Cornerback Chris Parks played in all 13 SMU games and finished tied for sixth on the team with 48 tackles despite a torn meniscus in his left knee (photo by Travis Johnston).

Cornerback Chris Parks stepped in to the starting lineup for SMU last season after J.R. Richardson went down for the season with a knee injury, and fared well, tying for sixth on the team with 48 tackles and breaking up seven passes. What wasn't widely known is that Parks did so while playing with a torn meniscus in his left knee. (The meniscus is a crescent-shaped fibrocartilaginous structure that provides structural integrity to the knee when it undergoes tension and torsion.)

“I don’t know exactly when I did it,” he said. “It was bothering me, and and I had an MRI after the Baylor game. They said it looked like it had been a while (since the injury), so I don’t really know how long it had been hurt.”

With Richardson’s injury, the Mustangs already were thin at cornerback, but nobody wanted Parks to risk further injury. Once it was determined that he wouldn’t risk further injury by playing, SMU coaches said Parks could do surgery “if hurt bad enough,” Parks said. “I chose to play through it.”

The injury nagged him throughout the season (“it hurt the most when I was getting in and out of my breaks,” Parks said), getting worse during the Mustangs’ rout of Fresno State in the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl, before he got it repaired at the start of the offseason. Now Parks, Richardson and 2012 true freshman Horace Richardson, who also went down for the year with a knee injury, are back with the team in spring workouts, and Parks said the future is bright for the defensive backfield.

“I feel like we can be great,” he said. “A lot of guys have a year under their belts, so even if they didn’t play a lot, they know what they’re doing. Horace (Richardson), Ajee Montes, A.J. Justice … we have a lot of guys who can contribute now.”

Parks finds himself in an awkward position. Assuming he doesn’t move to the offense on a full-time basis, senior-to-be Kenneth Acker is the team’s most proven cornerback. Parks is trying to fend off both Richardsons and Montes, among others, plus any newcomers for the other starting cornerback spot, while helping to mentor the Mustangs’ youngsters to make sure they’re ready to play if called upon. But Parks, who will be a senior in the fall, doesn’t find any conflict of interest in helping to prepare players who one day will replace him while he is still competing for a starting spot. After all, it’s exactly what former teammates did for him when he first arrived at SMU.

“That’s what you do as a teammate,” he said. “Chris Banjo and Sterling (Moore) did that for me. They took me under their wing and showed me what I was doing, or what I was supposed to be doing.

“Yes, I want to play, but we have to have everyone ready. Look at how many injuries we had in the secondary last year. When someone goes down, someone else has to be ready to step in. That’s what happened last year, and that’s what we’re doing now, too.”