Cover Story: Chase Boyle, Loyola's 60-Minute Midfielder

This article appears in our February edition, which is free for USA Lacrosse members. Join or renew today.

THE TODDLER FELL INTO THE RIVER netting a jellyfish. No one noticed. The floating dock sloshed against the current as the young girl floundered underwater for more than two minutes before her sister saw she had slipped off the boat and into the drink.

By the time Patrick Boyle pulled his daughter out of the water, her face had turned blue. She lay motionless on the dock as he applied the life-saving measures he and his wife, Farley, had practiced just days earlier in preparation for the birth of their third child. She could only watch from the window as she tended to their newborn and a mother’s worst nightmare unfolded before her eyes. Time stopped, it seemed, with each chest compression and puff of air.

And then the young girl started coughing. Like a fire hydrant, she expelled a lung’s worth of salt water onto the dock.

Chase Boyle was 2 years old when this happened. She doesn’t remember almost drowning, but the story of what happened afterward almost always amuses her.