There’s more Keeler to come
Published 9:00 pm Thursday, December 13, 2001
By John Sleeper
Herald Writer
SEATTLE – It was in the locker room Nov. 4, hours before the University of Washington women’s basketball team would open its season with an exhibition game.
Sarah Keeler was going a little nutso.
Far from slapping on a steely-eyed, penitentiary game face, Keeler was laughing, loudly belting out a running play-by-play of her getting into uniform.
“I was like, ‘OK, I’m getting my shorts on,’” Keeler said, ” ‘OK, I’m putting on my jersey.’”
Bill Russell often worked himself up to such a state before games that he would lose his lunch. But here was Keeler, breaking up her teammates with a sort of reverse striptease.
She had a right to. She had been away from the game she loves for too long. A 6-foot-4 redshirt freshman from Pendleton, Ore., Keeler was about to return to playing a game after two years of almost nothing but rehabilitation of one knee, then the other. Two years of weightlifting. Two years of pain and stiffness.
Two years of waiting. For this.
Damned right, she was going to enjoy it.
“This was her payoff,” UW center Andrea Lalum said. “It had all built up for two years, and this was a payoff for her.”
Keeler was a promising post from Pendleton High School when she suffered one of the most severe knee injuries an athlete can – a torn anterior cruciate ligament. It happened during a summer all-star camp before her senior year. A powerful, athletic player, Keeler is among the school’s career leaders in points, rebounds and blocked shots. She was a starter since her freshman year, had never been injured and had narrowed her choices of scholarship offers to Oregon and Washington.
She was set.
Then it happened.
“As soon as I went down, I knew I had done it,” Keeler said. “I was just like, ‘Are you kidding me? Why is this happening?’ (UW coach June Daugherty) was there. (Then-Oregon coach Judy Runge) was there. It was the biggest summer of my career, basically. There were a lot of coaches there, and I went down. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh. There goes my career.’
“I was more concerned that my scholarships were gone than what I had done to myself.”
Both Daugherty and Runge later called Keeler to assure her that their scholarship offers still were on the table. Keeler would later accept the offer from Washington and managed to play some games in mid-January of her senior year, although she was nowhere near 100 percent because of a complication that required arthroscopic surgery that December.
“My first game, I felt like I was just hanging at half-court,” she said.
Keeler’s knee problems didn’t end once she enrolled at Washington. As rehabilitation on her right knee was nearing completion, Keeler suffered a meniscus tear in her left knee and had surgery shortly before the season started. As she was recovering from that, Keeler twisted the right knee, tearing some scar tissue, and the decision was made for her to redshirt.
So Keeler was faced with missing not one, but the majority of two years, save the short stint at the tail end of her senior year at Pendleton.
So Keeler had to sit and watch as the Huskies won a share of the Pacific-10 Conference title last season and tore through the NCAA Tournament with wins against Old Dominion, Florida and Oklahoma before falling to Southwest Missouri for a spot in the Final Four.
In that time, Keeler went through the predictable self doubts. Could she still compete at the Pac-10 level? Was she truly a part of the team? Teammates would call her during road trips following games, which helped. Yet the doubts remained.
Keeler had to watch as her teammates bounced back from an 8-22 season in 2000 to 22-10 in 2001. It didn’t help that, by the time the NCAA Tournament rolled around, Keeler was practicing at full speed. Physically, she was able to contribute, but she couldn’t play in games because it was her redshirt year.
“It was hard,” Keeler said. “I didn’t feel the lows of losing as dramatically as the team did, but I also didn’t feel the highs of winning. I was obviously excited. It was fun to watch. I enjoy watching basketball. But at the same time, I was sitting there, going, ‘I practice every day with these girls. I could be out here.’ That was frustrating.”
The doubts have largely left, now that Keeler is playing. After two years off, the adjustment is gargantuan. The speed of the game resembles nothing of high school. Neither does the skill level of the players.
Now healthy, Keeler is showing flashes of her capabilities. Against Indiana in the Pac-10/Big Ten Challenge last Friday, Keeler played 15 minutes in a reserve role, scored a career-high 10 points (on 5-for-7 shooting from the field), had a pair of rebounds and blocked a shot.
So amped was Keeler by the breakthrough that she blurted in the postgame press conference that, “There’s more Keeler to come.”
“Everyone’s making the big joke about what I said, but it’s true,” Keeler said. “There’s still a lot more things that I have to work on, that I can offer to the team, that I can offer in our games. There’s a lot more that I can do.”
Adds Lalum, who faces Keeler every day in practice: “She is going to be an exciting player at the University of Washington. Nobody has seen her yet. She’s kind of like a secret weapon. She hasn’t even seen herself in two years. But she’s showing us moves that we’ve never seen before.”
For now, Keeler would do well to contribute rebounds, an area in which the 5-4 Huskies need to shore up. She has shown talent on both ends of the floor in practice. And once she catches up to the speed of the college game, Keeler will be anything but a secret.
After two years off, it’s coming. It’s a long way from Pendleton, Ore., to an Elite Eight program.
“She has to be steady,” Daugherty said. “She has be able to go out of the floor every day in practice and in games and dominate offensively. And she needs to go after every loose ball. She has to make attempts to get every rebound. She’s learning to play more physical and she’s getting good results.”
As she says herself, there’s more Keeler to come.
