By Mike Hutsell, Jeffersonville Evening News
11/6/2008
Lindsey Ragland fell to the floor. Her leg laid sore right in front of her. She thought she felt a pop. She couldn’t believe it was happening.
“At first I was kind of thinking ‘not again,’” said Ragland. “I just couldn’t believe it.”
Bart Powell had the same emotion. The Floyd Central volleyball coach saw the senior fall to floor and instantly became worried.
“She didn’t get up at first,” Powell said. “You certainly do worry when it happens.”
Ragland’s fear was a repeat of last season. That’s the year she sat on the sideline and watched.
She witnessed first hand as Floyd Central advanced all the way to the IHSAA Class 4A State Finals. She was rendered an interested observer due to a knee injury that forced her to miss her entire junior season.
Now after she had battled all the way back, she thought she may have felt that pop inside of her knee.
“It felt like it slid out of place at first,” she said. “I went down and it was just sort of a little numb at first. I was lucky, but for a second I was scared.”
This time, Ragland bounced off her backside and helped the Highlanders finished off a regional semifinal victory over Terre Haute South.
Then she was back in the lineup that night, when the Highlanders capped another regional victory with a three-game sweep of Columbus East in the championship.
“At first, when she goes down and doesn’t come right back up you worry,” said Powell. “I’ve had ACL injuries myself and I know how tough they are to come back from. The instant fear you have a coach is that something happened again.
“When I saw after a minute though, I knew she was okay. I was thrilled and I was relieved.”
Watching
The date’s still rings in Lindsey Ragland’s head.
“7/7/07,” she will tell you with absolute certainty when she’s asked when it happened. “Just playing one day in the summer I came down awkward and it happened.”
Ragland ACL was torn, her junior season was gone. Rehab was ahead.
“It was rehab three or four hours a day every day for about four months,” said Terri Ragland, Lindsey’s mother and a Floyd Central assistant coach.”
That meant a seat on the bench for the Highlander season. A front row view of Floyd Central’s march to state.
“It was bittersweet, I loved seeing it happen and I was so happy for the team,” said Ragland. “But I was out there. I’ve always played volleyball and I was missing it — it wasn’t the easiest thing.”
It was made even tougher perhaps by how tantalizingly close Ragland was to making it back.
“I was released by my doctor to play back row two days after we went to state,” she said. “I just missed it.”
As a coach and as a mom, Terri Ragland could see her daughter’s dissappointment.
“I could see it, I could see how much she wanted to be a part of it as a player,” Terri said. “We’d talk about it at home. She was geniunly happy for her team being there, but she couldn’t play and I could tell that upset her.”
Headed to state
Those emotions of missing out whirled through Lindsey Ragland’s head for mere minutes on Saturday afternoon.
“I thought about it for a split second,” she said. “I thought about going back and missing state again. When I knew I could move it, I was playing. I wasn’t coming out again.”
Saturday’s near-miss wasn’t the first time this season that Lindsey feared a reinjury, just the most recent. Maybe the most extreme.
“I’ve seen her go down several times this year,” Terri Ragland said. “The doctors say its natural. There’s probably some scar tissue in the knee that slides around and that will give you the feeling of it happening again. I kind of felt like she’d be okay.”
The return of Ragland has been vital for a Floyd Central squad that hopes to outdo last year’s march to the state semifinals and bring home a state title.
Powell said Ragland could have been a missing link to a title a year ago.
“Her serve reception is so solid and in our loss last year (to New Castle in the semifinal round) that area of our game really got away from us,” Powell said. “I’m not taking anything away from the girls who played on last year’s team. (Lindsey) has such a steadying effect for us in that area not to mention being a great all-around player.”
Winning Saturday would mean sharing the state-title for a mother and daughter.
“I get emotional thinking about it,” Terri Ragland said. “Seeing your daughter make state in something and coaching a team to state in something are both pretty surreal experiences. To combine those two things into the same season, it’s special.”
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