BOWLING GREEN — The more some things change, the more they might stay the same.
Bowling Green State University’s women’s basketball team will enter the regular season without its best player on the floor. Star point guard Lexi Fleming sustained an injury to her right leg in a team scrimmage on Oct. 30 and was ruled out for the season, as head coach Robyn Fralick detailed during Mid-American Conference media day last week.
The team took a minute to grieve her injury, and got back to work over the previous week and a half in preparation for Thursday’s season opener against East Tennessee State.
With high expectations on the floor and with Fleming off of it, the goals for BGSU remain the same entering the regular season.
“Honestly, nothing really changes,” Fleming said after Tuesday’s practice. “The expectations are still there. Our goals are still there. No goals have changed. It just looks a little bit different, and that’s how we face adversity, and that’s how life goes sometimes.”
Fleming walked around the Stroh Center on Tuesday with the help of crutches and her right knee wrapped up for a portion of what was open to the media. She said surgery is in two weeks and will go through physical therapy leading up to it and then after. She said she hopes to be back for the beginning of next season.
Despite having to sit out the upcoming season, Fleming has kept her spirits high.
“It’s definitely tough,” she said. “It’s hard to think that an injury is season-ending. Usually you’re just out for a couple weeks, couple months, but honestly, my head space is as good as it can get. I work on it every day, and my team helps me through it. They talk me through it. I can always go to them, no matter what I need.”
The Falcons were picked to finish second in the conference in the preseason coaches’ poll and, even without Fleming, still return an experienced core and have added talented pieces around it.
Even without their best player, Falcons team leaders like senior Kadie Hempfling have kept the vision of the season in perspective.
“Lexi being hurt, that’s a big blow to our team, but that still doesn’t change the trajectory of where we want to go and what we want to do this season,” Hempfling said. “We still have her spirit, and we still have her fight. ... Her competitiveness is unmatched, and if everyone just levels up a little bit and we stay together like we have been all year, then I think we’re going to be OK.”
That support is echoed by Fralick, who coined her team as a resilient bunch that reacted to Fleming’s injury only the way that Fleming would have wanted them to.
“They believe in each other,” Fralick said. “When the injury happened in our scrimmage, it was right before halftime, and I was even sort of like, ‘Woah,’ and everyone gets the wind taken out of their sails, and I was like, ‘What do you guys want to do”’
“They were like, ‘Play! Lexi likes playing the most. All she’d want us to do is play.’ So that is cool. That piece is cool. I think our meetings have been based on, ‘We’re OK, and we can do this.’”
Moments like these can galvanize a team, and that’s exactly the impression Fralick and the Falcons have given in response to losing Fleming.
“Obviously there’s a disappointing — there’s a grief piece to it,” Fralick said. “As a coach you feel so bad for your kids when something like that happens, but there’s a resiliency piece to it. One of my good friends shared with me the other day, she said, ‘Resiliency is built before adversity hits,’ and I thought that’s our team. I thought if there’s something to identify us, I think we’ve been a resilient team. Literally, with the way we play, too. We got to figure it out and find a way to continue to compete at a high level.”
First Published November 9, 2021, 11:32 p.m.
