Injured stars are back for Santa Rosa, Analy, Cardinal Newman basketball

Injuries are endemic to basketball, and it’s no rarity for a team to head into the thick of its schedule at less than full strength. Last year, though, the entire region seemed shorthanded. As the regular season transitioned to playoffs, three of the best guards in the Redwood Empire - Analy’s Aidan Toner-Rodgers, Cardinal Newman’s Damian Wallace and Santa Rosa’s Alex Diggs - were sidelined with season-ending injuries.

And now the good news: All of them were juniors a year ago. All three are back in 2016-17, leading their teams again and gunning for postseason berths.

“It’s great to be on the court again,” Toner-Rodgers said. “I’m just kind of grateful for it. You never know what can happen.”

The feelings of anguish were similar for these three young athletes last year, but the circumstances of their injuries were different. Wallace, a dynamic two-sport player, got hurt on the football field in Cardinal Newman’s North Coast Section Division 4 championship game loss to Marin Catholic. Cardinals basketball coach Tom Bonfigli described it as a “severe knee injury” that included a fracture in the upper part of Wallace’s tibia.

Diggs’ moment of agony came in Santa Rosa’s final 2015 summer-league basketball game in San Rafael. He drove to the hoop and his knee buckled when he landed. Diggs left the game immediately but didn’t think he had done anything serious to the knee. When the pain failed to subside, he went to a doctor and an MRI revealed a torn ACL and a partially torn meniscus.

Shortly thereafter, Diggs underwent surgery.

Toner-Rodgers’ injury was even less apparent to him. Analy was playing Santa Rosa at home when he flipped over a moving defender while going in for a layup and landed on his right wrist. Toner-Rodgers re-entered that game. In fact, he played in seven more contests, including three Sonoma County League games, before acknowledging that the wrist was only getting worse.

“I hadn’t gone to the doctor because I didn’t really want to hear what he had to say,” Toner-Rodgers admitted this week.

And his instincts were right. He had broken the scaphoid in his right wrist, a bone that takes particularly long to heal, and would be in a cast for six months.

And so in various neighborhoods of Sonoma County, three teenagers who should have been enjoying their final summers as high school kids, hanging out with friends and playing the games they love, dove into the grueling business of physical rehab.

Diggs’ comeback began in bed and consisted of little more than trying to lift his leg. After two weeks he started riding a stationary bike. That progressed to walking and stretching under the care of a doctor, and eventually to a long hours with a physical therapist. He would work with his therapist every morning, then do the same exercises at the Panthers’ practice later that day.

Diggs says it never got him down.

“To me, honestly, it wasn’t hard,” he said. “Because basketball’s my sport. If I can’t do that, all I have to deal with is just rehab. … I knew in the long run it would get me back here.”

Diggs attended every Santa Rosa game, every Santa Rosa practice. Wallace did the same thing at Cardinal Newman. Toner-Rodgers remained a good teammate, too, but he admits now that he was struggling internally with his bad luck.

“You want to support the team and everything, but personally it’s rough,” Toner-Rodgers said. “You want to be playing. When you see the team out there, and maybe after a loss you feel like if you were there it wouldn’t have happened, it’s the worst.”

For Diggs, the struggle was tenfold. On Nov. 9, with the pain of the injury still fresh, his mother died after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

One of the few things that could have lessened Alex’s grief, the ability to lose himself on the basketball court, was unavailable to him.

“My top priorities in my life are my family and playing basketball,” Diggs said. “When I lost one and then lost the other, it didn’t make things easier.”

As hard as Sharon Piper-Diggs’ death was on the family, first-year Santa Rosa varsity coach Richard Clark, an assistant last year, believes it brought the basketball team closer together. All of the players were familiar with Sharon; some had known her for years. She was a human resources professional for Medtronic, but had always found time to be involved in her son’s basketball team.

After Piper-Diggs died, the Panthers started wearing purple warmup shirts in her honor. Several, Clark said, have memorialized her with tattoos bearing messages like “No one fights alone.”

And still Alex Diggs kept working. So did Wallace and Toner-Rodgers. And, each on his own schedule, they slowly got back into the action.

Wallace had the most urgency because he was intent on playing football again for Cardinal Newman. He made it back for the start of the season, though football coach Paul Cronin kept him out of the Cardinals’ first two games as a precaution. By now, Bonfigli said, Wallace has regained his aggressiveness and burst.

Diggs said the early portion of the road back was uneven.

“I was kind of timid, kind of scared,” he said. “I kept going back to the doctor and asking if something was wrong. He said no, it’s all in your mind. … It was just a huge mental thing.”

According to Diggs, he no longer experiences any knee pain and has regained full motion. His coach puts him at “90 percent back.”

“It’s affected his game. So he doesn’t have the same explosiveness necessarily off his first step,” Clark said. “But now he’s incorporated a better jab step. And he’s using ball fakes to get guys a little out of position. His shot’s gotten better.”

Early in the season, Clark made sure to rest Diggs for the end of the first and third quarters, and beginning of the second and fourth. That has sort of gone out the window.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have the depth to spare him,” Clark said.

Toner-Rodgers’ return has been the bumpiest. When he finally got clearance to resume physical activity, his wrist was weak. But he wasn’t allowed to lift weights over the summer. Toner-Rodgers said the wrist feels fine now, but he still isn’t back to full strength. Analy coach Brett Page believes the injury affected Toner-Rodgers’ shooting form, noting that his percentages aren’t where they were in 2015-16.

“I took a big step back, for sure,” Toner-Rodgers said. “That was the frustrating part.”

But at least he’s on the court. The do-everything senior leads Analy in scoring (15.7 points per game) and assists (3.3), and chips in with 4.3 rebounds. The Tigers are 3-0 in the SCL and appear headed for another league title.

Wallace’s contribution is a little different. As Bonfigli notes, his fundamentally sound Cardinals usually have a strong half-court offense. Wallace gives them an athleticism they would otherwise be lacking.

“He brings outside quickness, penetration, ability to attack the basket,” Bonfigli said. “And he brings a person who is really a dangerous threat in the open court. If you want to extend the floor, you’d better be careful because he can really make you pay if you extend. And he’s the catalyst of our full-court press.”

Clark, meanwhile, doesn’t want to think about where his Panthers would be without Diggs. Actually, he has a pretty good idea. In his absence last year, the coach said, Santa Rosa lost its offensive flow and its sense of calm.

The Panthers are currently 8-7 overall and 1-2 in the North Bay League, but Clark can see steady improvement as his players adjust to his system. Diggs is a big part of that. He’s averaging 10.5 points, 3.9 rebounds and 2.6 assists, and his biggest asset doesn’t really show up in the stat sheet. Diggs is one of the Empire’s top defenders.

Against Mt. Eden on Dec. 28, for example, he was assigned to guard the Monarchs’ point guard. Santa Rosa lost a close one, 47-44, but that opposing point guard, the focal point of his team’s offense, scored two points.

Diggs, like Wallace and Toner-Rodgers, is happy to be spending the middle of his senior year on the basketball court, not cheering from the bench. In retrospect, he might even have gained something from his injury.

“It taught me a life lesson, like patience,” Diggs said. “You can still come back from grief and that kind of struggle, and be even that much stronger of a person to bounce back from something like that.”

You can reach staff writer Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Skinny_Post.