Point Park’s Weir continues to battle back

class, her teammates will help watch him and once she’s out, she’ll go to their room to be with her son, do homework or fit in some precious moments of relaxation. From there, she’ll go to practice, where Malik will join and be cared for, rarely ever making a sound. Affectionately known as M.J., Malik is equal parts mascot, as he was lovingly described by Grenek, and object of affection for Weir’s teammates, so much so that they’ll complain to her if they haven’t seen him for a couple of days.

Following practice, her boyfriend — Malik Shegog, who graduated from Duquesne this month after a successful football career at the school — will pick their son up and return him home as Weir takes night classes. After that, she’ll come home, go to bed and prepare for more of the same the next day.

Some days are harder than others, like the one where M.J. was up for much of the night and Weir remembered doubting whether she could be both a college basketball player and a mom. Through it all, though, she persisted.

“She can do anything she puts her mind to,” Shegog said. “Outside of her just being a great person, she’s a great mom. You really don’t know that about a person until it actually happens. You can picture it, ‘OK, yeah, I think she could.’ But you don’t actually know it until it happens.”

A junior, Weir admittedly and understandably isn’t where she once was. Playing in a 40-minute game five months after giving birth takes its toll to the point she says she feels sometimes like she’s going to (figuratively) die. What used to be part of a regimen, things like getting in an extra 100 shots in the gym, are no longer possible, meaning frustration invariably creeps in when she misses some of the shots she used to so regularly make.

But for Weir to even be at this point speaks to something else. Just as she returned from child birth, she was coming back from that broken foot. Three years ago, she tore her ACL, MCL and PCL, an injury Grenek said doctors at UPMC South Side described as one of the worst knee tears they had ever seen.

Previously, she would bounce back from those obstacles purely for herself. Now, she has something else to motivate her, something that has, even in a brief time, so powerfully shaped her life.

“Now that I have M.J., I feel like it’s even more of a reason for me to keep going,” Weir said. “Hopefully, he’ll never give up on the stuff he likes to do.”