Roughly 11 months after he last donned the Tiger orange and black, senior co-captain and running back Jordan Culbreath is once again in action with the football team. Culbreath missed all but two games last season after a diagnosis of aplastic anemia, but his remarkable recovery led him back to a team that is thrilled to see its star rusher in good health.
The athletics department announced on August 25 that Culbreath — who was granted a Medical Hardship redshirt by the Ivy League — would return to the squad as a co-captain. He was a co-captain last year as well, but much of his leadership came from afar, while he was in the hospital.
Now, though, he is back on the practice field, working his way forward.
"I'm trying to see how I react, I'm out here working hard every day, taking it one step at a time," Culbreath said after Wednesday’s morning practice. "I want to be the best that I can be. Sometimes my mind is where I used to be two years ago, and my body's like, 'wait a second.' But they'll catch up together, and they’ll work on the same page pretty soon."
Culbreath will continue to receive treatment for his illness during the season, and both he and first-year head coach Bob Surace '90 said they were unsure of how much he would be able to play this year. Still, Surace sounded positive when asked about Culbreath's progress.
"He's standing out on the field right now as a hot player," Surace said. "I think he’s been getting his wind back, shaking some of the rust off that anybody would have. You know, you watch him [and] he has balance, he has vision, he can block, he can catch, he can do all the different things as an every-down back."
Surace continued to praise his running back by drawing on two instances in which Culbreath has already proven that he can still play.
"His teammates will tell you he looks good, he really does," Surace explained. "Ask the linebackers, two of our starters. In live [play], one of them missed an open-field tackle one-on-one, [and] people say [he] is an All-American. And the other one got knocked on his can on a pass protection play." Senior co-captain and inside linebacker Steven Cody has been named to two preseason All-American lists after finishing fifth in the nation in tackles-per-game last season.
Despite his encouraging progress, though, few expect Culbreath to immediately return to his peak form of two seasons ago, when he ran for 1,206 yards — good enough for fourth all-time at Princeton. That year, Culbreath was unanimously named to the first All-Ivy League team after leading the Ancient Eight in rushing, racking up five games of at least 150 yards along the way. Against Dartmouth in the season's last game he notched the second-highest single-game rushing total in Tiger history, with 276 yards.
The next year, though, was a different story. After not feeling like his old self in the off-season, Culbreath made it through the season-opening loss to The Citadel without making much of an impact on the ground. The next week, he was removed after one half at Lehigh.
Then-head coach Roger Hughes soon tearfully revealed that Culbreath would likely be out for the season, and the running back spent weeks in the hospital undergoing testing and treatment.
Culbreath admitted that this period was a difficult one for him. "When I think about last fall, it's hard because it actually went by really fast for me," he explained. "While I was going through that, I tried to make myself feel like nothing, I was almost in denial, like this wasn't happening to me. In my mind, I try to blank that out now … There are no excuses now that I'm back in the pads. Other teams aren't going to care where I was last year, so I try not to think about that."
It was this optimism that struck Surace when he first spoke with Culbreath after landing Hughes's old job in December. "I called him right after I got the job, only player I called … to let him know how proud I was as an alum," Surace said. "It was Christmas. On Christmas day, you’re called a kid who may or may not survive … I was expecting to talk to a guy who, it might be his last Christmas. And he was like the most excited and happy, [with a] great attitude. So that’s a lesson for all of us — coaches, team, everybody — that [when] you hit obstacles, having the right attitude sure helps."
Still, it was not until the spring of the last school year that playing football became a remote possibility for Culbreath.
Surace said he spoke to Culbreath's doctors, who told the coach they were encouraged by what they saw. But the running back was not fully cleared until the summer, two months before preseason began.
Now Culbreath is back on the turf, running plays with members of the first-team offense and impressing everyone who stops to watch. It is still unclear whether he will be the featured running back in the months to come, but at least one thing is certain: He will be ready to take on whatever task is given to him.
"I don’t really have any personal goals," he said. "Whoever the running back is, if we're winning games, that's fine with me … I'm going to take advantage of every day I get out here."
Surace stressed that he was happy with Culbreath's progress, but that he was not placing any expectations on him.
"Whether he rushes for 1,500 yards or three yards, [what matters] is just the fact that he's healthy, and he's happy he's part of the team," Surace said.
The Tigers will open the Surace era on September 18 against Lehigh in Bethlehem, Pa. — in the same stadium in which Culbreath played his last downs of competitive football.
"It's our first game, it's the next team we have to beat, that's all that means to me," Culbreath said. "But it is kind of a coincidence that the last game I played and the next game I'm going to play are at Lehigh. At least I know the field."
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