Sports

An end which mustn’t be final

By Matthew Semisch

12/16/2014

In my line of work, I’ve become acquainted with an innumerable amount of people without truly getting to know most of them.

You might disagee with what’s soon to come in this sentence, but I feel that my observing from a certain length is justifiable. 

For example, I feel it’s needed when covering high school athletes, only some of whom are even marginally more than half my age.

As a journalist, I’ve learned that you can ascertain a lot about a subject from the proverbial arm’s length. In so doing, you sometimes experience feelings you hadn’t prepared for.

Here’s one that I’m currently dealing with: I feel horrible for Lauren Mach.

In my eight months at the Courant, I have not covered a student-athlete both so talented and so unlucky. Mach, a senior at Westhope Public School, has played key roles on her co-op high school volleyball, basketball and softball teams. All that seems to have kept her down are injuries and the court inside the Minot Auditorium.

Three years ago, Mach suffered a concussion there that shelved her for a short while. On Dec. 5 of this year, that same Minot Auditorium court brought her down once more.

During the Westhope-Newburg (W-N) girls’ basketball team’s 55-39 victory over Kenmare, one of Mach’s knees gave out. Her and her team’s worst fears were then realized last week when a scan showed that she had torn one of her anterior cruciate ligaments (ACL).

“She never seemed to get out of there healthy, and I guess that place finally did what it could to finish her off,” said Layne Fluhrer, W-N’s assistant coach and the head coach of Westhope-Newburg-Bottineau’s (W-N-B) softball team. 

“She turned to make a cut she’s made a thousand times before and her knee just gave out on her.”

W-N head coach Jordan Cooper has offered Mach a role as a student assistant coach. Fluhrer is set to do the same for softball.

This isn’t the first time Mach will have been missing from the fields of play. She accidentally sliced open one of her pinkies over the 2013-14 holiday break and severed tendons in it.

She missed much of the second half of her junior season with W-N’s basketball team. Mach rejoined the Sioux two weeks before the District 11 tournament despite not having fully recovered.

“It’s not like she’s one of those players that is hurt and not injured,” W-N head coach Jordan Cooper said. “What she’s suffered through have been legitimate injuries where she has to stay out, because otherwise she’d put herself on the floor. 

“Even last year with the pinky injury, her doctor told her that she shouldn’t be doing anything for a while in terms of basketball, but she just said, ‘Well, I’ll play left-handed. Just wrap it up, and I’ll play left-handed.’ 

“Of course we didn’t let her do that,” Cooper continued, “But once she was ready and the doctor said her finger wasn’t going to get any worse, she got out there and played hard.”

As winter morphed at its normal glacial pace to spring, Mach turned her attention from basketball to softball. She and her W-N-B teammates ended up having winning the Class B West Region title and making their first-ever appearance in the state tournament.

Mach was invaluable to the Sioux, batting a team-best .458 last season and knocking in 31 runs. One of those RBIs came when the Sioux first baseman swatted a two-run home run during the West Region final against Watford City on May 20.

Seven months later, Mach’s long-term future is in question. Her dream has been to play college softball, and she learned on Dec. 5 - the day she tore her ACL - that she had been accepted into an elite development camp put on by the University of North Dakota.

“That was kind of a double-whammy for her,” Fluhrer said. “She checked her e-mail after she got hurt, actually while she was on the trainer’s table, and that was rough to take. It had kind of turned into her dream to play college softball, but I don’t believe for a second it’s over.”

Nor should he, and neither should Mach. Her injury problems might ward some schools eyeing her off, but those that turn away will be putting their backs to a student-athlete whose talent, drive and leadership abilities cannot be questioned.

That’s what every school wants in their student-athletes. That’s what one college would get in Mach.