Baumert fights through the pain to still contribute during her senior year (Spomer/WBR)
Creighton volleyball’s senior setter Maggie Baumert’s bad wheel has been the underlying story throughout the Bluejays’ 2015 season so far. After hyper-extending her right knee during her sophomore season at the University of Georgia, the fifth-year senior experienced pain in the same knee during workouts for this upcoming season that led to her undergoing an MRI after the first week. The examination revealed a partially torn anterior cruciate ligament, but after she sat out the 2011 season as a redshirt during her first year at Georgia, her options going forward were limited. She could get surgery, miss the 2015 season, and hope the NCAA rewards her with a long-shot sixth season of eligibility that would allow her to play in 2016; she could just call it a career and not try to push through the pain, or the last option — she could fight through it and make the most of her final collegiate season.
While accomplishing that task and doing so on the court effectively has proven to be difficult, the decision to keep playing has not been one she regrets.
“Obviously it’s my last year playing volleyball, and it’s my fifth year, so this is all I have. That motivated me to keep playing,” Baumert said before Creighton’s Thursday afternoon practice session at D.J. Sokol Arena. “I knew our coaches would work with me through it, so I knew it wasn’t going to be a thing where since I can’t practice I can’t ever play. They use me in the ways that they think they should use me, and we have two other great setters that we can use when needed. I think the coaches have really helped me get through this, honestly.”
After getting the diagnosis on her knee, Baumert received a cortisone shot to help dull the pain and see if she could be a serviceable setter. The team had a highly-touted recruiting class, was favored to win the Big East, and had a loaded non-conference schedule with chances every weekend to get quality wins that would help build their NCAA Tournament resume. For the first few weeks, Baumert and the coaches tried to gauge the pain tolerance and figure out whether she could fill a role on the court or just make the decision to end her playing career instead of pushing it any further.
“We went into preseason and she went pretty hard for the first week, and we thought she was doing pretty well,” Creighton head coach Kirsten Bernthal Booth said. “Then it hit a point where she was in a lot of pain. We went through about a month of deciding whether or not she was just going to hang it up. The conversations were pretty regular.”
Baumert is a steady setter for the Bluejays (Spomer/WBR)
While Baumert’s status was up in the air, redshirt sophomore Kenzie Crawford stepped in to set for the Bluejays. Right out of the gates, Booth’s statement about the selflessness and depth of her 2015 squad was put to the test. Creighton went 1-2 during the opening weekend, defeating Miami of Ohio in five sets before dropping matches to Louisville and at then 8th-ranked Illinois. Crawford averaged 10 assists and 10 digs per set, along with 6.7 kills per set during the first weekend. She recorded the fastest triple-double in school history when she posted 51 assists, 11 digs, and 10 kills against Louisville in just her third career start.
Crawford’s performance stepping into the starting role and the teammates around her responding to the early adversity, showed the Creighton coach something about her group that isn’t always a guarantee from team to team and year to year.
“There are lots of heroes in this story,” Booth said. “From Maggie, but also Kenzie. Whatever we have asked of her, she’s been willing to do. If it means run a 5-1, if it means run a 6-2, if it means letting Maggie set, Kenzie has done it with an incredible attitude the entire time. I think the circumstances could be a recipe for disaster because of so many different lineups, and I think some of these players that are sometimes playing, sometimes not playing, sometimes finding out the day of the match that they are not playing or that they are starting, I think most teams would be destroyed by it; instead this team has rallied around whoever is playing. I can’t implore enough that that’s the success of this team.”
Still the question of what their most experienced setter could provide this season still needed to be answered. When she wasn’t in playing condition, the fifth-year senior and team leader was still trying to make her presence known.
“I try to be as loud as I can and as positive as I can,” Baumert said. “It’s been hard. I want to be out there all of the time and I can’t be. It’s not how I pictured my senior season would go, but I’ve dealt with it, and I have great teammates that will back me up, too.”
As someone who aspires to be a coach when her playing days are over, the injury was a blessing in disguise of sorts for Baumert as it let her test out that role early in the season while her playing status was still up in the air.
“Coach [Booth] has always talked to me about coaching, because she knows I want to get into it. When I was deciding whether to keep playing or not, she always reminded me that if I would stop playing that I would always have a coaching role,” Baumert said. “She always tells me to continue to do that when I’m not playing. It’s been good, she’s helped me out a lot.”
Baumert sets, but also is a force on the block as seen here against Nebraska (Spomer/WBR)
During the second weekend of the season, Baumert and the coaches felt good enough about her health that she could test it out on the court, at a time when the team needed their senior leader the most. After dropping the first two matches at a tournament hosted by Northern Iowa, Baumert started and played in every set as Creighton got their first win over top ten team in program history when they swept the Kentucky Wildcats.
