Injured Homestead star to get final call
MEQUON – Senior year for Chloe Marotta has been about deferring dreams and adjusting goals.
If things were going as planned for the Homestead standout, she would have grabbed her 1,000th rebound by now and been on the short list of candidates for the Miss Basketball Award. If she had not injured her knee last summer, maybe she would be leading her team to a conference title right now or could have made it to the McDonald’s All-American game.
Instead she watches, waits and slowly heals.
“Sometimes I sit there and kind of shake on the bench like ‘Get me in. Get me in’,” she said, “but I know that it’s best for me to take my time with it and focus on it.”
Marotta is probably the best player in the state who hasn’t played in a game this season. A two-time all-state pick who committed to Marquette University as a junior, the 6-foot guard / forward was poised for a big senior season until her right knee gave out on her while attempting a layup last summer.
Thursday she returns for one final curtain call.
It will be Senior Night at Homestead and Marotta will be in the starting lineup. She’ll be allowed to score the first basket of the game, play will stop, and then she will return to the bench presumably to a healthy round of applause.
One person leading the applause will be Homestead coach Corey Wolf, who has watched her star player attack her latest challenge with the same kind of passion she attacks the glass.
“You hear all these stories – and there is nothing wrong with it – of kids who are always moving on to the next, best thing,” Homestead coach Corey Wolf said. “They want to play college or go to the pros and they’re always thinking about what’s next and what’s better and what’s bigger.
“This would have been the perfect opportunity for her to do something like that. I asked her about it and she said she wanted to be with her teammates.”
Sports and life are about handling adversity and Marotta is symbolic of the wounded stars who still manage to make a positive impact on their teams even when their bodies can’t cooperate. You can’t keep them down.
One day after she suffered her injury, she was back in the gym. The day after she was diagnosed with a torn right anterior cruciate ligament she was, you guessed it, back in the gym. About a week after surgery, she was back with the team. Despite all the rehab and extra training that goes into coming back from that kind of injury, Marotta’s presence with her teammates has been constant. Wolf can’t remember her missing a day.
“There were two choices,” Marotta said. “I could sit around and mope about it, but I took the other choice to be positive about it and realize I could really help myself and taking a year off is not so bad. It could be blessing in disguise, work on my weaknesses.”
That attitude is not surprising to some of the people who have faced Marotta. Last year, while leading Homestead to a second-place finish in the North Shore, she impressed opposing coaches with her brand of leadership. Skill-wise she regularly posted doubledoubles in scoring and rebounding while showing improvement as a perimeter scorer.
She was in full-blown off-season training when she suffered the injury. She was playing in a summer tournament with her high school team when the knee gave out. A couple of days before that, she played with her club team in a tournament.
“My doctor (considered) it a fatigue injury,” Marotta said. “You never know with this kind of stuff, but my legs were super tired, though.”
She had surgery in September and then set a course for a 7-to-9 month recovery period. The goal from the start was to emerge from the injury a better player than what she was before the setback. When she couldn’t put weight on her leg, she’d sit in a chair pounding the basketball into floor, throwing it against the wall or shooting it from close range.
In the last month, she was cleared to run and participate in non-contact drills. One game days, she dresses and warms up with the team.
“The (opposing) coaches will ask me if I’m playing and I’ll tell them ‘yeah’ just to confuse them, but I don’t end up going out there,” she said.
Not yet. The next stage of her recovery will be cutting and pivoting. She has plenty of time to be ready next season at Marquette where her dream will resume.
Those 1,000 rebounds she had hoped to reach in high school are now on her checklist for college. Miss Basketball has given way to Big East freshman of the year and making the All-Big East Team. She won’t be able to play in a state tournament, but she can help Marquette win a league title and get to the NCAA Tournament.
But first she’ll have one final dream come true as a Homestead Highlander.
“Right from the start I was like if I can’t play, the one night that I would love to get in would be Senior Night,” she said. “I’d love to play every night, really, but Senior Night is special to me.”