SPORTS AND HEALTH – Kelsey Griffin’s escape, which she had been diagramming in her mind for three years, came close to fruition during her junior season at Nebraska.
She was homesick and heartsick, her love of basketball worn thin by injuries, when her mother called from Alaska with news that Griffin’s father had head and neck cancer.
Griffin, a 6-foot-2 forward, hung up and thought, “This has to be a sign that I’m not where I’m supposed to be.”
The more she thought about it, the clearer her decision became. Griffin remained at Nebraska.
Two years later, the Cornhuskers, who were 15-16 last season, are where nobody outside the program thought they were supposed to be: ranked third in the country and seeded first in the Kansas City Region of the N.C.A.A. tournament.
Without Griffin, the Big 12 player of the year, the road to the Final Four in San Antonio almost certainly would have bypassed Lincoln. Her journey — from nearly leaving school to losing last season to an ankle injury to leading the Cornhuskers to a 30-1 record, easily the best season in the program’s history — was not a solo endeavor.
She received direction and encouragement from her teammates, especially the scholarship class that entered Nebraska the year after her. They will all leave together, the Cornhuskers’ self-described Fab Five and Griffin, bonded by their stick-to-itiveness.
“I’m so happy,” Griffin said last weekend during the Big 12 Conference tournament. “I feel so privileged and blessed to have had this season with my teammates, who are a lot of my best friends.”
Griffin, 22, seems to be guided by an internal navigation system, coming across as someone in need of no direction. A biological sciences major, Griffin is a three-time, first-team Big 12 academic honoree. She is also a three-time all-Big 12 first-team selection and the first Cornhusker to be named the conference player of the year.
For all her drive to succeed, she is not unlike a lot of college students in sometimes feeling lost.
“Most people think 18- to 22-year-olds, because they’re on this stage, they have it all figured out,” Nebraska Coach Connie Yori said. “A lot of them have challenges and a lot of doubts.”
She added, “You name it, Kelsey’s fought through it.”
Griffin averaged 13.3 points in 32 starts as a freshman in 2005-6 despite playing the last month of the season with mononucleosis. Her mother, Jan, remembered Griffin’s many tearful calls home.
Griffin said, “My freshman year I was excited coming out of high school to play in college, and it got to be a grind.”
As a sophomore, she overcame a season-long breathing problem that was never diagnosed to lead the Cornhuskers to their first N.C.A.A. tournament since 2000. She had help from a freshman class that formed its own team: center Nikki Bober, forward Cory Montgomery and guards Kala Kuhlmann, Nicole Neals and Yvonne Turner.
A year later, the Cornhuskers were on their way to another N.C.A.A. tournament, but Griffin, who started 29 games, felt no joy, only ceaseless, searing pain from a cracked rib she sustained in the preseason.
“It was super hard my junior year,” she said. “It really made me question my priorities.”
In conversations with her mother after her father’s cancer, Griffin said, “I wanted her to say, ‘Kelsey you need to come home,’ but she’s not like that.”
An academic scholarship to Alaska-Anchorage was waiting if she went home. But every time Griffin pictured herself leaving, she thought of her teammates, and everything they had overcome collectively and individually, and she could not go.
“I committed to play here,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave my teammates, to just bail on them. I’m proud of my word.”
Her father, Jim, is cancer free, but Griffin’s trials were not over. She hurt her ankle in a pickup game in August 2008, had surgery and was sidelined for the season.
She got by with a lot of help from her teammates, especially the class of 2010. When people talk about Nebraska’s quick turnaround from a sub-500 season, it makes Yori laugh because this season was actually seven long years in the making.