Alyssa Snow said she wouldn’t let a little thing like a knee injury keep her from Frontenac’s rivalry game against St. Mary’s Colgan Tuesday.
But Snow, who goes under the knife Tuesday to have surgery on a torn Anterior Cruciate Ligament, won’t be available for Frontenac Coach Jeremy Rakes as a player. Instead, Snow has joined Rakes’s staff as an extra assistant coach.
“The doctors have told me that I probably won’t be able to make it for the game … that I will need to rest,” said Snow, a senior. “But I told Coach Rakes that I’m going to do whatever I can to make it there.”
Make no mistake, Snow would rather be playing. But an injury she sustained in the third-place game in the Lancer Classic against Columbus will keep her from the court.
“I was just playing defense, the same as I always do, and the girl crossed over,” Snow said. “I tried to drop step back, but I felt my knee go in.”
Rakes said he didn’t know how serious the injury was at the time.
“A minute after she came to the bench, I felt this tap on my shoulder, and she said she was ready to go back in,” Rakes said. “Not knowing what the prognosis was, we let her go back out there. But when she came back running the other way, she started bawling. I’ve never seen her cry other than one of our sub-state losses. She was in pain, and I knew something was wrong.
“It didn’t really sink in until the next day when I was watching game film,” Rakes said. “I felt so bad for her. She’s a great kid who just loves to compete.”
Just like that, Snow’s career in athletics — the six-month recovery time also rules out softball — was over. But as one of just two seniors, along with good friend Emily Barto, Snow said she felt a responsibility to help her teammates.
“I’m really close with my teammates, and I’m close with Coach Rakes,” Snow said. “I feel like I can help my teammates out, to calm them down when things aren’t going well. And they’ve been great to me. Emily has just been tremendous.
