Jordan Frericks heard a  “pop.”

It was a non-contact injury, one the star forward for the Missouri women’s basketball team suffered in September 2016 while completing a mundane layup in a workout before preseason practices had even begun. It changed everything. One moment, Frericks was preparing for a senior season as a leader on a team with all the momentum in the world — the Tigers were coming off their first NCAA Tournament berth in a decade and setting their sights on even more.

The next moment … pop. A torn anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee.

“I honestly can’t even remember the pain,” Frericks says. “I was just so emotionally in shock and mad and upset. That kind of took over.” Even though Frericks had never suffered a serious injury, she knew what this one entailed: surgery, a year of rehabilitation, a deferred final punctuation mark to an illustrious career in black and gold. She watched from the bench as her teammates advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament without her.

“I hate to say she had a redshirt senior year, but that’s what she did,” says Eric Orne, Frericks’ high school coach at Quincy (Illinois) Notre Dame. “And she came out of it a lot stronger mentally.”

After the initial shock of the injury — Frericks tore her meniscus as well — wore off, though, she started to see the silver lining. Frericks had a redshirt to burn, so she would be eligible for her senior season in 2017-18. She suffered the setback early enough in the season that she would have a full year of recovery time to be ready for preseason practice. She had the built-in desire and competitive fire not only to endure the rehab program set out for her by the Missouri training staff, but also attack it.

Now she’s right back where she was before the pop: a senior playing an integral part on another Missouri squad challenging for a top spot in the  NCAA Tournament. “When she tore her ACL, she was at such a high place. She was playing so well,” coach Robin Pingeton says. “With her drive and determination, I don’t think any of us are surprised with the level she’s playing at. And I think there’s still more. I think she’s still getting comfortable out there.”

 

 

The Road Back

Everyone in the house had at least one. Bri Porter had five. Like some sort of physical rite of passage, Frericks, her roommate, Kayla Michael, and their housemates Bri and Cierra Porter all bore scars from ACL surgeries. Frericks was the latest to join the club.

“We had some bad mojo going on,” Michael, who tore her ACL during the 2014-15 season, says with a laugh. With that mojo, though, came a readymade support system for Frericks. Not only were three of her teammates constantly around to support her, but they also could provide guidance on what to expect on the road to recovery. And help her with more practical matters in the first three weeks following the surgery, when she couldn’t put any weight on her right leg.

“I mostly helped her with getting food and stuff,” Michael says. “I didn’t have to bathe her or anything.”

On the day of the injury, Jay and Carol Frericks drove from Quincy to be with their daughter. After the surgery, Carol stayed in Columbia for a week or so. This was the toughest period for Jay. He coached Jordan in soccer and basketball through grade school and had seen her thrive athletically her entire life. But now she couldn’t walk without the help of crutches. “I still get emotional even talking about it because I know how much time and energy she puts into it,” Jay says. “We turned it around real quick. We kind of went on from there, trying to keep her head up, trying to keep Mom and Dad’s heads up.”

Jacob Linn, the director of athletic performance for the team, worked in partnership with athletic trainer Alison Mosel and a physical therapist to plot Frericks’s recovery from all angles.

The first six weeks focused on regaining full range of motion in the knee as well as keeping her right quadriceps from losing too much mass through limited use. They used a blood-flow restriction device donated by the Missouri Orthopaedic Institute to help increase flow to the injured leg and speed up the healing process.

For two months after that, they added weight training on the upper body and the muscles around the knee. Then it was on to basic knee and hip movement exercises — step-ups, lunges and squats. “Everyone was on the same page all the time,” Linn says. “The magic came from the synergy of all the professionals and just the kind of person Jordan is. She’s a super-high-attention-to-detail person, very meticulous in everything she does. Anything we asked her to do, she would do it to the max.”

By the spring, she was running, skipping, hopping and jumping. By the summer, she was working out with the team. By the fall, she was ready to go.

At first, Michael would get nervous when she saw Frericks take a tumble during preseason practices. She would hold her breath until Frericks got up, shook it off and went about her business. That feeling didn’t last long. Frericks was back.

“From the very beginning, I was going to do everything possible the right way to make sure that this wasn’t something that was going to hold me back from where I wanted to go,” Frericks says. “I just knew that if I kept feeding myself the ‘what ifs,’ nothing good would come. I just had to make sure I had the right perspective every day.”

 

 

Back Where She Belongs

Jay and Carol have gone to every Tigers home game and almost all of their road games this season. They want to cherish every moment they can during their daughter’s final season in Columbia.

So of course they were in attendance on Nov. 2, 2017, for Missouri’s exhibition win over Southwest Baptist, Frericks’s first game in more than 19 months. “I thought my heart was going to blow up,” Jay says. “I could hardly stand it. But after I saw that she was back to herself, I’ve never looked back. We’re tickled pink that she’s out there playing at the level she was prior.”

Just like before the injury, Frericks is a tireless rebounder, a tenacious defender and a highly efficient scorer in the post. She helped the Tigers to a 13-game win streak, took part in their second straight home win against national power South Carolina and had 16 points and seven rebounds in a recent victory over Tennessee, which drew a program-record crowd of 11,092. Frericks also reached a major milestone this year, becoming just the third Tiger ever to reach 1,000 career points and 1,000 rebounds.

Back on Dec. 22, Orne brought his current batch of basketball players to Columbia to see Missouri beat Illinois. Frericks scored 10 points in 19 minutes. She spent at least that much time hanging out with the 55 girls from Quincy after the game. “She’s always willing to give back,” says Orne. “That just tells you the quality kid she is. You have a kid that was in your program, had a lot of success, but she’s grounded, balanced and someone our kids can look up to.”

Frericks’s year away served a couple of valuable purposes. She was able to watch and learn from the bench, which honed her basketball IQ. And she focused on her schoolwork so she could lessen her class load this year and focus fully on her senior season.

It was a bit of a blessing in disguise. Not that she’d ever want to go through it again.

“Just knowing that I have no pain and don’t think about my knee, it’s so refreshing,” Frericks says. “I didn’t know that’s how it would be coming back. Just knowing that it’s not even something that affects me now, it makes me realize that what I did, and the people who helped me throughout my training and rehab process, we did it the right way. I’m just enjoying the moment with my team — and not having to think about my knee.”

 

Photos by Nick Mebruer