Kendall Simmons

When Pittsburgh Steelers’ offensive lineman Kendall Simmons won the 2002 Joe Greene Great Performance Award for being the Steelers “Rookie of the Year,” he felt at the top of his game.
Simmons, #73, started in 14 games in that season, weighing in at 315 pounds of mostly muscle that he used to protect his quarterback or block tacklers in all of those games.
But just before training camp for the 2003 season, Simmons started experiencing symptoms that made him feel uneasy on the field: blurry vision, weakness, extreme thirst.
Perhaps the most bizarre symptom of all was a weight loss of nearly 45 pounds, despite Simmons eating and training the same way that he always had.
Just as the football season was about to get underway, a physical exam revealed the cause of these unusual symptoms and Simmons received the shock of a lifetime: he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes and started receiving insulin shots immediately.
Off His Game Like so many people diagnosed with diabetes, Kendall Simmons first went into the denial mode.
“I wanted to just go ahead and keep doing things the way I’d done before,” he explains. “I didn’t want to change my eating, I was embarrassed to take my shots in front of people. I just wanted the whole thing to go away.”
But one thing Kendall did not want was for the football world to see him, after winning “Rookie of the Year,” fall into a sophomore slump. So he went out there and played every game of the 2003 season, even as he was coming to the terms that he was living with a chronic illness and trying to grasp the nuances of how to manage his insulin, eating and work-outs to achieve optimal blood sugar management.
“I was on a rollercoaster ride in terms of my sugar most of that season,” Simmons says. “I might go from 230mg/dl to 50 in the course of a game. The media didn’t know what was going on with me medically and I knew that I wasn’t playing my best. I had to turn it around.”
Making a Plan Like everyone who is newly diagnosed with diabetes, Simmons needed to put together a support team to help him get his diabetes game together. With the help of his doctor, his trainer, his coach, the owner of the Steelers, and mostly his wife Celesta, Kendall Simmons began to take charge of his diabetes.
Ultimately, Kendall’s attitude, though, was at the center of his change in diabetes attitude.
“I had worked too hard to make it to this point in my NFL career to let something like diabetes get in the way,” he explains.
In the moments though that he did feel a little bit sorry for himself, wife Celesta was there to remind him that he just needed to stay strong. Celesta learned carbohydrate counting and nutrition for diabetes right along with Kendall and started adjusted her cooking to fit with his low-carb meal plan.
Kendall felt most appreciative that Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney looked at his diabetes as just another hurdle, not a handicap in any way. Rooney’s son has diabetes and so he, too, understands the nuances of the disease and how it needs to be managed.