Enjoying it all

Punxsatawney Phil, the weather-casting groundhog, saw his shadow and predicted six more weeks of winter, but Missy Carey isn’t taking any chances. She’s preparing for spring the same way she prepares for her chosen winter sport. With dedication.

The West Valley senior, a three-sport athlete, is an important cog in her high school’s basketball team and its drive toward a state tournament berth – the school’s first trip to state since the Eagles won the Class 3A championship in 1997.

Meanwhile, Carey spends her one day off, Sunday, getting ready for her next sport, fastpitch softball.

“We’ve been working out and practicing in the batting cage,” Carey laughed. “We want to be ready in case the snow melts.”

Carey is used to blurred lines when it comes to seasonal sports.

“There would be times during the summer when I would play two summer league basketball games and then run off to play a doubleheader softball game,” she said. “I’d be in Medical Lake for one sport and race back to the Valley for another. It got a little hectic.”

The hectic pace hasn’t been limited to summer. In the fall, Carey helped the soccer team reach the state Class 3A semifinals and bring home the Eagles’ first state trophy after a fourth-place finish at state.

“My season ended too early, though,” Carey said. “I hurt my knee – I tore my meniscus – and I had to have surgery to repair it. They went in and repaired it and I was up and starting rehab two days later, but it was tough to stand by and not be able to be out there on the field.”

The injury hasn’t slowed her basketball game.

“I still wear a knee brace, but, for the most part, it’s just to keep my knee warm,” she said. “I don’t have any problems with stability or anything like that, but it works a lot better if I keep it warm.”

In fact, the stability issue has been handled throughout the team – no small feat for a team that features five seniors and three freshmen on the varsity roster, with no sophomores or juniors in between.

“We knew we were going to be very young coming in,” she said. “These freshmen are going to be the future of this program. They’re going to be incredibly experienced sophomores next year. I hope we’ve helped set a good example for them and for the future of the program.”

Not that it hasn’t taken some extra work.

At the beginning of the summer league season, coach Lorin Carlon assigned each freshman a senior mentor – someone to make sure they got to practice and games on time.

“Mo (senior Melissa Mauro) had a little trouble remembering at first,” she said. “The first couple times she’d show up at practice without her freshman and would have to go back and get her. That only happened a couple times and it hasn’t happened in a long time now.”

Carey and her senior teammates are the last of the veteran players at West Valley to remember the trials and tribulations of playing in the Greater Spokane League.

“I look back on last year’s senior players and how difficult it was for them,” Carey said. “Before last year and the success we had, they’d only won something like three games in their first three seasons. They fought through some really tough times.”

When West Valley dropped out of the GSL to join the Class 2A Great Northern League a year ago, the chances for success improved greatly – the Eagles finally were competing against schools their own size.

The first team to discover that new-found success was last year’s girls soccer team, a squad that reached the postseason for the first time in school history.

An integral part of that team, Carey said she learned some valuable lessons that she has tried to pass along to her basketball and softball teammates.

“The thing I learned from soccer is that you can’t take it for granted that you can just kick your game up at the end of the season and be successful,” she said. “You have to get in there and work hard right from the beginning of the year. You have to work hard and make it happen. You have to make these things happen.”

Carey has set a heady pace for making things happen. The hectic summer pace rolled into a hectic pace for soccer season and rehab for her repaired knee. She got off the bus returning from the state soccer tournament and walked right into basketball practice.

Now, with basketball entering the home stretch, she’s already thinking spring.

“This is my senior season,” she said. “I really want to get the most out of this last year here. I want to enjoy it all.”