Dana LeeDec 4, 2025, 07:00 AM ETCloseDana Lee is a reporter-researcher at ESPN.
It’s May 2024. Charlotte is 16 years old and playing the best volleyball of her life until chills give way to a fever. Her organs shut down. She is in Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis on life support.
Her grandmother appears. The woman who adored tulips. Who taught Charlotte how to bake. Who loved watching her play volleyball. When her grandmother’s breast cancer returned, she vowed to live long enough to see where Charlotte would play in college. She died in July 2023, four days after her granddaughter committed to Indiana. But she’s with Charlotte now.
“I was moving through lights,” Charlotte says, sitting in the Indiana film room an hour before a November practice. “I was thinking I was going to die and accepting that fate.”
He quickly stuffs a suitcase with shirts, pants and toiletries before heading to Riley, an hour-and-20-minute drive away in Indianapolis. Charlotte’s mom, Erin, is already on the road ahead of him.
It had been just three days since Charlotte started to feel sick. The Vinsons had gone to church that morning, Mother’s Day, and then brunch. A few hours later, Charlotte couldn’t stop shivering. Her fever spiked. By Wednesday, she was struggling to get out of bed, and she threw up when she did. Phil took Charlotte to see a doctor around 10 a.m. In the waiting room, she said something that terrified him.
They rushed to the emergency room at IU Health Ball Memorial, where Erin, a family physician, met them. Charlotte’s blood pressure was low, her heart rate high, her organs were shutting down. She was diagnosed with toxic shock syndrome, a rare and sometimes fatal condition most associated with tampon use. In Charlotte’s case, the infection was caused by strep bacteria and unrelated to tampons. Paramedics loaded her onto a stretcher and boarded her onto the lifeline helicopter.
Hovering over the landing pad at Riley, the helicopter is loud, but Charlotte doesn’t hear a thing. The sky above the hospital roof is bruised gray and overcast as Charlotte is wheeled in.
Erin is still on her way to Riley when the attending physician, Dr. Courtney Rowan, calls. She wants permission to intubate Charlotte right away; there’s no time to wait.
Charlotte’s body has stopped sending blood to vital organs like her kidneys and liver and brain. Depleted of oxygen, her cells are dying and releasing lactic acid. Doctors do their best to stabilize her. They pump rounds of antibiotics and medication into her body to fight the infection and lessen the strain on her overworked heart.
But 24 hours later, on Thursday, Charlotte’s condition worsens. She codes that night, and Erin scrambles to make sure Phil is in the room. Get Phil, she pleads. She knows he will never forgive himself if Charlotte dies and he’s not there.
Dr. Rowan explains to Erin and Phil that Charlotte’s best shot is to go on ECMO, a machine that will function as her heart and lungs, because her body is too weak to pump blood.
Dr. Rowan is compassionate but blunt. Charlotte could die on ECMO, but she will definitely die without it. The Riley doctors perform the surgery to insert the tubes that night in Charlotte’s hospital room — she’s too sick to move into an operating room.
Three nurses are in the room at all times. One to monitor the ECMO machine, another assigned to the dialysis machine that acts as Charlotte’s kidneys, a third manages everything else. One of the nurses braids Charlotte’s hair.
Most of all what Charlotte’s body needs is time. Family members, coaches, teammates and friends shuffle in and out of the waiting room down the hall. Someone prints photos — Charlotte with her friends, Charlotte playing volleyball — and hangs them on the hospital room wall so they are the first thing Charlotte will see when she wakes up.
Through this holy anointing, may the Lord and his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit.
A machine breathes for her and she can’t speak. Charlotte gestures for a whiteboard in her room. It’s early still, and only Erin and Charlotte’s aunt are in the hospital room. Charlotte takes the marker and writes. “Grandma.” Erin thinks Charlotte is confused — her grandpa was in the room just the other night — but Charlotte is adamant. “All white,” she writes. “I saw Grandma.”
It takes five people to help Charlotte stand from her hospital bed. One nurse at the front to steady her by the shoulders, three to support Charlotte from the back, a fifth person by her side to manage the handful of tubes and wires sprouting from Charlotte’s body. Once she’s standing, she’s walking, marching around the hospital floor at a determined clip with IV and oxygen tank in tow.
The Vinsons pass hours at the hospital watching “The Bear” in Charlotte’s room, closing the door because they are at a pediatric hospital and sometimes there is swearing in the show.
