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10/29/2008 - WOMEN'S SOCCER
Playing for Mercer worth the injuries as Bears progress - ESPN.com
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Courtesy ASunPhotos.com
MACON, Ga. - Katheryn Hurst's body has had enough. After five surgeries in seven years on her right knee and assorted other ailments in what passes for her good left knee, ranging from a broken ankle to torn meniscus, the simple act of walking to class each day is painful for the Mercer University senior. As a result of the litany of injuries, she played just four games during her first three seasons on the women's soccer team. Until this year, she had been under the knife more times in her life than she had taken the field at the college level.
Even now, 17 appearances and three goals into her first full season, she can play at most 15 to 20 minutes a half before pain wins out in their ongoing feud. So while redshirt eligibility and medical hardship waivers could potentially restore two of the three seasons she lost to injury, such bookkeeping can't do anything for the pain from a knee that doctors have told her will have to be replaced by the time she's 30.
"Potentially, I could play for two more years after this season, but physically, this will be it for me," Hurst said. "But I'll be satisfied with that, especially if we win conference this year."
To understand why, you need to know more about the Mercer Bears.
At some point in the coming weeks, as conference tournaments and the NCAA tournament reduce a field of 320 teams to one national champion, someone will talk about a team coming from nowhere to push a favorite to the brink of elimination.
But the truth is that every team comes from somewhere, even if it's a small, lumpy field that ought to come with a caddy to read the breaks and where crowds rarely push into triple digits. And the journey takes a lot longer than 90 minutes.
Mercer's "somewhere" begins with people like Hurst and her teammates juggling long hours in the weight room, trainer's room, classroom and on the soccer field for four years and leading a program with no postseason history to the top seed in next week's Atlantic Sun conference tournament and a shot at the NCAA tournament. But for the individual players, it began long before that, with a simple realization that soccer mattered enough to them to endure almost anything -- even multiple knee surgeries -- to keep playing it as long as they could.
So it was for Mercer senior Heather Manting when she was growing up. Manting anchors the nation's ninth-stingiest defense (a ranking likely to improve after the team posted its fifth consecutive clean sheet in Saturday's 2-0 win against Campbell).
By Graham Hays
ESPN.com
