PARK RIDGE − Concerned friends came up to Kate Broderick and told her she looked sick and that she was too skinny.

She took it as a compliment.

“I can’t even explain. I was an extra, extra small shorts [size], and I would look at myself in the mirror and think I looked the same. At that point, I knew I had a problem, but I was OK with it,” Broderick said. “It takes over your whole life. I lost friends. I almost broke up with my boyfriend. I didn’t go out. I had no energy to do anything.”

Anorexia, an eating disorder, sent the Park Ridge senior into a tailspin costing her the basketball season and a big chunk of her senior year.

The 18-year-old, who stands 5-foot-9, was as light as 103 pounds. Her preseason basketball picture from the winter is − in a word − ghastly. She’s pale, her arms are bony and the jersey hangs over her frame like an oversized drape.

Kate’s parents, Rich and Kristin, both teachers, were initially at a loss for what to do for their third of four children before sending her to a residential hospital in Cherry Hill, where her weight and food intake were watched.

“I said, ‘Kristin, I’m really concerned she was going to die,’” Rich said. “She was like 103 pounds. We said we had to do something, forget about sports, forget about everything. This isn’t good.”

Kate says the stay at the facility was the worst two months of her life.

She called home every day begging to come home, threatening to kill herself if her parents didn’t come, but the treatment eventually helped rewire her brain to see food as nourishment, not an enemy.

She also had a goal of returning to play softball for Park Ridge. Her fight to get back there will be recognized with the Charlie McGill Scholarship Award at the 2026 North Jersey High School Sports Awards, presented by HSS. The show begins at 7 p.m. on Friday, June 26 at Passaic County Technical Institute.

“That was the whole goal the whole time I was there, I was emailing my coach that I would be back for softball,” Kate said. “I knew to be able to play softball again, I needed to be there physically.”

Sitting at her grandparents dining room table on a perfect spring day, Kate’s eyes are bright and her cheeks are full. You ask her if the treatment works, if she’s on a regular food schedule now, the uncomfortable question of if her weight is up, and she says yes without much hesitation.

“I am not glad that it happened, but I also learned so much,” Kate said. “I am a completely different person than I was before and I feel like I’m smarter and a stronger person because of everything. I went through so much struggle and challenge, now I feel like I am better version of myself and I know myself better.”

A sports family

The Brodericks are a close, loving family.

Rich, a long-time North Jersey coach, and Kristin, a teacher, have four children, ranging from 22 (Shea) to 15 (Sean). Sports is what they do. Kate would team up with her older brother Jack, and Shea and Sean would be on the other side. Soccer, basketball and Wiffle ball games until all hours.

Kate got into softball because Shea was a pitcher, and she wanted to be like her big sister. She also played soccer, but gave it up after freshman year. Kate also got into basketball because, well, she’s tall.

“Growing up, I always focused on basketball and softball more,” Kate said. “I knew that’s what I was better at anyway, so I liked them more.”

High school basketball was an adjustment. Kate remembers how in middle school, she was the point guard and loved to shoot. Then when she got to high school, she was put in the post (Park Ridge doesn’t have a ton of athletic 5-foot-9 girls) and she was scared to even look at the basket.

For the Owls softball program, Kate was handed the ball as pitcher as a freshman. She knew that the team’s fate largely rested on her arm.

“I was the starting pitcher but freshman year was kind of rough,” she remembered. “I started but it was a lot of pressure every game. I would get very anxious.”

In Kate’s sophomore year, everything was wonderful. The Owls won a sectional championship in basketball and a division title in softball, but things were about to take a harsh turn.

Pressure weighs

It would be easier if there was one moment, one issue or one thing that caused Kate’s eating habits to nose dive, but there isn’t one.

Yes, she says social media is a factor. There’s a pressure – especially on young women – to look skinny and glamorous, and she says eating disorders are almost celebrated. Kate also says there was peer pressure to be in shape all the time.

