West Laurens’ Torren Harrison inspires with positive perspective on childhood accident, amputation

There are countless memorable moments in the life of Torren Harrison that have taken place on the West Laurens baseball field. 

Two of them that are especially scrapbook-worthy, one his sixth grade year and another late this past season, provide snapshots of his personal journey, with the sport as a backdrop, in overcoming a childhood ATV crash that claimed his left leg.

The first dates to Feb. 11, 2020, close to four months after the accident, when the Raiders invited him to throw out the ceremonial first pitch of their season-opening game against Veterans. 

A beaming Harrison, walking via crutches, made his way out to the mound wearing a West Laurens jersey to match the team’s, and delivered a circle changeup to catcher Brody Slaughter as the crowd and players in the field went wild with applause. 

Fast-forward to the second, taking place his senior night April 14 of this year, and Harrison can be seen swinging the bat with the same giant smile, from steps away at home plate as mother Jakita Luten looks on from behind the backstop during a new tradition called “senior BP” – which gave him and the Raiders’ five other seniors a chance to take a few swings, then circle the bases one more time after a win in their final home game of the regular season. 

Now moving about fluidly on a prosthetic leg, he took off to touch them all after peppering the outfield with several line drives, and was received at the plate with just as moving an ovation from teammates, friends and fans – by now the next-closest thing to family – who lined the field. 

His mom can still picture the expression of joy she saw on his face that night so many years ago, matched only by this one in an emotional scene that offered a great picture of Harrison’s lifelong affection for baseball, and this West Laurens team’s love for him. 

“He was all smiles,” Luten recalled. “It was just a full-circle moment where everything just came back together, how everything was destined to be.” 

Harrison doesn’t often get into games, but there might not have been a more indispensable player in the Raiders’ program over the past four years, and particularly this season’s run to a region championship and the state quarterfinals. 

Though his impact goes mostly unseen, the senior has been as valuable a contributor as there is to the team’s success with his nonstop effort, and ability to lift others up with a contagious optimism. 

“Hardworking!” said West Laurens head coach Parker Gordon. “He never complains and never makes excuses. Torren is 100 percent bought in to Raider Baseball and all he wanted was to treat the program and his teammates with the highest respect. He breathed life into our practices and dugout. He is a true Raider and will be missed next season.” 

His experience has been just as much an inspiration to everyone around him who’s observed his determination to make the best of difficult circumstances. 

“To me, it’s amazing,” Luten said. “Some people may not have taken it the way he did, but he thrived with it.” 

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Though his memories are a bit fuzzy, Harrison remembers all too well the day that changed his life forever. He and a friend were riding a four-wheeler on Dublin’s Champion Ophelia Road on a Sunday afternoon in October of 2019. 

Just after he had taken over driving, the craft veered slightly off the road, and an overcorrection back toward the center caused it to overturn into the ditch, pinning his leg beneath a tire. After being treated by emergency responders on the scene, Harrison would be airlifted between multiple hospitals for surgeries hoping to save and eventually restore use of the mangled limb. 

“To be honest, it really was a blur,” he said. “I had a lot of things in me, IVs and stuff. Literally, when we got to the ambulance, they put in an IV instantly, and it was a lot going on. I guess they gave me some stuff to calm me down and sooth me down. I got in a helicopter, and I think I went to Macon and went to Atlanta after that.” 

Doctors, at first, were optimistic. But regressions in the days and weeks that followed made amputation the only option. 

And though the news, what he already understood to be a distinct possibility, didn’t come as a surprise, Harrison admitted feeling “very hurt, shocked” as he was hit by the many implications of a decision he knew was largely out of his hands. 

“I didn’t think it was really going to be that bad, then they tell you that, and you’re just like, ‘Oh man,'” he said. “My nanny and my mama they came to me, they said what the doctor said, and I said, ‘I know, mama.’ And they just went on and did it, did the surgery.” 

Coping with the pain of that realization, and the healing process, made that time in the hospital the toughest part of the whole ordeal. 

“Me and my family talk about his all the time. I tell them, I think God put angels around me those couple of months,” Harrison said. “I really don’t even know myself how I stayed strong for my family and my teammates. I really don’t know.” 

But those early steps to make peace with the new reality were his first of many conscious decisions to turn the problem into a privilege. 

“He took it, and put his own spin on it,” Luten said. “He just accepted it for what it is.” 

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Though the injury threatened to take some things away from him, one that Harrison refused to let go of was the game of baseball. 

It’s a sport he’d loved all his life, and played since about the age of nine, in his mom’s best recollection, starting on the rec fields of DLCRA and Dudley Little League with teammates he’s been close to from the time they started school. 

“Ever since he was little, he just loved the atmosphere of playing baseball and the camaraderie with his friends,” Luten said. “He grew up with this same group of people since he was in kindergarten.” 

While the setback was bound to affect his ability to play to some extent, the hope of doing so again did a lot to shape his perspective in the early steps of recovery, and after thankfully being able to return to the field a few years later. 

“It meant a lot, because I thought I was done,” Harrison said. 

The injury, a few months out from the start of what would’ve been his sixth grade season, would rule out hopes of trying out for that first middle school baseball team in January. But Harrison still wanted to be close to the sport, and his longtime teammates, so he approached then WLMS head coach Vaughan Murkerson about becoming part of the team as a manager when he returned to school. 

