In the second quarter of the state quarterfinals her junior year in high school, Caitlin Howe took the ball on the wing, drove past the girl covering her and did a jump stop--but her right knee kept going.
The five-foot-ten guard was carried from the court with a torn anterior cruciate ligament, though she didn't know the precise nature of her injury at the time, and was brought into the locker room.
The Fairport (N.Y.) High School star, who came into the game just seven points shy of 2,000 career points, saw the giant cake her parents had bought for her reading, "Congratulations on 2000 points."
"I looked over to my mom and said, 'Did I get it?'" Howe recalled. "She said, 'You have 1,999 points.' I groaned, but I still had another year."
Fast forward nine exhausting months of arthroscopic knee surgery, rehabilitation and practice. A packed gym is poised for Howe, who had previously committed to attend Duke, to break 2,000 in the season opener. Within the first few minutes Howe sinks a jump shot. The game stops and flowers and approbation are given to her. The game resumes and she trots the floor a few times. Again, she takes the ball on the wing.
"Very similar to the first time I'd done it, I drove past the girl and I pushed off really hard and it went again," she said. "I knew right away what happened. It didn't even hurt. I went down--no tears--and just pounded the floor screaming. The entire gym is completely silent. I'm just screaming, 'No,' because I knew exactly what I had done."
The right ACL had torn again and Howe missed her entire senior season.
"Looking back on it now, it was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me," Howe said. "I wouldn't be the person I am today without having to go through that pain.
"When you experience pain and have to endure that, you can relate so much to people who have gone through pain. It just changes your whole perspective on life. Up until that point, my whole life had been concentrated on basketball. It was my passion--it was everything to me. My family was important to me and my friends were important to me, but basketball was the only thing I wanted to do. And having that taken away from me for so long, and then having it taken away from me again, it was just so hard. It makes you really look inside."
During her first surgery the doctor mined the middle third of her patellar tendon to replace the torn ACL--the standard procedure for ACL reconstructive surgery. Howe, however, had patellar tendinitis and the weakened tendon might have been the cause of her excruciatingly slow and unsuccessful first rehabilitation stint.
For the second surgery the doctor used a cadaver patellar tendon and Howe's rehabilitation has proceeded much better. Whereas her right leg had 65 percent of the strength of her left in the fall of 2001, her right leg strength is up to 95 percent of the left leg's this fall.
When healthy, Howe, who averaged 23.4 points per game during her junior season, can be a great asset for the the Blue Devils.
"Caitlin's shooting touch is phenomenal," Duke assistant coach Gale Valley said. "She's a special kid--when the ball goes up you think it's going in every time."
Last year, the only weakness in Duke's offense was a lack of three-point shooting, and Krista Gingrich, the best deep threat from that team, graduated.
"What Caitlin gives us is she just stretches the defense out," Valley said. "Now they have to play her tight and it gives us one-on-one defense in the post, because if she's on that post's side, they're going to have to go out and guard her too."
Howe is enthusiastic about stepping into a defined and limited role on the team and increasing her responsibility as her career progresses.
"For my high school team, I took the tip and then I played point guard and then I had to get all the rebounds," Howe said. "So in some ways it's kind of nice. It's more fun to play with players who can do things too."
Two weeks ago Howe tore the meniscus--he cartilage cushion in the joint��in her right knee. When she had surgery last Tuesday morning the doctor found aggressive bone growth that would soon be getting in the way of the ACL and would have damaged it. The surgeon removed the offending bone growth and heated the bone to prevent further growth.
"It was almost a miracle that [the doctor] went in there," Howe said. "It was the smallest thing that I could have done to my knee in order to have the doctor go in there with a scope."
Howe, who expects to be back in action after a couple of weeks, says her knee feels "awesome," and with her incessantly optimistic perspective, is more confident after the most recent surgery.
"It's completely worth it for me to take the risk [of injury] because [basketball] is my love," she said. "It's my passion."
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