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.”
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