Amelia Renner has worked to be noticed on the volleyball court ever since she was in middle school.
Last fall, she got more attention than she ever expected, but not for the reasons she had hoped.
“We had a match at Evergreen, and when I entered the gym, I had part of the football boys from Evergreen saying to me ‘Are you that girl in the video?’ ” Renner said. “And I’m like ‘Yeah, that’s me.’ ”
The video. Those who have seen it won’t soon forget it.
It shows the play last September — a play like hundreds Renner had made as a member of the Prairie High School volleyball team — that ended her high school volleyball career, threw a monkey wrench into her senior year and altered the course of her future.
Renner joined a long list of local athletes who have suffered major knee injuries. But Renner’s injury was unique, and the video reveals that.
“I think she was scheduled to get an MRI when I watched the game film,” Prairie volleyball coach Jen Palmer said. “But I didn’t need to wait for the results after watching that. Anyone who watched that would know it was bad.”
Renner’s recovery involved more than physical trauma. Her journey was fraught with repeated frustration before finally reaching a place of hope.
“I came down on one foot, but I came down on the inside of my left foot,” Amelia said. “When I did that, my knee went inwards 90 degrees toward my (right) knee. Then I collapsed on top of myself.”
Her knee buckled laterally the way it’s meant to bend forward. But at the time, no one knew that, not even Amelia.
“I just remember going up, hitting the ball, coming down and going to the ground,” she said.
Tommy Renner dropped his clipboard and raced to Amelia on the court.
“The gym was just crickets,” Palmer said, “except for Amelia’s screams, which were bloodcurdling.”
Amelia was eventually stabilized and moved to the bench. The decision was made to take Amelia home that night and visit a doctor the next morning.
The next day, Amelia’s doctor ordered up an MRI, and Tommy and Amelia were sent to pick up a brace. On the way, Tommy received a text from Palmer.
“She sent me the video, and the message was something like ‘Watch at your own risk,’ ” Tommy said. “So I pulled into a gas station.”
In an ACL reconstruction procedure, the surgeon normally takes a hamstring tendon from the same leg of the injured knee to rebuild the ACL. But scar tissue around the Amelia’s knee prevented that. So the doctor had to go into the right hamstring to draw the tendon.
“I think that’s what upset me the most,” Amelia said. “I was like ‘Don’t let her cut into my other leg!’ But she did anyway.”
Tommy added: “It wasn’t like she had a choice.”
The second surgery brought good news. Amelia’s meniscus had begun to regenerate — “It was kind of like a miracle,” Amelia said — but that also meant a slower rehab process to allow the meniscus to fully heal.
Amelia said those discussions have helped, as well as talking with other athletes. Her physical therapy group ranges from patients 22 years old all the way down to a 9-year-old who blew out her knee playing rugby.
She’s even reached out to others, like Hockinson football player Peyton Brammer, who suffered a knee injury about a month after Amelia did. Amelia’s cousin is Micah Paulsen, a teammate of Brammer on Hockinson’s boys basketball team.
“When I found out that Peyton got hurt, I sent this big long text to my cousin and said ‘please send this to Peyton,’ ” Amelia said. “The surgeon who did my surgery did Peyton’s too. And then later, Peyton ended up in my group PT.”
These discussions, Amelia said, helped her realize there is more to life than playing sports.
“Now I’m just a student; I’m no longer a student-athlete,” she said. “I’m no longer the athlete that I was, and I’m never going to be the athlete that I was again. For me, the biggest part is realizing that.”
As one of the sports she played when she was younger, Amelia opted to play golf at Prairie last spring, earning second-team all-league honors.
Prairie golf coach Paul Shapard “told her if she put a quarter of the amount of time she put into volleyball into golf, she could maybe play at college,” Tommy Renner said.
So last summer, as she worked to strengthen her volleyball skills, Amelia also took golf lessons.
After her injury, Amelia thought golf might allow her to remain a student-athlete at Prairie.
When she finally ditched the crutches in January, she was cleared to begin chipping and putting. By April, she got the go-ahead to start a full golf swing and return to high school sports, once she got a brace for her knee.
“Like one of those braces linebackers wear,” Amelia said.
Then the closure of schools, and with it all of spring sports, ended that dream.
But missing school is what hurt most for Amelia.
“I had already missed a third of the beginning of my senior year, and now I’m not going to have the rest of it,” Amelia said. “It’s awful.”
She worked so hard last summer to make her senior year of volleyball special, and in the first match, it was taken away.
Now working hard to get healthy enough to play golf, that was lost before it could even start.
