Brockton High School soccer player Amelia Vieira returns months after breaking foot to escape fire
BROCKTON - A true test of an athlete's character measures how they respond to adversity. For Amelia Vieira, a senior on Brockton High School's soccer team, that test wasn't administered on the field or in the classroom.
For her, it came in the form of a house fire this past February.
"I was at home. I heard some banging noises. I didn't correlate it with fire right away," Vieira told WBZ-TV.
By the time she realized the source of those sounds, she says flames were spreading from the garage. Vieira had to find a way out from three floors up.
"I had to jump out of the window," said Vieira.
The fall down to the porch left Amelia with a broken right foot and a hairline fracture in her arm.
"Sometimes it's unbelievable to hear," said Vieira. "But, there's a lot of things that people go through that are even more unbelievable than what I went through. So, I kind of have to keep that in mind honestly just to stay humble and realize that this isn't the worst that could have happened."
A little over six months later, boards are still up marking the damage to her family's Brockton home. But, Amelia has tossed the crutches. She says she's worked her way back close to full strength, in time for her senior season.
"She took care of business, didn't want to make it about her" Brockton High School athletic director Kevin Karo told WBZ. "It was just 'Hey, it happened and we'll move forward.'"
By moving forward, Amelia's refused to let that February fire stop her from playing the game she's loved since she was four years old.
"Soccer is almost like life to me," said Vieira. "You're going to run into people that are going to try to take the ball from you. This is kind of a weird analogy, but they're going to try and take the ball from you. You kind of have to fight for it back, which is kind of what happened with the fire. The fire tried to take a lot from me and I took it back. I kept going with it. Now I have goals that I want to reach and I plan to reach them."
Vieira has now returned to the role of a leader the Boxers know they can lean on.
"It's just something that really comes natural to her," said Karo. "I can see it in her on the field, and in the school, when she's around. She's just got that personality and that leadership quality people kind of gravitate to her I just can't wait to see where she takes it from here."