Grandma Sophia
By C.J. Moore
Originally published 12:22 a.m., March 20, 2010
Updated 12:23 a.m., March 20, 2010
Compare Sophia Lenard’s game to that of an old man, and she acknowledges the observation with a big smile.
She’s heard it before, that her game this season resembles the crafty old guy at the Y, who is schooling guys half his age with smarts and tricky maneuvers he’s learned over the years, as his quickness has faded as quickly as his receding hairline.
“Coach always jokes with me, ‘You’re this old-time player that should wear the band around your head, all the fake moves,’” Lenard said.
“Oh yeah,” ESU Coach Brandon Schneider said. “Double zero would be the perfect number for her. Double zero and a headband and maybe some rec specs.”
Lenard, whom her teammates call Grandma Sophia, was once the young pup with all the quickness and showboat moves that superior athletes can get away with. But near the end of last season, her right knee started giving her trouble and in June, Lenard had arthroscopic knee surgery.
Usually it takes six weeks to recover from such surgery, but Lenard’s knee was recovering much slower. Once practices started in October, Lenard still wasn’t ready, and the reason, doctors discovered, was Lenard had an extremely arthritic knee. She might only be 22, but her knee was that of a 50-year-old woman.
“She needs the type of surgery, at some point in her life, that’s going to end her athletic career,” Schneider said.
Left with no other option than to play with the pain, Lenard, a starter her junior year, started playing limited minutes off the bench in mid-November, and it was clear she wasn’t the same player.
“You feel really bad for her, because here’s a player that I think would have been one of the top athletes in the conference and also one of the top overall players,” Schneider said. “To be quite honest with you, a player who has a future at the very least making some money overseas as a player. The injury has taken some of those things away from her.”
That athleticism was gone, and Lenard had to learn a new way of playing. Schneider constantly talks about Lenard’s basketball intelligence, and she used that to her advantage. Similar to the old guy at the Y, Lenard figured out ways to score without the ability to out-quick everyone.
“All my life I’ve been fast and could jump, and one year, it just hits you, can’t do that anymore,” she said. “I had to change my game, spot-up shoot, not drive too much.”
It didn’t take long for Lenard to succeed playing her new style. In her third game back against Evangel, she scored 16 points in only 17 minutes. But still, Lenard wasn’t able to play for extended minutes, and some days she wasn’t able to practice. She was even forced to sit out on Feb. 10 against Southwest Baptist when she had to tell Schneider before the game that her knee hurt too much that day.
“There was some days when my knee couldn’t go,” she said. “If I had a game, and I played really well, it was really sore the next day and would get painful.”
Because of her knee, the Lady Hornets never really knew what they were going to get out of Lenard. Some games she would hit her first couple shots and be the big-time scorer everyone expected her to be — like when she scored 22 points in a payback win against Northwest Missouri State — and some games Lenard would disappear.
In the final game of the regular season and then the two games at the MIAA tournament, Lenard was more of a disappearing act, scoring only 16 points in those three games combined.
The Lady Hornets were not playing well during that stretch, and Lenard wasn’t pleased with her contribution.
“I didn’t want to end the season like that,” she said.
So when the South Central Regional tournament started last Friday, Lenard decided she was going to step it up. She wasn’t going to think about her knee. She was just going to play.
In the first game against Tarleton State, Lenard scored 11 points and made all three of her 3-pointers. In a season-high 28 minutes against West Texas A&M, Lenard scored 13 points. And in the championship win against Northeastern State, Lenard scored 12 points, was named to the All-tournament team, and also turned back the clock to her young pup days, once again attacking off the dribble.
On two straight possessions early against Northeastern, Lenard caught the ball on the wing and drove hard to the basket, scoring both times in traffic and drawing the foul on the second drive. Her two baskets springboarded a 16-2 run that gave the Lady Hornets all the momentum.
“I was just thinking, ‘This is it. Just go hard. This is not what I want to remember my senior year as, being soft and going in there and not playing hard,’” Lenard said. “I wanted to go out with a bang and play hard. I wanted to win, and I was doing it for the team and the coaches.”
When Schneider subbed for Lenard near the end of the championship game, she limped off the floor. It was obvious that she was spent, at least for that day.
As the Elite Eight approaches — ESU opens against Michigan Tech on Tuesday — Lenard said she’s ready to go and has only one last push left to try to bring home the Lady Hornets’ first National Championship.
“We work so hard for this,” she said. “We deserve it.”
Once Lenard’s career ends, which she hopes isn’t until after Friday’s title game, she’ll need some rest.
But before long, Grandma Sophia will probably be back out on the court with the young’uns, and maybe when she returns, she’ll do so with the headband and rec specs.
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March 20, 2010 at 12:49 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )