Indiana University football player Donovan Clark shared another in a long line of stories about life in a broken system, sharing how his athletic dream was stolen from him by former IU head coach Kevin Wilson and his staff.

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (WTHR) - By now, all the IU football horror stories read essentially the same. The only difference is the injury, whether it’s a concussion, a back, an ankle, whatever. The player gets hurt while playing for former IU coach Kevin Wilson, who was forced to resign last week. The player is forced to engage in an activity that exacerbates his injury.

The player misses time with the injury, all the while being trashed and bullied by Wilson for his lack of availability.

The player is medically disqualified despite gaining clearance from an outside doctor. The player is refused the freedom to transfer, finding out later that Wilson has told prospective schools the player is an injury risk.

The stories are the same.

Only the details change.

So here is Donovan Clark, a 21-year-old from Fort Wayne South Side High School who started at cornerback as an IU freshman, sitting in the kitchen of his clean, well-appointed off-campus apartment, exclusively telling WTHR another in a long line of stories about life in a broken system, sharing how his athletic dream was stolen from him by Wilson and his staff.

“It’s still unbelievable to me, to prepare for something my whole life; at this point this was part of my identity, so to have it stripped away from me like that, first of all, it isn’t respectable and second, it was just degrading,’’ Clark said. “…Everybody says they’re prepared for life after football but nobody is prepared to have it taken away from them just like that…Looking back on it now, yeah, I went through a period of depression.’’

As was the case with Dominique Booth, whose story was told here, Clark made an immediate impact as a freshman cornerback for the Hoosiers. He played in all 12 games that year and had 17 tackles. The future was bright; he was almost certainly going to be a starter his sophomore year and beyond.

And then his lower back started acting up as he began off-season training. He told the trainers about the pain, but was told he simply needed to stretch more.

He was then told he needed to do several exercises, including the power clean, which puts great stress on the lower back. Clark told the strength coach and trainers the exercise caused pain and they needed to give him a modified program to help ease that distress. They didn’t listen. So when Clark lifted a heavy weight, he felt a sharp pain radiate down his leg.

“You’re soft,’’ they told him. “Stop being a p----.’’

So Clark fought through it, later slapping an Icy Hot patch on his back in the hope it might ameliorate the pain. By then, he was afraid to tell the strength coach his back was bothering him, for fear of being termed “soft’’ or worse yet again.

A week later, Clark was lifting heavy weights while doing squats, an exercise he insisted caused back pain. They didn’t want to hear it. So he continued, and halfway through a squat, he felt that excruciating pain down his leg. Clark demanded that he get an MRI, which ultimately showed he had a bulging disk in the L4-L5 region. Still, he said the team doctor and trainers told Clark it wasn’t that bad and he should be ready for spring practice. Clark had his doubts, not to mention his pain, but he’d become so intimidated by the harsh response his complaints elicited, he soldiered on. The staff then told him to receive a pain-masking epidural, which he did.

A few weeks into spring practice, though, he made a tackle, and the pain returned in his leg.

“I ran over to the side to report it to the trainer and coaches,’’ Clark said. “I could tell by their faces they knew they had done something wrong. They reported the news to coach Wilson. He came over to me and said, `I am not paying you to be hurt. If you want a role on this team, then you have to show the coaches during the spring.’ ‘’

So Clark returned to the field once again, and once again, he injured the back.

That’s when Clark, and every other injured player, was sent to “The Tent,’’ an area where players were forced to do heavy exercises regardless of their physical condition. Even more, injured players could not eat meals with the rest of the team; they had to wait to eat last.

“It was a long and humiliating year,’’ Clark said. “It was like if you were hurt, you were outlawed from the team. Like you were a non-person…Being hurt was like a sin, like you were wearing a scarlet letter.’’

Wilson would come by and share the same message with injured players: “I’m paying you $70,000 to play. You’re getting paid more than 80 percent of the world.’’

“It’s like we didn’t have the option to be hurt,’’ Clark said. “They honestly wanted to win that bad. They wanted to win more badly than they cared about us. I couldn’t understand why they would put us in a position to be harmed.’’

Finally, Clark went on his own to see a specialist out in Colorado. He needed surgery, but chose instead to have a minor procedure in May 2015. Slowly, the pain went away and Clark was cleared to play football by a doctor in Fort Wayne, but Wilson had seen enough. He wanted another cornerback recruit, so he forced Clark to accept a medical redshirt in 2015.

When Clark asked for a transfer, the request was denied. More, though, Clark said Wilson reached out to prospective schools and told them Clark was damaged goods – exactly as Wilson had when he told Booth’s wish-list schools that the Pike standout had suffered eight concussions, which wasn’t true.

“After this happening several times, I was discouraged and decided to honestly just give up,’’ said Clark, who will graduate in the spring of 2018 with a SPEA degree. “I was ashamed of myself at this point in my life. I was in a very depressed place and my life as an athlete had been stripped away from me.’’

I asked Clark what he would say if he could get an audience with Wilson, who has not responded to requests for a comment.

“I’d ask him why,’’ Clark said. “He has kids. They play sports. Is this what you would have wanted done to your kids? If he can justify that, then more power to him.’’

There are several reasons why Wilson was forced to resign, and chances are we’ll never truly know the full scope of the truth. Clearly, though, his insensitive and dangerous handling of players’ injuries played a huge role, reaching the point where athletic director Fred Glass hired an outside law firm to look into some of the issues that had been raised.

Clark was not one of the half-dozen or so IU athletes who spoke to the outside counsel, but his is a story that should be heard, if only to cement the fact that Wilson was only interested in winning and not the general welfare of his players. According to Donovan – and Booth and several others who have come forward to WTHR and other area news outlets – players were only useful to Wilson if they were healthy and ready to play; otherwise, they were chattel, indentured servants who served no purpose other than to take up a scholarship spot. He wanted them out of sight, out of mind.

“It was basically miserable,’’ Clark said. “Anybody who played IU football from the time Wilson got here to the time he left, they’ll tell you the same thing.’’