Geoff Grammer, Journal Staff Writer
An awful lot raced through the mind of 17-year-old Harper Dunn five weeks ago between the anterior cruciate ligament in her left leg snapping when she landed from a block attempt in volleyball practice and the time it took her body to hit the floor.
After all, it does take a little while for a towering 6-foot, 6-inch body to fall to the Earth.
One moment, the girl who has been on a collision course with college basketball stardom since she received her first Division I scholarship offers before she even started high school was jumping up for a block in volleyball practice at Albuquerque Academy, the next she admittedly was crying “hysterically” on the court.
“I knew instantly that I had really messed something up. I knew that was something I had never done before,” says Dunn.
“I landed with my leg straight. It locked. And between when that happened and the time I hit the ground, I had already started thinking about basketball. That’s how quick I already had things going into my head.”
The active teenage mind of the Albuquerque basketball prodigy with more than 30 Division I scholarship offers who has been a regular invitee to the Team USA basketball training camps the past couple of years took, like any of us would, a moment to simply freak out a bit.
“I would tell you that stages of grief, I probably got hit with all of them except acceptance within 30 minutes of (the injury),” Harper recalls.
But then something else hit her — and it hit a lot harder than that jolt of excruciating pain of blowing out her knee. And it has defined her approach to how she’s tackling the journey back from an injury that has cost her the rest of her high school basketball career.
‘I’m an agriculturalist’
Harper Dunn was never really about basketball, anyway.
Don’t get that twisted. She absolutely loves basketball and has every intention of again playing it at the highest levels in the world, including at rising college hoops power Oklahoma next year, as she recently announced.
But she refuses to let that be her identity. And when she reminded herself of that, an injury became a nuisance you work around more than a roadblock to stop her.
