Despite painful past, NIU's Brewer a medical marvel

When Shavonne Brewer would wake up in the morning and head to the bathroom, she would limp and struggle to get there.

"Like I was 80," Brewer said.

Problem was, Brewer, a redshirt sophomore guard on the Northern Illinois basketball team, was only 20.

Actually, Brewer felt like a senior citizen long before she even hit puberty.

"I started feeling really bad pain in my feet at age 9," Brewer said. "I would constantly be twisting my ankles, then I fractured a bone in my foot. The bottom of my feet constantly hurt. Then my knees and back started to hurt."

Brewer was suffering from flat feet. Extremely flat feet, and not the slightest arch. For anyone with this problem, even walking can be difficult. For an athlete such as Brewer, who was trying to play volleyball, basketball and softball, performing effectively was a daily miracle. Excruciating pain became a part of her routine, day in and day out.

"I ended up quitting everything but basketball because that's all I thought I'd be able to do, and I still didn't think I'd be able to make it all the way through high school," she said. "I really wanted to play basketball in college, so I played through the pain. I didn't want the pain to stop me."

Ultimately, it did. Brewer had career-ending foot reconstruction on her right foot in December, with surgery on the left in eight to 12 months.

Brewer is devastated, but finds some solace in knowing she is a medical marvel for getting as far as she did.

Most high school basketball players can't land a Division I scholarship with two good feet. Brewer, who is still part of the team at Northern but wheels around practices and games on a manual scooter, did it with two bad ones. Really bad ones.

"I don't even know how I was able to play at all," Brewer said. "God is good, I guess."

While suffering throughout her career and changing from one set of orthotics to another to find any relief, she became a nominee for Illinois Ms. Basketball as a senior at Rock Island High School. She was the metro player of the year in the Quad Cities that season.

She averaged 18 points per game as a senior and got looks from major Division I programs such as Iowa but the recruiting cooled as she kept experiencing one foot-related injury after another.

She ultimately signed with Rockhurst University, a D-II school in Kansas City, Mo.

"I was lucky to get anything," Brewer said. "I've often thought about how much more successful I could have been if I had had none of these problems with my feet."

Brewer was the starting point guard at Rockhurst her freshman year and was averaging 10 points per game before she tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her knee. Doctors told her the ACL had probably been compromised due to her foot problems.

Luckily, she had caught the eye of former NIU coach Kathi Bennett before the injury and was offered a scholarship. Brewer, who sat out last year due to transfer rules, finished the rehab of her knee and was beginning to feel better.

But when she returned to DeKalb this fall for preseason practices, Brewer knew immediately that she was in trouble.

"I would be running down the court, and it felt like someone was stabbing me in the shins," she said. "The pain was back. It was worse than ever."

Doctors put casts for her feet so she could play, but that didn't help. After many conversations and tears, Brewer agreed to surgery, which took place on New Year's Eve.

Doctors had to make four incisions on her right foot. One was to remove bunions that had formed on the top of her foot due to her improper gait. A second cut was on the inside of the foot to stretch the tendons and then reattach them. The final two incisions were on the outside of the foot. A bone graft was used to make the bones there longer in order to create an arch.

In addition, her heel bone was broken in half and elongated to help support the arch. And the bone on the top of the foot was realigned because it had come out of its socket.

"They found a lot more in there to repair than they originally thought," Brewer said. "It was like I had four different surgeries on that one foot."

The good news is that doctors anticipate a full recovery, and Brewer should be able to pursue her dream of passing police academy training.

"I'm excited to see how my body feels when this is all over," Brewer said. "I really want to be a detective and I want to have a normal life. I'm hoping I'll be able to do that with better feet."

The promise of a career as a detective helps take the sting out of her abbreviated career as a college basketball player.

"Obviously I have bad days when I think about it," Brewer said. "Basketball has been a part of my life practically since I came out of the womb.

"The fact that Northern is keeping me on scholarship and I also still get to be on the team and go to practices and games really helps. I feel really blessed about that."

• Follow Patricia on Twitter @babcockmcgraw and contact her via email at pbabcock@dailyherald.com.