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.
“I was told that only about 10 percent of patients have their meniscus regenerate,” Amelia said. “So we had to keep it as immobilized as possible to give it a chance to heal.”
Going to her bedroom on the second floor of the family’s Brush Prairie home was off limits, so Amelia began sleeping on one end of a sectional sofa in the family room, with Mom or Dad on the other end.
“She couldn’t do anything because her leg was immobilized straight,” Tommy Renner said. “Even sitting down was hard.”
Amelia missed three weeks of school after the first surgery. A second surgery, to repair her ACL, was scheduled in November.
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.
“Normally, people who have ACL surgery are off crutches after a week or two,” Amelia said. “But I ended up on crutches for about four months.”
She’d also miss an additional three weeks of school.
After her injury, the Renners quickly got Amelia into see a counselor.
“We said all along that the emotional part was going to be the hardest part,” Tommy said. “These kids, they work their whole childhood for this dream, and now the dream is gone.”
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.
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.
