Great athletes often become great in part because of a refusal to accept the idea that they have physical limitations.
<em>I can go faster. I can lift more than that. I can push through the pain.</em>
But no matter how hard some may try to pretend that science doesn’t exist, it’s there. Every human body has its limits — and they can only be stretched so far.
Mackenzie Blazek was forced to come to grips with that reality in 2020. The Whiteland alumna, a former Indiana All-Star and two-time county player of the year, was planning to spend this winter playing her junior season at the University of Illinois, but after a year and a half of recurring injury problems, she decided enough was enough. She announced her medical retirement on Oct. 23.
“It was a hard decision to make,” Blazek said. “I spent a lot of — it was a solid week of just headaches about, ‘What am I going to do,’ pro and con lists, talking to a lot of medical professionals and trying to get their opinions.
“I’m confident in my decision. I do miss it, especially now, watching them play and seeing them go to practice and all this stuff, it’s very different, but I knew that if I had tried to keep going in the condition that I was at, it would not have been good for me.”
Blazek had a relatively smooth ride as a freshman, playing in 30 games and starting three. But that following summer, just before the Illini embarked on a journey to play in Australia, she started experiencing pain in her right shin. The cause was stress reactions — where the bone is overused but not yet to the point of fracture — in a couple of locations.
After some rest, Blazek played in Australia, but the problem continued to resurface heading into her sophomore campaign. She missed the first four games of the 2019-20 season before making her debut in a 12-minute appearance against Arkansas-Pine Bluff.
Gradually, Blazek started hitting her stride; she scored in double digits in consecutive December games against Merrimack and Evansville. But after the nonconference finale against Missouri, she had to take another break that kept her sidelined for the first two Big Ten contests.
Believing she was rested enough, Blazek came back to play against Indiana on Jan. 6, and she played a career-high 36 minutes against Minnesota just six days later, contributing nine points, five rebounds, three assists and a pair of blocked shots in an Illinois win. But her minutes again dwindled quickly from there, and after logging just six in a Feb. 2 game against Wisconsin, the decision was made to shut Blazek down for the season.
That turned out to be the final game of her collegiate career.
Throughout the spring quarantine time, Blazek essentially lived in the Illini training room and weight room, doing as much low-impact cardio as possible on bikes, elliptical trainers and climbers while also working to strengthen the muscles around the bone while she waited for it to heal.
But her condition never improved for long. An MRI in May came back clean, but within a couple of months the stress reactions had resurfaced yet again. Every time she tried to get back on the court and play, the pounding proved to be too much.
“When it didn’t get better with rest, that kind of tells you something,” Illinois coach Nancy Fahey said. “It’s not a toughness thing, it’s just a reality thing.”
As much as Blazek might have wished for a different reality, by the fall she knew that she was going to have to say goodbye to the game that she had played and loved since she was 6 years old.
The juice was just no longer worth the squeeze.
“After it had come back for the fourth time, I started talking to the doctor and my trainer, kind of saying, ‘Look, I don’t think this is going to go away,’” Blazek recalled. “And it was a choice that I could keep playing very limited minutes until it got to the point where the doctor was just going to completely shut me down and I’d go back in the boot and then have to start all the way from square one.
“It wasn’t ever going to get to the point where I could play at the level that I want to play, and it was just always going to be a couple of minutes here, rest for a couple of weeks, a couple of minutes there — and that wasn’t ideal for me.”
The decision to hang it up was made even tougher by the ongoing pandemic, which prevents Blazek from being around the team as often as she would like. She still has a roommate on the team, and says the girls on the roster are “still my best friends,” but with Big Ten COVID-19 protocols requiring the players to be tested daily, it doesn’t really make sense for her to be around if she can’t be on the court.
If she hasn’t had a recent negative test, Blazek tries to keep her distance.
“I just want to be respectful,” she said. “I’m not getting COVID tested every single day, so I don’t want to possibly bring anything to the team that could prevent them from playing.”
While her playing days are over, Blazek isn’t completely done with basketball just yet. Since there’s little point in staying in Champaign this summer, she’ll instead return home and coach an eighth-grade AAU team for the Indiana Elite.
Then, she’ll return to school and continue working toward her degree; Blazek is majoring in English with a minor in business, and for now she plans to pursue a graduate degree in marketing after that.
As for her physical well-being, she has a gym membership and started working out again in December — and she can get through her regular day-to-day routine largely pain-free.
“I’m not going to go on a 3-mile run or go pound out a couple of miles on the treadmill,” Blazek said, “but I can run on the elliptical or do a jog here and there and it’s fine.”
Had she continued to play, there’s no guarantee that the rest of her life would pan out that way.
As much as Blazek will miss basketball, she has no regrets about walking away while she still can — and her former teammates and coaches were behind her completely.
“When it comes right down to it, we’re always going to be on the safety of the players’ side,” Fahey said. “And it wasn’t without effort on her part. She gave it a really good effort; it just didn’t happen for her.
“Great person. I wish she was on the team, and we miss her.”
