January 2011


-Sports-


13


Eagles push hard but fall short T


By Reed Novak, Staff Reporter


he boy’s basketball team lost the home opener to Calvin Christian, 44-63, Friday the 14. Despite physical disadvantages, however, not a single one of the players gave up. It soon became an intense fight to the finish.


After the game, Coach Stan Bickley said, “The other team’s strength was that they were taller than us. They played a hard offense.”


Although the team played hard as well, Calvin took an early lead which they kept throughout the game. With a score of 16-


32 at the half, the Eagles came within ten points of closing the gap, but their hard work wasn’t enough.


“Size was a big part of our loss,” said Nathan Medrano (‘13). “They were taller than us and they outplayed us. We didn’t show our true potential tonight.” There was something else that con- tributed to the loss: the number of fouls called on the Eagles. Even though the number of fouls on both sides were high, the Eagles’ cost them dearly. But as many points were lost, many more of Calvin’s


were halted.


“There were [more] points lost than there should have been, but it’s a young team and they’re all aggressive players,” said Bickley. “We didn’t play our best, but we played pretty well.”


Realizing mistakes made in the game, the Eagles are anticipating the rematch with Calvin on February 4.


Bickley said, “They played hard, and next time we’ll play harder. I’m looking forward to it.”


Above: Lenny Comma (’13) vaults to the basket as a defender tries to block his shot. Comma recently was moved from point guard to power forward, providing the team with a stronger offense in the paint.


Left: Sophomore Nathan Medrano pushes past his defenders to reach the basket, scoring two points for his team against Calvin Christian. The boys struggled throughout the game to keep up with the other team.


Photos Courtesy of Dylan Mayer Trusting God: a journey of Faith By Connor Horn, Backpage Editor


or an athlete, the game can be both a thing to be enjoyed and a thing to be respected. On one hand, in moments of intense sportsmanship, an athlete can get lost in the work of their hands and feet, finding themselves enraptured in the speed and deftness of activity. On the other hand, however, there is a darker, more dangerous side to sports, a dark side that Junior Faith Kraatz came face to face with last February.


F


“I was playing basketball at a Calvin game,” said Kraatz in a matter-of-fact tone, as if she was describing just another day at school. “I was taking a shot, and as I came down, I got hit on the side. That’s when my knee bent inwards, causing my shinbone to move forward and my thigh bone to move backwards, making them separate.”


This kind of injury is not uncommon. The National Athletic Trainers Associa- tion estimates that 22 percent of all high school basketball players endure an injury of some kind. Knee and thigh injuries, like the one Kraatz endured, represents one-fifth of all the injuries sustained by players. Because of this, nobody suspect- ed a thing at first.


“I tried to keep playing at first, actu-


ally,” Kraatz said, laughing. “I couldn’t, though, because it was too much pain. I sat on the bench for awhile, but the pain was so intense that about fifteen minutes after the injury, I decided to go to the hospital.”


It was at the hospital that Kraatz learned the full gravity of the injury she had just endured. “We went to get an MRI, and my doc- tor told me that my ACL was completely torn and that it had to be replaced with a cadaver’s ACL,” Kraatz said. ACL stands for “Anterior Cruciate Ligament.” It’s one of the four major liga- ments (fibrous tissue that connect bones together) in the knee. Without it, it’s


impossible to bend your knee. “He also said [that] my meniscus was torn a little bit, and that my MCL (medial collateral ligament) had also been torn,” said Kraatz.


The doctors decided to operate on Kraatz, starting with her broken menis- cus.


“The MCL was just a ‘heal-on-its-own’ type of thing, so we just fixed it up and let it be. With the meniscus, he just cleaned up the tearing. The meniscus, it’s basical- ly a lot of little fibers, like a shirt almost, so [the doctor] just clipped some of those fibers, and then we just had to wait for it to heal.” With the MCL and the meniscus fixed, the doctors turned to the biggest concern: the torn ACL. “My ACL was actually taken out, and they took the new ACL and put it on a little pulley system, and they basically just pulled the new ACL into my knee. It took about an hour and a half for the surgery, and then afterwards I was in a bed for two weeks,” Kraatz said. However, Kraatz still had a long road ahead of her.


“I had to do about nine months of physical therapy, three days a week for three hours, although sometimes I go to therapy five days a week. It wasn’t for the ACL, because you can’t really strengthen the ACL, but all the muscles were worn out and they had to be worked back [into shape]. I could actually grab the skin on my knee, whereas before I couldn’t do that because I had muscles there.” With Kraatz in therapy for her knee, her athletic life had to be put on the side- lines. For someone like Kraatz, that was completely devastating.


“I was in tears because I had to tell my basketball team that I was out for the season. That was terrible–the look on the faces of the girls when I told them made me feel horrible. It was hard to believe it


really happened; we had such an awe- some chance of going to state, and then I end up out for the season. As a starter on the team, I was heartbroken to let them down like that,” Kraatz said. This injury, though sidelining her physical goals, caused Kraatz to face a lot of mental and spiritual growth as she struggled with her inability to get back in the game.


“In my spiritual walk, definitely, I was really tested. I have this goal, see, to go to the WNBA, which is the Women’s National Basketball Associa- tion, so I was like ‘Okay, I’ll just rehab really hard and get going again,’ but I had to learn to be patient because it ended up taking months for me to get back into the game.”


Indeed, patience was something Kraatz had to learn the hard way, espe- cially when the unthinkable happened: during Kraatz’s recovery, she suffered another injury, tearing her meniscus a second time.


“I was playing softball, which was a sport that my doctor said that I could play, and I had this freak accident and tore my meniscus again. It was a completely ran- dom accident, it shouldn’t have happened, but it did,” said Kraatz. “It was a definite setback.”


Not only did Kraatz have to deal with this physical injury, she also had to bal- ance the rest of her life with this sudden setback.


“I’m not a patient person, I never have been, and when you deal with something like a broken ligament, which takes nine to twelve months to heal, it’s taxing,” Kraatz said, frustrated. “Having to deal with getting my homework done, my job, physical therapy, it was getting really hard to deal with, but you have to just keep working through it. I just had to trust in the Lord that I’d get through it. What was worrying, though, was that I want to


Kraatz skillfuly outmaneuvers her opponent toward the ball. Her experience and agility on the court have proved to be a key asset on the team. Photo by Sarah Zimmerman.


get into Baylor for college, but the way I’m getting there is through an athletic scholarship, and here I am in physical therapy! You’re like, ‘Heal already!’ but at the end of the day, you have to let it go.”


Still, Kraatz took such adversity head on.


“I’ve gotten tougher mentally because I have had to be able to tell myself ‘work through the pain, work through the pain’. It’s hard, [and you want to stop,] but you can’t stop, you’ve got to keep going, you just can’t stop. So you learn to persevere, get a bit of patience, and work through it.”


Now, however, as Kraatz nears the end of her therapy, she remains hopeful about her future.


“I’m playing basketball this season,” Kraatz said, flashing a brief smile. “You work hard, but at the end you finish the race. So I’m hopeful [about this season]. I just have to be careful, is all.”


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