Slowly but surely Baumert and the coaches started to develop a routine to help her make an impact on the court. Twice this season, against Kansas State and DePaul, she has unwrapped the heating pads that help keep her knee loose, strapped on the clunky brace that stabilizes her knee, and led the Bluejays back from 0-2 deficits to win five-set thrillers. On Creighton’s current 10-match winning streak, which includes a 9-0 start in Big East play, Baumert has played most of, if not all, of the sets in seven of those wins, including a sweep of Lipscomb and Marquette, and a four-set victory over Villanova — all wins that look pretty good on Creighton’s NCAA Tournament resume.
The routine that her coaches monitor — which, by the way, isn’t one that always sits well with a competitor like Baumert — is go as hard as you can when you’re on the court in a match, then rest and slowly build back up as the next weekend’s matches draw closer. Sometimes Baumert puts up a fight when she feels she can go sooner in practice, but Booth doesn’t budge. After all, it’s for the senior setter’s long-term well-being, something the Creighton coaches are not going to sacrifice in order to win.
“I don’t reign her in when she’s playing. Where we’ve had to reign her in is she would prefer to practice every day,” Booth said. “We’ve had lots of discussions — she’s a fifth-year senior, she’s set a lot of balls, she’s played a lot of volleyball, I’m not really worried that she’s going to forget how to ‘ride the bike’ when she gets out on the court. That would be where I’ve had to reign her in more. It’s a playful banter, she’ll say, ‘I want to practice.’ I’ll say, ‘Yeah, I know you do, but you’re not going to.’
“She knows that the coaching staff is coming from a place of caring about her. Clearly, if this is something that we were hurting her for when she is 40 or 50 years old she would not be playing, but she’ll have surgery on her ACL once the season is done, so now it’s just a matter of how much she can tolerate.”
The question of how of her pain tolerance and how well she can bounce back got tested last weekend when she played on back-to-back days for the first time in over a month in four-set wins at Butler and at Xavier.
“The coaches talked to me going into the weekend, and we decided that I would play Friday, and then depending on how I felt we’d see about Saturday,” Baumert said of the decision. “Friday went well, I was definitely sore after the match, but if they wanted me to play then I was going to play [on Saturday]. I definitely needed a lot of rest this week, but it’s back to the baseline pain I would say. I felt good enough to give it a go [on Saturday]. I’m always pretty honest with [the coaches], if I don’t think I can do something I’ll tell them, but at this point it’s just let’s keep going until I can’t do it anymore.”
That was a big hurdle for the coaching staff and especially for Baumert. It let her know, that at least for now, her knee can handle back-to-back matches, something she hopes she’ll be able to do if her number is called upon in the Big East Tournament and the NCAA Tournament, provided the Bluejays continue to play well and earn a bid for the fourth consecutive season.
“That was the first time in a while that I had played back-to-back matches, so I definitely think it was good for me to know that I can play two matches if they need me to,” Baumert said.
For a team that returned 11 players to this year’s roster, Booth said her senior setter is providing leadership more with what she isn’t doing during this time of adversity as opposed to what she is bringing when she can be on the court. While some players will sit around, sulk, and feel sorry for themselves when they’re injured, Baumert tries to be a positive example for her teammates at all times.
“One of the things about Maggie as a role model is she doesn’t make it about her. She doesn’t talk about the pain that she’s in,” Booth said. “Maggie has done a great job of that, and when she’s not playing or practicing, she is engaging and walking around and being a part of things, and she has not made it about herself. She has told me flat out that she’ll support whatever decision I make, so if I don’t play her in a match that she wants to play in, she’ll handle it with a positive attitude.”
“I think she is setting a great example, but I think the big thing is that with injuries people can spend a lot of time feeling sorry for themselves. The attitude that she brings when she’s not playing and practicing probably is the biggest thing that she’s done.”
For now, Baumert and the Bluejays are flying high with a 15-7 overall record, and a 9-0 mark at the midway point of Big East conference play. While there were times earlier in the season when she almost made the decision to call it a career, she pushed through it, and right now is she isn’t regretting that decision.
“This is my last time playing, so I wanted to do anything that the coaches and the team needed from me,” Baumert said of how she convinced herself to keep fighting through the pain. “I just feel like I can impact the team in whatever way the coaches decide to use me. That wasn’t worth giving up.
“At this point, I think anyone on our team is willing to play any role that the coaches give them. I definitely feel like I made the right decision, and it’s been fun. I’m glad I stuck it out and kept playing.”
The Bluejays continue Big East play this weekend as they take on Providence Friday night at 7PM and turnaround for a 1PM Sunday afternoon tilt against St. John’s. Both matches will be at DJ Sokol Arena.