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Parkersburg Catholic student Mikalya Alkire is very smart.
Being the recent recipient of a 30 score on her ACT is proof enough of this fact.
The Crusaderette basketball player also was quick to deduce why I wished to speak with her when I showed up Tuesday at practice.
"It is okay," said Alkire. "Everyone asks me about it."
What is "it" you ask?
Well 鈥� We take a trip back to Jan. 17 for the beginning of the story.
Parkersburg Catholic hosted Ravenswood in a regular-season girls basketball game with everything going as normally as it could for an LKC matchup.
Crusaderette head man Marty Vierheller was yelling, as he usually does, and the action on the court was fierce.
Maybe a little too fierce in the third quarter 鈥� .
"I just remember feeling lots of pain and screaming," said Alkire, who took a hard hit on the knee unintentionally from a Red Devil player. "My parents told me it was a blood-curdling scream and they knew something was wrong. I'm a pretty tough cookie as they would say and usually things like that wouldn't phase me."
The then-junior was hopeful there was no damage to her Anterior Cruciate Ligament. Maybe it was just a sprain, she thought, because if there was an ACL injury, her season was over as the normal healing time is several months.
Not to mention, there was nothing in her injury history to suggest something like this may happen to her. A twisted ankle in seventh-grade track was the worse she ever faced.
MRI results two days later dashed all hopes. Her ACL was torn, with several bone contusions to go along with already-bad news. Surgery was set for Jan. 27.
She was understandably devestated, but her IQ again showed through with her silver-lining outlook. "It was hard going down halfway through the season," said Alkire. "But I knew I was a junior, so at least I had one more year left to play."
The day of her surgery she set the goal to be back for her senior year. Basketball being her favorite sport after all.
What remained of the season went by fast for Alkire and she was glad it did. "If it had dragged on, it would have made it a lot harder," she said. "I'm a big communicator and it's hard for me not to be out on the floor talking to the girls."
But her voice wasn't silenced from the team for good. Alkire helped coach the Emmas (Pfeiffer and Gardner), who took her place down low. Her nuturing nature helped the two freshman noticeably grow over the course of the season -- to the point they are big contributors to this year's squad.
"It took us a while to mentally regroup," said Vierheller, whose team dropped the first four games after Alkire got hurt. "We were in crisis management mode immediately. Sectional play was a month away and by that point, we figured some things out and were playing well. We could have won the sectional, but didn't."
Off-season work came before the team knew it. Alkire continued to progress in her rehabilitation to the point where she started working with Allison Burner on performance training in August at Mountain River Physical Therapy.
Sliding, cutting and planting on her injured knee were the high-impact exercises on the regimen. Those posed no problems for the now-senior as she was confident where her knee was then. "Jumping on it was weird," she recalled. "I hadn't done it in so long, but once I got back into the swing of things, it wasn't that bad at all."
She was finally cleared to return to sports in September, but skipped her usual fall sport of volleyball to get ready for hardwood action. "We want to go to Charleston 鈥� of course," said Alkire on her goals for this season.
She has played in every gameso far this season. The Crusaderettes have responded to having one of their leaders back on the floor as well. They are off to a 6-0 start.
When asked if she was bitter from the injury, Alkire said she feels no ill will toward what happened to her on a cold night back in January.
"It's weird to say, but overall I think my injury was a blessing in disguise for me," said Alkire. "If I wouldn't have gotten hurt, I would never have worked as hard as I did before my senior year. I'm so much stronger now than I had been in the other years because I had to put in the extra effort and lift and do the exercises. I worked out so hard to be able to get back for this year and be cleared."
That wisdom shown is yet another sign of a sharp cookie.
Contact Joe Albright at jalbright@newsandsentinel.com.