and a change of her major, Ally has been a Dean’s List Student who had a 4.0 grade point average in the spring. Most of her courses have been online given her frequent treatments out of town.
She credits Rachel Nelson, the academic advisor for ODU’s swim teams, for helping to keep her focused-on academics, even during the toughest of times.
She returned to campus from another round of treatments in Florida in early April, not long before ODU’s annual Monarch Awards ceremony, in which the University’s athletics department honors its best student-athletes.
During an evening event at Chartway Arena, when students were decked out in formal attire, Ally was surprised when her name was called.
A few days earlier, she had received an email asking her to sit among the award winners. She wasn’t sure what that meant.
“I had just gotten out of the hospital,” she said. “I was still catching up in school. When I got the email, I thought, ‘Well, this will be interesting.’”
She received the award given to the most inspirational student-athlete of 2025-26 and received a long standing ovation.
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DXqJlpoETzJ/
“I had a hard time with it,” she said. “I think sometimes deep down, I forget how big what I’ve done is. I forgot about how long the odds were of me coming back. I had to figure out how to live again.
“In some ways I’ve kept what I’ve gone through on the down-low. Not many people knew I was in the hospital for the second round and during the first round, I was away from campus the entire semester. So not everyone knew. It was great to receive that award. It was a special night.”
Johnson remembers early-on, during Ally’s difficult adjustment to learning to deal with CRPS, encouraging her to think about her future, and by that, he meant decades from now, not just toward the next swim season.
“I kept telling her, Ally, I don’t really give a damn if you ever swim again. I want you to be able to walk, to be able to pick up your kids, to have a normal life.”
She finally began to think in those terms after returning to campus in April from another round of surgery.
Over time, the CRPS has spread. Originally, it took over the sciatic nerve but has spread to the femoral nerve.
“PT has been hard,” she said. “I’m not going to lie about it. And now, I think it’s a different beast. Last time I had to figure out to control below my knee to my foot. Now I’m trying to control my hip and below. CRPS has taken over the entire leg, not just half the left, and rehab looks a little different now and is a little harder and a little less perfect.”
She said her doctors acknowledged after her first round of surgery that they never truly expected she would ever swim again.
“They didn’t expect me to come back to college athletics,” she said. “They were like, strive for it, let it be the goal, but they admit they never thought it would really happen.”
But the challenge is bigger and the work will be tougher this time. She did not respond as well to surgery this time as she did in 2025.
“In this season of recovery, my goal has to be being able to do daily tasks,” she said.
“Ultimately, life has to be my priority. Being able to walk, to stand long enough to cook dinner, all of those things, have to take priority. And while I can sit here and confidently say I want athletics to be part of that, I don’t know if that’s reality. So right now, my focus is on life.”
Whether she gets in the pool or not again hasn’t been announced, but she will remain enrolled at ODU and will be a part of the team.
“My education, my career, my quality of life, have to be priorities,” she said. “But I will be a part of the team, although just how that looks hasn’t been determined. As I’ve told a lot of people throughout this process, the scariest part of this process is that swimming was the only thing in my life prior to CRPS. It’s scary to say swimming may not be a part of my life.”
She acknowledged nonetheless, “I may have to take a step back from the sport.”
Livsey said regardless of whether she ever swims another lap for ODU, Ally has set an inspiring example for others trying to overcome obstacles in life.
“She faced it head on,” Livsey said. “She had times of disappointment, but you could never break her spirit. She was determined. This isn’t going to beat me, she kept saying. I’m going to get through this and I’m going to swim again. She did swim again, and whether she swims again or not doesn’t matter as much as the rest of her life.”
Contact Minium at harryminiumjr@gmail.com
This article was Harry Minium’s final one for ODU Athletics. He has retired and moved to Germany to Germany with his wife, Kerstin.