THE YORKTOWN HIGH volleyball team practices in the school gym, and Charlotte sits on a chair on the side of the court. It’s July, and Charlotte had been attending — watching — the summer workouts for a few weeks.
Please? It’s just a serve, a motion so deeply entrenched in muscle memory that at the hospital, when she could barely move her limbs, Charlotte mimicked serves from bed, closing her eyes and imagining exactly this.
Charlotte tries to laugh it off — “Oh my gosh, this is so embarrassing” — but Bloom sees the realization dawn on her face. This is going to be hard.
She lost more than 20 pounds on her 6-foot-2 frame and was trying to regain weight while her appetite hadn’t returned. Swallowing was still a delicate process.
Parent was frank with the Vinsons: Charlotte might never play volleyball again. Her heart was weakened from the infection and dealing with inflammation. There could be scarring, which would further reduce heart function. The probability of her playing again, at the level she wanted to, was slim.
“I would say less than 1% back when she was in the ICU,” Parent says. “By the time she left the hospital, maybe 10%.”
“I remember the first day she was allowed to stand,” says Mike Lingenfelter, co-director of Munciana Volleyball, one of the top clubs in the country. “She’s mad because she can’t run. She can start to run, now she’s mad she can’t jump. She’s allowed to jump, she’s mad because she doesn’t jump as high.”
At the Munciana gym, Lingenfelter shook his head. “Why do we want to be where we were?” he asked Charlotte. “Why wouldn’t we want to be better?”
Charlotte threw herself into rehab, a grueling process she naively once thought might take a week, but was actually several long months.
“She was very adamant with me,” Bloom says now. “Like, ‘I will be back this fall.’ I didn’t know if that was going to happen, but she really believed it.”
Erin figured Charlotte could perhaps make it back at some point before the season ended. “In my mind I was like, ‘Well maybe senior night at the end of the season it can be like a little token serve,’ you know? That’s not where Charlotte’s brain was.”
Toward the end of August, Charlotte was clear: She would play in Yorktown’s game against Wapahani on Sept. 3. That day, Charlotte had a battery of tests and three appointments with doctors at Riley before being cleared to play — front row only — later that night. Fans greeted her with a standing ovation. Some cried. Charlotte delivered a match-high 13 kills from her outside hitter position.
She played in every game after that, leading the Tigers to another state final. She played in her final club season for Munciana that summer and later traveled to Croatia as part of the U19 national team.
By the time she arrived on Indiana’s campus this summer, Charlotte felt like she had regained the fitness she had lost. She felt like she had fulfilled Lingenfelter’s promise to get even better.
She had ambitious goals — to play in college, win an NCAA championship — and at age 16, when most kids are getting their driver’s license, she had learned there was a finite time to accomplish them. She had learned that you could get a fever one day and never wake up. The very condition that made her a walking liability is what made her eager to crash into her freshman season full steam ahead.
“I was angry,” says Charlotte, dressed in a brown Alo sweatsuit. Inside the team film room, white binders and a scouting report for tomorrow’s game against Oregon litter the table in front of her. “I’m someone who likes to have a plan, like this is what I’m going to do, no one’s going to stop me. For that to be put on hold, it made me question things.”
Her nails are painted mint green. The color on her right thumb is irreparably chipped. When she pauses, she fills in the blanks by talking with her hands; her fingers are slender, long enough to easily palm a volleyball.
Charlotte’s older sister, Kate, an assistant director of compliance at Indiana and a former volleyball player at Ball State, absorbed much of Charlotte’s frustration. Charlotte spent a lot of time in Kate’s office over the next few weeks, eating her lunch and stewing.
“It was a big struggle mentally,” Kate says. “I don’t think she knew how hard it was going to be. She’s been a starter on every team she’s ever played on and had to change her mindset to, ‘All right, in practice I’m going to be the best I can be for the team.'”
Aird wouldn’t budge. He had learned in the few weeks of Charlotte being on campus that she valued honesty. He liked that a lot. She wanted to be coached hard, even if the message was blunt. Now Aird was being blunt.
Aird had been in the waiting room of the ICU while Charlotte was sedated and hooked up to multiple life-saving machines. Later, the Indiana coaching staff would visit in shifts once it looked like Charlotte would be OK.
With Charlotte, Aird balanced conflicting desires. Charlotte wanted to play. He didn’t want her collapsing midgame. Charlotte wanted to play now. He saw her as part of a long-term plan for the program. They discussed the idea of redshirting, which Charlotte rejected. Aird preached patience.