“That was my way of staying in the game, being with my teammates,” he said. 

The relationships forged through that role turned out to be a major lifeline during his rehabilitation. 

In addition to the support of his friends and teammates, love flowed in from all corners of the Raiders’ region, many of whose teams presented him signed baseballs, cards and best wishes as tokens of their thoughts and encouragement each time they went on the road. 

It’d be later that year that Harrison began the process of trying out potential prosthetics, in hopes of finding one that would allow him to regain full mobility. Though he did, getting back to any semblance of normal was nothing close to an immediate transition. 

“I had to really, first, start off walking,” Harrison said. “Like a baby, you walk, then you run. And I just kept going, built off my therapy and kept doing my physical therapy and stuff like that.” 

The new leg took a lot of getting used to, and had a long learning curve. But come baseball season, he was ready to get back out and play, starting with some fall ball action for his local travel team, and then his seventh grade WLMS season early in 2021. 

“That first year was a little tough. He did what he could, as much as he could, and I tried to be as helpful as possible in that transition process for him, with all that stuff going on,” Murkerson said. “It was difficult for him, putting pressure on it, trying to trust it and things like that. There were days when he was like, ‘Coach I can’t.'”

But through all the ups and downs of adjusting, Harrison made an impression with his relentless attitude, insistence on going at drills and conditioning full-speed and giving every team activity the best he could. 

“He refused to be last in anything,” Murkerson said. “He never let it be an excuse.” 

Fast forward to high school, and his comfort with the prosthetic leg has become all but seamless. In fact, you have to pay awful close attention to pick out any sign of it in his movements around campus or the field. 

“It’s crazy to see how far he’s come to where, you don’t really even think about it or notice it,” Murkerson said. “Most of the guys don’t really say anything about it. It’s kind of like the new normal now.” 

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The phrase, everything happens for a reason, gets thrown around a lot. 

But looking back on everything this misfortune brought about, there are numerous examples Harrison and others in his life can point to of how the Lord used this great complication for good things… in the short-term, simply as an encouragement to those who observe his confident outlook each day around the school and baseball field. 

“Having him in the dugout, being a positive light, even through all of that stuff he was going through, that helped me out a lot, helped us out a lot, helped the team out a lot,” Murkerson said.  

There were a number of other circumstances that made the time period of his accident and recuperation a difficult chapter for the WLMS baseball program, many of them tied to the COVID-19 pandemic, which had wiped out the back half of the 2020 season and heavily affected the spring of 2021. 

Harrison and his head coach also shared some common ground in this season of hardship, after Murkerson lost his sister Em in a tragic accident in May of 2020 that was weighing heavily on him for much of the next year. 

They both were a daily support for each other, with Harrison’s optimistic demeanor a Godsend on many of those toughest days. 

“He helped me through,” Murkerson said. “He doesn’t realize this, but he’s helped me probably a lot more than I’ve helped him. He’s meant a lot to me. Me and him have always been pretty close since that sixth grade year.” 

The two have been reunited as player and coach this spring, since Murkerson’s step up from WLMS head coach to an assistant position on the high school staff. And they continue to share a special bond. 

“We were talking the other day, and he said, ‘Coach, you know when this is over, I’m going to cry on your shoulder,'” Murkerson related in a conversation just before the team’s first-round playoff series. “I said, ‘look I’m going to be right there with you, crying with you.'” 

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Though his game action is limited – this past season, he appeared in five contests, with a double against Baldwin on that senior day as a lone hit – Harrison has contributed a great deal both athletically and spiritually to the Raiders’ recent baseball success through his role in practices, pregame drills and team activities, and as a hype man charged with keeping spirits high in the dugout. 

That responsibility, in particular, was a fairly significant one for this West Laurens team whose dynamic set of players tended to be at its best when feeding off the momentum of the game, or manufacturing its own emotion when the chips happened to be down. 

“At practice, our energy’s up. We fly around the field like crazy,” Harrison said. “Once we get up, it’s hard to come back down.” 

Through the years, it’s become not so much the competition as the community – time spent with teammates during down time at practice and on the bus headed to and from games – that Harrison considers his favorite experience playing baseball. 

Even when he’s not in a state of actively encouraging, teammates and coaches say that his constantly hopeful disposition always brightens their day. 

“He’s one of the most positive people I’ve ever met in my life,” Murkerson said. 

That gift for helping others shift their perspective on personal difficulties is one he now intends to use in his future career. 

Harrison, who will attend Macon’s Central Georgia Technical College to pursue a program of study in orthopedic technology, plans to enter the healthcare field on a path inspired by the relationships built with those in the industry who helped guide his way along this road he never originally chose. 

From his story, he’ll be able to draw plenty of wise counsel to offer other young amputees, or victims of major trauma, who are also working to reach the positive side of a life-altering trial. 

“I’m super proud of him,” Luten said. “Who could take on this type of experience and just make it their own? He also wants to pretty much give back to other amputees, make them feel as comfortable as possible in accepting whatever happened to them, just making it their own.” 

What’s Harrison’s biggest piece of encouragement for anyone who might be currently facing that type of struggle? 

“My advice is to dig deep, find something to dig deep, find who you do it for,” he said. “Anything within you that you can do to keep going, you find it and do it for that reason, and keep God on your side.”