Van Buren’s Standifird blossoms in football, track, overcomes hand injury

Garrett Standifird swears he used to be painfully shy. To see him now, though, working the floor over at Planet Fitness, you’d never know the Van Buren senior — throwing around one-liners like a seasoned pro — was ever bashful. “I usually just fill in for people and work three days a week,” Standifird said. “But lately, I’ve been working more — five days two weeks ago and four days last week.” What is unique to the Van Buren senior track standout, however, is his work ethic. Chatting among the people? He can do that, too. “I can talk to anybody now,” Standifird said. “I don’t like to ... but I can.” Standifird, squinting in the early afternoon sunlight, is smiling. He’ll take center stage today at the McDonald Relays in Fort Smith, competing in the discus and shot put. But Standifird’s athletic career, including the track scholarship he would sign with Little Rock three months shy of graduating from Van Buren High School, may not have happened without some serious perseverance. When Standifird was 14, he lost parts of two fingers on his left hand in his grandfather’s workshop. “My grandpa (Ed Standifird), he has a woodshed with all the basics to make projects,” Standifird said. “He wasn’t there at the time, but he had taught me a lot of stuff about safety. I was in there making a project for a friend of mine. It was a little dark in there, and I had been outside all day, and my eyes hadn’t adjusted. There was a knot on the board that I was cutting. My hand slipped forward and ...” Standifird blacked out. “I had no idea what had happened when I woke up,” he said. Standifird’s mom, Tammy, called 911, grabbed Garrett and — in one fluid motion — hit the gas. Because they were so far out in the “sticks,” as Garrett explained, they met an ambulance at a convenience store and he was rushed to St. Frances Hospital in Tulsa. The accident happened near Porum, a rural stretch of Oklahoma, less than 100 miles from Tulsa. “They took great care of me; they were very nice,” Standifird said. “My entire arm was wrapped up.” Standifird returned to school; life quickly returned to normal. But sports? Could Garrett Standifird play football? Would he become limited? “I was kind of worried but I never really showed that to anybody,” he said. “I kept it all my head. Anytime someone asked me what I was going to do sports-wise I would say, ‘What about it?’ “I wasn’t going to quit unless somebody made me quit.” More trauma Standifird, who had played football for his dad Daryl’s fifth-grade Pointers team, working his way up to high school, hit another snag late in his freshman season. “Our next to last game, my ring finger, the only one they were able to save, got caught in another player’s shoulder pads,” Standifird said. “So, my ring finger was kept at a 45 degree angle for two years.” The pain was agonizing. “Every day the pain just got worse,” Standifird said. “But I never told anybody. It was six months prior to my next surgery.” Garrett’s humor “My original hand doctor, Dr. (Kenneth) Chekofsky, he didn’t sugarcoat things — he told me straight out how it was,” Standifird said. “He was very polite to me, and I was very polite to him, and he told me I was one of his favorite patients.” And Standifird trudges forward. “Right after the accident, I was making jokes about it,” Standifird said. “And I haven’t stopped making jokes.” One joke, Standifird said, was on his former offensive line coach, Mike Lowrey. “My sophomore year, I had to wear a strap on my left hand, to take all the weight off my hand whenever I lifted weights,” Standifird explained. “It took me a little longer to grab onto the weight to get it up. Coach Lowery came over and yelled at me and said, ‘We don’t use straps at this level.’ “I took off my hand and said, ‘Coach’ (revealing his hand) and he said, ‘OK.’ We never talked about it.” Second surgery Standifird hit the weight room soon after, but hit another bump in the road when the titanium plate inserted in his hand proved to be too thin. Two weeks later, a thicker plate was inserted. The accident, which he soon began joking about as a way to move past what had happened, doesn’t affect his ability to heave the shot put. The mental aspect, however, was a different story. “It affected me with life, and it affected me with football,” Standifird said. Family legacy Standifird’s dad was a starting left tackle on one of Van Buren’s best teams from the 1980s — the Gary Autry-coached 1987 squad. That team, in fact, beat Alma, 21-20, on the final week of the season in one of the best Crawford County battles ever, driving 80 yards for the go-ahead score in the final minute. Van Buren then blasted Bentonville and Newport to open the playoffs before losing to eventual state champion Arkadelphia — coached by the late John Outlaw — in the ’87 semis. Three decades later, another Standifird is proudly blocking for the Pointers. “Sports has always been a part of my life,” Garrett Standifird said. “It was one of my dad’s, too. It was one of those things that he would teach me and that helped us bond. “Sports has always been a big part, especially football, because that’s what he excelled at.” Shot put Sandifird has been on point this spring. He won the Alma Relays on the last Friday of March. He placed second at last week’s Pointer Relays. Track suits him well, says assistant Van Buren track coach Christopher Elliott. “Throwing the shot and the discus is really something he (Standifird) enjoys doing,” he said. “In track and field, to find a kid that buys in, no matter what the sport, is really hard these days. It really kind of sets them apart and makes them a unique individual to begin with.” Last week, after he had finished throwing the discus, Standifird remained in the infield adjacent to the Pointers’ track, helping officials retrieve discs from other competitors. “Since I’ve gotten to know him as a ninth-grader, his work ethic is really what kind of sets him apart from other throwers I’ve had over the years,” added Elliott. “A lot of this came naturally to Garrett, but he also put the work in to really try to excel and be the best that he personally could be.”

THE OFFICIAL SITE OF
Van Buren High School Athletics

VAN BUREN’S STANDIFIRD BLOSSOMS IN FOOTBALL, TRACK, OVERCOMES HAND INJURY

KEVIN TAYLOR

Times Record | 4/18/2019

PHOTO CREDIT: Jamie Mitchell