Diabetes no obstacle for UVM captain Alex Jenkins

Alex Jenkins doesn’t have a choice so she checks.

An hour before the game. Moments before kickoff. At halftime. After the post-match cool-down session.

Vigilance is paramount for the University of Vermont’s co-captain. Occasionally, an extra juice box is needed. Jenkins refuses to let the alternative — a blood-sugar crash that leads to an errant pass or costly late-game touch for her soccer team — be part of the equation.

“Diabetes doesn’t wait for me and I’m not going to wait for diabetes to make decisions for me,” said the 20-year-old.

Type 1 diabetes is nothing new to Jenkins — she’s lived with it since age 6. But the fact that one of the Catamounts’ fittest, most versatile and most reliable players has to stay a step ahead of the disease, too, is likely to shock those outside the program.

Yet she handles her diabetes so deftly that it’s almost a non-issue for her team.

“It’s not like it’s an unknown for us, planning around that, ‘What if Alex has a crash?’ because she manages it so well,” UVM coach Kristi Lefebvre said. “I think I could count on one hand the times it’s even happened in practice since she’s been here.

“I think that says a lot about her awareness of her own body and her preparation. It’s definitely more than the average athlete has to deal with. It’s extra precaution, extra preparation.”

At the very beginning, the precautions were simple.

That apple Jenkins enjoyed so much when she got home from school? Off-limits. Her body’s inability to produce insulin made unscheduled snacking a potential hazard.

“I remember being like, ‘Oh, man, I can’t eat my apple when I get home from school. I have to eat it earlier,’” said the junior, now a biochemistry major on a pre-med track.

With Jenkins’ diagnosis, she became the second person in a family of five to deal with Type 1, which affects roughly 5 percent of America’s 29 million diagnosed diabetics, according to the American Diabetes Association.

Her father, David, already had the condition and a month after doctors detected Alex’s case, her youngest sister, Jordan, was diagnosed. (Her other sister, Brooke, a sophomore on the UVM team, doesn’t have the disease.)

From there it’s not a stretch to figure that growing up with two other diabetics and spending time every year at Camp Surefire, a summer camp for kids with Type 1 in her home state of Rhode Island, helped prepare Jenkins for life as a college athlete. Family made it a round-the-clock presence while Surefire, where she’s since become one of the directors, normalized the experience.

“It’s a camp, basically like any other summer camp — except we eat and check our blood-sugar every two hours,” Jenkins said. “We try to teach kids they don’t have to be limited by their diabetes and we try to teach them ways to manage it.”

But as a Division I student-athlete with ambitious career plans to boot, the reality of life with diabetes means complexities can multiply rapidly.

What happens when Jenkins’ blood-sugar levels dip below the desired range?

Good luck focusing during study time, or performing in practice, or trying to go sleep. And if it happens after a meal, a full stomach isn’t an excuse.

“Then I have to go eat something, but I’d already eaten dinner so I feel sick because I had to eat more food,” Jenkins said.

Catch the flu during finals, as Jenkins did last spring? Those same measurements spike and make life just as difficult.

“Your body’s fighting infection so that raises your stress levels, which then raises your blood-sugar levels,” Jenkins said. “So I just had a miserable week. And it was right during finals. Some finals grades were lower than they should’ve been because I couldn’t really focus, I couldn’t do anything but sleep and I could barely eat.”

However, that no-excuses, face-things-head-on outlook is what makes Jenkins such a valuable piece to the puzzle for the Catamounts.

“There’s something to be said about that, leadership-wise, when you don’t project your issues on others,” said Lefebvre, who had never coached a diabetic athlete before Jenkins.

“I think it compares to other things too. It could be diabetes, it could be chronic fatigue, it could be a nagging injury, family problems ... it’s every day and this is how she handles it,” Lefebvre said.

As a soccer player, that mentality has manifested itself in several ways. Jenkins’ commitment to fitness means going the full 90 minutes is never out of the question, and her versatility — she’s listed as a midfielder/defender — has allowed Lefebvre to play her across the field in every direction.

“She’s actually played — aside from in goal — every single position for us and she’s a junior,” Lefebvre said.

This season, it appears the junior’s competitive drive has secured a steady home as a holding midfielder.

“She’s a very assertive, aggressive personality, but she’s a good kid, a hard worker,” Lefebvre said. “She’s a workhorse, she adapts to every position. She’s someone you want on the field because she’s a leader, she covers a lot of ground and she’s tough.”

One point of pride for Jenkins: Her control over her diabetes has never cost her in a game for UVM. Her game-day routine is quite dialed-in. She knows what fast- and long-acting carbohydrates are, and how they figure into optimal pre-game nutrition.

“I’m really good about always checking, which is important — it’s just being proactive. And I also know my body,” Jenkins said. “I can feel my blood sugar dropping even if I don’t have my monitor on me.”

At intermission, she knows enough to give herself a little extra insulin — she doesn’t wear her pump, a cell-phone sized device she can clip to her waistband, during the game — to see her her through the prospect of playing more than 90 minutes.

“If we’re playing in an overtime game and I start to feel my perception of the game is changing because I can tell when my blood sugar is dropping, that’s going to affect how I can perform,” Jenkins said. “And in terms of the team, I don’t want to let the team down by missing a tackle because my blood sugar is low.

“That’s why I work toward having control of it. It’s not just me.”

As if she didn’t have enough on her plate, Jenkins said she’s working on an idea — “Potentially next semester, because this semester is super busy being in-season” — to form a group with UVM students with diabetes who can help others in the community.

Then there’s the thought about pushing for a diabetes-awareness game, similar to what UVM teams do with Rally Against Cancer contests like Sunday’s soccer doubleheader at Virtue Field. (The women host Stony Brook at noon, the men host Bryant at 3 p.m.)

“I can’t reverse it, I can’t go back in time. Why in the world would I be upset about (diabetes)?” Jenkins said. “I just need to kind of roll with it and make the most out of it. I think promoting (awareness) and talking to people is something that’s important.”

This story was originally published Sept. 26, 2015. Contact Austin Danforth at 651-4851 or edanforth@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/eadanforth