TRINITY GRAD GETS ANOTHER SHOT
Mary Dunn has never been much of a benchwarmer.
A 6-foot-3 senior at Youngstown State, Dunn stepped into a starting role for the Penguins at the beginning of her freshman year when starting center Sarah Cash went down with a preseason injury. She then went on to win the 2017 Horizon League Freshman of the Year award after averaging 11.3 points per game in her debut season.
Dunn started 34 games over her first two seasons before moving into the role of sixth woman as a junior, but even though she wasn’t starting many games, she wasn’t spending much time sitting out, either. The Trinity grad put together her best season yet while coming off the bench, averaging 12.6 points and 5.7 rebounds per game while earning firstteam All-Horizon League honors.
After Cash’s graduation, Dunn resumed her role as Youngstown State’s starting center last year. She started out a little slow in the first three games of the season — at least by her standards — then she caught fire in game four.
Late in a 79-77 comeback win against Eastern Michigan, Dunn went up for what seemed like an ordinary layup. It didn’t look like much on film, but she felt a tweak in her knee when she landed.
Just like that, the biggest highlight of her college career quickly turned into the biggest hurdle she has ever had to face.
“It was actually the best game I’ve ever played,” Dunn said. “I scored 30 points and I got my 1,000th point. I was super high on adrenaline, I feel like. Even after the game, I was hopping around. It was such a good game and I thought it was just tweaked.”
About a week went by and the pain still hadn’t subsided, so Dunn went in for an
MRI. She said she didn’t expect it to reveal anything, but when the results came back, she found out she had a torn meniscus. After only missing two games in seven years of playing high school and college basketball, Dunn would be forced to transform from dominant center into a spectator for the remainder of her senior season.
“It was really hard,” Dunn said. “Especially I didn’t get to travel, which was a really hard thing for me, because our team goes on the road for five days at a time. Those are my best friends. I want to be there with them.”
Dunn watched helplessly from the sidelines as the Penguins sputtered to a 13-17 record just one year after a 22-win season in which they fell one win short of a trip to the Horizon League championship game.
Luckily for Youngstown
State’s supporters, though, everyone is coming back from last year’s team — including Dunn. The only senior on last year’s team, Dunn applied for and received an extra year of eligibility because her injury took place just before the cutoff for a medical redshirt.
Although she initially had hoped to return in time for last year’s conference tournament, she now knows that sitting out the rest of the season to allow her knee to fully heal turned out to be the best decision she could have made.
“You can play in up to eight games [and still qualify for a medical redshirt], but it has to be the first eight games,” Dunn said. “Even if I went in the game and got hurt for one minute, I would have lost my eligibility. I wanted to make sure I was going to help my team and not hurt my team.”
Dunn, who hopes to one day play professionally overseas, graduated in May with her bachelor’s degree in communications and sociology along with minors in political science and psychology. She’ll spend her final year in Youngstown pursuing her master’s degree in professional communications while looking to add one more chapter to her storied college career.
With the Penguins’ entire roster returning for next season and their standout center back to full strength, expectations are sure to be higher than ever in Youngstown.
“I’m all about the team. I’ve gotten everything I want to get personally,” Dunn said. “Our team is going to definitely be the team people are looking out for.”