South Elgin’s Rodriguez out with ACL
South Elgin junior basketball and softball standout Kara Rodriguez will miss the 2011-12 girls basketball season with a torn anterior cruciate ligament.
Rodriguez tore her ACL while performing a cheerleading routine at South Elgin’s pep assembly last Friday. She will undergo surgery Oct. 13.
“It’s a tough break for us,” said Storm girls basketball coach Tim Prendergast. “She’s one of our starters and she’s our best defensive player. It really hurts us to lose her. We were looking forward to her having a great season. We’re losing a high-energy player who has such a good attitude and works so hard. People feed off the things Kara does and we’ll really miss that.”
Prendergast said he feared the worse when the injury happened.
“She was going 1,000 miles an hour and doing one of those double or triple flip things cheerleaders do and I knew when she landed this wasn’t good,” he said.
Rodriguez averaged 2.7 points and 3 rebounds per game last season for the Storm and was usually assigned to guard the opponents’ quickest player.
Softball is the sport Rodriguez aspires to play in college and she is hoping to be back in action sometime during the spring season. A versatile player who can play the outfield, shortstop or catcher, she hit .436 for South Elgin as a freshman when she was a Daily Herald All-Area selection. She hit .321 last season. In 56 varsity games she has 9 home runs and 47 RBI, a .718 slugging percentage and a .452 on-base percentage. One of the fastest players in the area, she also has 16 stolen bases.
“It’s surprising because I never expected this to happen to me,” said Rodriguez, who plays for the Northern Illinois Lightning 18U travel softball team. “But it’s real and I don’t get to play basketball this year.”
Rodriguez said she has every intention of being the model patient so she can return to her softball career not too deep into the coming season, one in which the Storm and coach Jason Schaal will return a veteran team to the field.
“I plan to do everything they tell me to do so I can get back on the 4-month side and not the 6-month,” she said.
Which would please Schaal as well.
“It’s unfortunate,” he said, “but Kara’s a strong girl and between her and her parents, they’ll do the rehab and the right things and hopefully we’ll have her back for the stretch run.”