During a modest-to-strong junior season in both sports, Kate’s habits began to change. Rich remembers her asking to join a gym and signing up for a membership. After softball games, after two hours and seven innings pitched, Kate would go to the gym.

“I didn’t know if it was a thing where she was trying to get stronger for softball or what,” Rich said. “Or maybe it was just because she was pitching every day.”

Food was an afterthought. If there was dinner on the table, Kate would say she already ate. If the family ordered takeout, Kate would take the food back to her room and not eat it.

“It just kind of progressively got worse,” Kate said. “It wasn’t like something happened and everything switched. It just grew over time.”

Last summer, Kate would spend hours at the gym on the treadmill. Some days, she’d allow herself an energy drink: 10 calories. She would go to the grocery store and find the lowest-calorie food she could consume just so she wouldn’t starve.

She was eating 300 calories. A day.

“I wouldn’t miss a day and each day I would go longer and harder,” Kate said. “The more I was doing [at the gym], the more I would say if I’m doing all this, why would I waste it on eating whatever? I started going to the gym more and eating less because for some reason that’s what I thought was the right thing.”

At one point, Shea called her out and said she had an eating disorder and needed help, but she barked back that Shea was being dramatic. Her parents noticed after a trip out to California that she looked skinny in the pictures.

But what can parents say in this situation?

“I really didn’t know how to go about it,” Rich said.

Breaking point

Kate remembers her friends talking to her mom and saying they were worried about her. Kate went to help her mom set up her classroom for the fall and broke down sobbing, confessing to her mom that she didn’t know what to do.

“I looked at myself in the mirror and I could not recognize myself anymore,” Kate said. “I finally realized that being told that I looked sick wasn’t a compliment.”

Kate began to see therapists and a nutritionist. It helped a little, at first. But soon Kate was lying to everyone about how much she was eating, and was still exercising.

“I would tell them I was eating three meals a day and I was still losing weight, they’d say, no,” Kate said. “They were all in contact with each other and they said [I] had to go somewhere else.”

That somewhere else was the residential hospital in Cherry Hill. Kate was supposed to be there for six weeks, but it turned into eight. It was a combination of soft therapy and tough love. The patients are weighed every day. They aren’t allowed to exercise.

“Taking her there was brutal,” Rich said. “It was real, real tough. She would call every night saying get me out of here. It was breaking my heart. As a parent, I wanted her home, but I needed her to be better.”

Kate watched every Park Ridge basketball game on a stream. It was no help.

“It was terrible,” Kate said. “I was watching and my friends would call me about the game and I would say I don’t care, I don’t want to hear about it.”

Eventually, the lessons began to take hold. She was released and spent time at a partial hospitalization program, where her meals were monitored.

Hunger to return

Kate was determined to get back in the circle for the Owls, but that meant working out again.

She had to be convinced that a hitting workout or pitching lesson wasn’t going to send her back down a bad path.

“Junior year, you can look at my stats, I would pitch in games without having eaten anything the whole day,” Kate said. “This year, I’m like, I don’t know how I did that. I had breakfast, snacks, lunch and it showed in my games and how much you need to eat.”

The Owls finished above .500 in softball, losing in the first round of the sectional tournament. Kate won 12 games, pitching just about every inning of the season.

That was as big a win as any player had in New Jersey this season.

As far as the eating disorder? It’s not a switch that can just be turned off. There’s no magic cure, but Kate, who will attend West Chester in the fall, seems genuine when she talks about how much she likes breakfast, snacks and Chipotle now, and clearly, she doesn’t want to be that person anymore.

“She better, she’s better,” Rich said. “And the best thing now is we have gotten so much closer, you know what its like with teenagers, you ask them about their day and they go in their rooms. Now we communicate a lot and we’re still talking. She’s 100 times better, which is the only thing I care about.”

“I feel a lot better,” Kate said. “I’m still seeing my nutritionist and therapist once a week and I’m not 100 percent and I still struggle sometimes, but from where I am now from a month ago or a couple of months ago, I am so much better.”