Forrehabbing rlarers, rrrrrrrr stole last chance
When Olivia Memeger felt the tug in her quad, she had no idea just how long the wait for lacrosse would be.
It was April 11, 2019. Memeger, a junior attacker on Strath Haven’s lacrosse team, was off to a flying start. In seven-plus games, Memeger had 26 goals and 45 points, the leading offensive catalyst for a squad likely to be squarely in the second tier of the deep Central League. She’d scored twice against Penncrest that afternoon before getting injured, though she pushed through to finish the game.
The diagnosis, which kept her away from the team during a spring break trip, was a quad strain. It would take four to six weeks to heal. If Strath Haven made a deep run into the District 1 playoffs, Memeger could get back on the field.
Instead, a 4-1 start tumbled into just two wins in the last 13 games and a first-round playoff exit. And long before COfl ID-19 was the ubiquitous and existential threat of today, Memeger figured that she’d have another chance, as a senior, with a clean bill of health.
That’s not the way it turned out for her, or for so many other spring-season athletes.
“I played my last game in a Strath Haven uniform in April of my junior year and had no idea that that was going to be the last time I was going to play for Strath Haven,” Memeger said last week. “It’s definitely hard and I think we’re all feeling that, but I always thought
I’d kind of know when my last game was going to be, and I definitely wasn’t expecting it to be a middleof-the-season game against Penncrest.”
Memeger finds herself in a subset of athletes hit particularly hard by the cancellation of the spring season. All athletes are feeling it, none more so than seniors. But within the upperclassmen are athletes like Memeger, who were denied some or part of their junior season and who looked toward the 2020 campaign as a goal to get back to health, a capstone season that was never to be because of school closures wrought by the global pandemic.
The direness of the situation grows in direct proportion to the length of the rehab. In girls lacrosse, where knee injuries seem all too common, it’s a frequent refrain.
Melissa Massimino was within shouting distance of the end of her junior season when it ended under unusual circumstances. A misstep while warming up for Radnor’s District 1 playoff game with Perkiomen flalley sent Massimino down in a heap. The midfielderfldefender watched that game sitting on the ground near the Radnor bench, tears in her eyes, bags of ice on her rapidly swelling knee. Radnor would lose its next game to Conestoga, and though the Raiders got to states via playbacks, they fell in the quarterfinals to
Harriton.
But Massimino, who goes by Missy, lost much more to the torn ACL suffered that day. Gone was her senior season on the soccer field. Gone was a basketball season, though she did recover for a Senior Day appearance and a made 3-pointer. Lacrosse was the light at the end of her rehab tunnel.
“I was upset that I was missing my senior season of soccer and basketball as well,” she said. “I was still on the team and that was good, but also rehabbing and going to PT, that was hard, thinking about lacrosse season.”
Agnes Irwin’s Kacy Hogarth could relate. The junior attacker tore her ACL last April 10 against Baldwin,
knowing as soon as it happened that she’d be done for a while. The Owls were 10-2 when Hogarth, who had 16 goals and 10 assists, went down. They finished 21-8. Crucially, Hogarth was marooned on the sidelines for the second loss to rival Episcopal Academy and all three setbacks to eventual PAISAA champion Notre Dame.
“I thought our team was headed in the right direction,” Hogarth said. “I thought our offense and defense were really starting to click, and obviously I was so disappointed to not be a part of that because I was so close to seniors like Grace Bartosh and Emily Wills. It was disappointing not to be able to play another game with them. And watching the practices and watching the games after that was really hard, especially the big games against Moorestown and
EA. Those games are some of the best games that you can play in because of the adrenaline, and the rivalry makes you love the game even more.”
The injury cost Hogarth her senior field hockey season. But it amped her up for what she hoped would be an Agnes Irwin “revenge tour,” against a deep class of talent in the InterAc and the Owls’ usual national schedule.
The University of Maryland commit had plenty of support in her rehab. She worked with older brother David, a Haverford School grad, when he was on break from William & Mary, where he plays baseball. Former AIS lacrosse coach Jenny Duckenfield was a constant source of comfort, and Hogarth credited classmate and friend Natalie Pansini with motivation at every step.
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