Stroud's Fighting Spirit
By Christy Cabrera Chirinos
HurricaneSports.com
CORAL GABLES, Fla. – They’d been married long enough, Todd Stroud says, that it was his wife who first noticed the changes, subtle as they were.
The cough that wouldn’t go away, no matter how many antibiotics he took. Cuts that wouldn’t heal. Indigestion. The fact that he was always so cold he needed a space heater at his desk. That nagging feeling that his energy just wasn’t what it once was.
At first, Stroud somewhat shrugged off the concerns. He was getting older, he thought.
Then something happened that neither Todd nor Marianne Stroud could explain away easily.
“Before his illness, he was a powerful runner. He would win his age groups in marathons and I was not that. I was a back-of-the-pack runner,” Marianne Stroud recalled. “Then all of a sudden, I started beating him. I was faster. I think that was one of the biggest things where he could really see a physical change. He’d gotten slower, even though he was doing his best and trying his hardest. He could literally see, on a watch something had changed.
“He started asking, ‘What’s wrong with me?'”
Getting that question answered took some time, given the fact that Todd Stroud’s symptoms could apply to a variety of ailments and illnesses.
It was only after his doctor – and his doctor’s nurse – insisted on a urine test that led to a kidney biopsy that the Hurricanes defensive line coach was eventually diagnosed with AL amyloidosis, a rare blood disease that creates a buildup of protein in the body’s vital organs and is caused by a bone marrow disorder.
Stroud’s first reaction upon hearing the news was what anyone who knew him might expect.
He was ready to fight and fight hard. The reality of what he faced, though, left him in a daze.
“I was like, ‘Okay, we know what it is. What’s the treatment?’ and [the nurse practitioner] said chemotherapy. Okay. Then I asked if there was a cure,” Stroud said. “She said no, there was no cure. Well, what did that mean? So I asked what my prognosis was and she gave me the textbook answer – I had 12 to 36 months to live. I was numb at that point. I didn’t tell anyone for like a week. I just carried on with my business.”
That conversation happened in 2015, when the 56-year-old Stroud was still an assistant coach at Akron.
It was followed by chemotherapy so intense the coach signed all matter of waivers before having a six-month dose of drugs pumped into his body in a single treatment session. He underwent a stem cell transplant. There were years of low-dose chemotherapy that continued, even after Stroud joined coach Manny Diaz’s staff at Miami in March.
And it was here, earlier this year, that doctors at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center gave Stroud a relatively clean bill of health, something the Strouds and their four children have celebrated every day since and will celebrate again this Thanksgiving.
“Facing your own mortality is an interesting thing. Although you can call it a curse, at the end of the day, we’ve really looked at it as a blessing,” Stroud said. “My wife has kind of guided us through this, but, it is a blessing. It slows you down. It makes you enjoy things a lot more. You re-evaluate your priorities. You don’t sweat the small stuff. You enjoy your family more. You enjoy your kids more. You enjoy the time you spend with your players more. I want to spend more time with those guys, too, because I feel like I have something to offer them. It just slows everything down a little bit more and you see the world a little bit brighter.
“You’re kind of more grateful every morning you wake up. I think it’s made me a better guy.”
Those who know Stroud best – including Marianne, his wife of 31 years and Diaz, whom he first met when Diaz was a graduate assistant at North Carolina State in 2000 – say Stroud was a pretty good guy long before his diagnosis.
As he battled his disease, he was determined to continue working and be there for his players, missing only a handful of practices at Akron while the Zips prepared for the 2015 season. And even as he went through his own treatment, Marianne noticed, Stroud tried to serve as an inspiration to other patients battling Al amyloidosis, mentoring them as they, too, fought the disease.
“He is the most amazing, incredible man ever, to me and to our family. Even in his weakest times, he tried to always take care of us,” Marianne Stroud said. “Even without his illness, he is an incredible, giving, kind, magnetic, charismatic man who makes people feel better about themselves after they’ve been with him for a few minutes.”
Said Diaz, “Todd and I were together for six years at NC State and I don’t know if I’d ever been around someone who was more positive and more upbeat in their outlook on life than Todd Stroud. It was almost impossible to find the guy in a bad mood. He taught me a lot. I was still a very young coach at that time and he taught me a lot about how to handle the ups and downs that inherently come with this profession. … When you find out what he’s up against and what he did to overcome what he had, I don’t know if anybody else could have done it. You can’t help but wonder if it was his personality, his temperament that helped him get on top of this thing. What an inspiration for everyone that knows him.”
In his short time at Miami, Stroud has also already made an impression on the defensive linemen who stop by his office regularly for post-practice chats – or to snack on some of the treats Marianne often sends to the football facility with her husband.
Their coach hasn’t made much of a fuss about his illness, but his players know how sometimes, he’s walked across the Greentree Practice Field to visit the on-campus Lennar Center to either receive treatment or meet with his doctors before returning to the office and getting back to work shortly thereafter.
“He’s been through so much and he has such a great outlook on life. He’s always so positive and our whole room just feeds off of that,” said Hurricanes defensive end Greg Rousseau, whose 12 sacks rank fourth in the country. “He’s serious when it’s time to be serious, but we have fun, too. He’s a great coach and we’re really blessed to have him.”
Added defensive end Scott Patchan, “The guy can connect with us, first off, so that’s a positive. And he knows what he’s talking about. … It means so much that he takes some of the time that he could be focused on continuing to be healthy and he dedicates it to us. It shows us how important we are to him and in return, we try to pay it back to him every single day. … He’s out there every day with a smile on his face, no matter what and that puts a smile on our faces.”
In essence, that’s why Stroud was determined to keep coaching, even though there were points where he was encouraged to step away from football and focus on his health.
Getting better and fighting his disease was always important. But the bond he’d forged with his players was too strong to ignore. He brought that same mentality with him to Miami and now, the coach says, he’s convinced that approach helped him get better.
“The support my family gave me, especially my wife, is the reason I’m alive today,” Stroud said. “But there’s also the intrinsic motivation of it all, of still having value and helping kids. When you’re a young coach, you probably do it for selfish reasons – because you’re still a competitor or you want to be rich or you want to become a head coach.
“But when you get to my age, I think you finally realize why you do it – you do it to help kids and influence kids. And that’s why I’m in this. That’s why I’m still doing it right now. The biggest charge I get is watching these kids grow up.”
