Basketball helps Ryerson University coach Sue Stewart weather the storm after accident

Sue Stewart - Courtesy of J. Thompson/National Post

TORONTO — Almost everyone on the bench was standing as the final desperate shot went up with 1.5 seconds showing on the clock. What began as another quiet night inside the gym was ending with the jolt of a possible upset. Sue Stewart remained seated.

She has spent the better part of seven years fighting to regain her footing. And as the last shot of the game began its descent, the 42-year-old assistant coach remained on her chair, third to the left of the head coach, who was on his feet. The ball fell awkwardly at the intersection of rim and backboard, missing the net and giving the Ryerson University women’s basketball team a 66-65 win over the nationally ranked University of Toronto.

Stewart pumped her fist, slowly. “Oh, you haven’t seen nothing yet,” she said afterward, traces of a smile forming. “Right now, because of my situation, I was just sitting still. But anybody who knows me will tell you that I am very animated, because basketball is all of me.”

Stewart was named Canada’s best female university player in 1992, the year after helping Laurentian University defend its national title. Basketball took her to the Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996, but as she was beginning the transition into coaching a few years later, basketball was taken from her.
In 2005, she slipped and hit her head in a hotel shower, which led to another fall at home and a trip to the hospital. Stewart had badly damaged her brain stem, and what began as a general feeling of illness spiraled quickly into slurred speech, a coma and last rites being delivered at her bedside.

Stewart struggles to recall the medical specifics of those early days — “you need to speak to my mom” — but she wages daily war with the consequences. She lives with her family in Mississauga, Ont., because she needs help commuting around the region. She still has trouble with her left leg, her balance, her speech, her left hand and her vision.

Courtesy of J. Thompson/National Post

But basketball has come back. Stewart declined an offer to join Ryerson three years ago because she felt she was not far enough along in her recovery, but she accepted this season. She is on a one-year contract as a part-time coach and recruiter for a young staff at an underdog school.

“There will be challenges for her,” Ryerson athletics director Ivan Joseph said. “There are some physical challenges, absolutely … and she’ll have to decide and figure out how she’s going to accommodate them. But I think the upside of what her experience and credentials are, I don’t think there’s any reason that she can’t overcome them.”

Stewart cannot drive, in part because of damage that limited movement in her eyes. On Saturday, the day after the win over the U of T, Stewart was going to make a scouting trip to Sheridan College in Oakville, Ont., which meant a long taxi ride was in her immediate future.

She maintains more control of things on the court. Stewart often works out with players outside of regular practice hours, in a one-on-one setting in the gym. She counsels them on working within the offence, on technique and on her experiences of playing professionally in Europe. Fifth-year guard Ashley MacDonald scored 15 points against Ryerson’s crosstown rival and was, despite standing 5-foot-3, a driving force in the late stages of the game. She had lunch with Stewart a week before the game.

“I definitely know it’s been a struggle,” MacDonald said. “It must be hard for her to come back and see … if I was her, I’d just want to play, play and play all the time. I can see where it’d be very hard. Coming back, she’s very into it. She loves it. You can see the passion.”

Stewart can still pass the ball around, too, although players have to be mindful to bounce their passes back, because direct passes still move too quickly for her to handle. Stewart still cannot ride a regular bicycle because of her balance issues, so she works hard on an elliptical trainer at the gym. She is looking for a personal trainer.To see her walk across the floor, Stewart’s limp betrays the gait of a middle-aged player injured in a weekend game of pickup, and not of someone who had to learn how to sign their own name all over again in their thirties.

“A lot of people see me in the mall and say, ‘Oh, did you hurt your ankle?’” she said with a chuckle. “And I have to say to them, ‘No, it’s more neurological.’ I have neurological issues that will get better in time.”
She emphasized “will.”

“That’s what I’ve been told,” she said. “So I just have to weather the storm and deal with what comes my way.”

The storm rolled across unexpectedly. Stewart was a student at Malone College (now Malone University) in Canton, Ohio, when she drove out of town to coach a girls travel team. She had almost finished her studies, and arrived at her hotel two weeks after the out-of-country medical insurance provided through the school had expired.
The team lost its first game on the Saturday, and Stewart gave the teenaged girls a pep talk back at the hotel. She went to her room for a shower and a nap before the second game, but slipped and hit her head in the shower. The showerheads were short, and she was not. She felt a sharp pain, but thought nothing of it.
She woke up to what she heard as a faint noise. It was a parent hammering on the door of her room, telling her the second game was about to start. Stewart felt awful. She vomited profusely before the game, but cleaned herself off and coached. Her team won but did not advance any further into the tournament.
Stewart felt embarrassed when she vomited again during the post-game meal at a nearby restaurant. She traveled with a bucket in the back of the bus on the ride back to her car before driving herself home to

Canton. She stumbled into her house, and went to sleep. She began slurring badly. She ordered food, but had no energy to get to the door to pay the deliveryman, so she went without. She dragged herself into the bathroom to look at herself in the mirror, to see what was wrong. She fell again. It was a bad fall. Worse than the first. Stewart cracked the back of her head on the soap dish in the bathtub.

“She called me and she told me, ‘Mom, I just took the whole shower curtain down,’” her mother, Nona, said. “And I’m laughing at her — I said, ‘What happened? Did you put a dent in the tub?’ — I didn’t know how serious this was.”

The slurring got worse. A roommate called for an ambulance. Stewart’s parents made the drive to Ohio. The news was grim.

“She wasn’t able to even move her eyeballs, that’s how bad it was,” Nona Stewart said. “The brain stem is irreparable. It’s a very delicate part of the brain. And she damaged it twice. ”Doctors sedated Stewart, who slipped into a coma. She received last rites.“The nurses told me, ‘This is exactly what the doctors expect, that she would just sleep and that would be the end of her,’” her mother said. “They’d kind of given up on her.”

Her daughter, the former Olympian, awoke. It cost US$10,000 to fly Stewart from Canton to a hospital closer to home in Mississauga, and the family’s medical bill was reportedly as high as US$100,000. Fundraisers covered most of that expense. Nona Stewart has forgotten the precise total.

“The first word she said was, ‘Mama,’ ” Nona said. “She was just like a newborn baby. She had to be taught all over again, like a baby growing up.”

A Friday night in February was another sign of how many steps Stewart has made back to her goal of regaining 100% of what she lost. She spent most of the night scribbling into a notebook on her lap, carefully charting where each shot was taken, and which ones were good, and which ones were bad.
She sat on a bench outside the gym after the win, accepting smiles and high-fives from passing players. A campus newspaper profiled her two days earlier, and there were still copies on a nearby newsstand heralding her on the front page: “Susan Stewart’s journey back to basketball.”

“To be out here in this environment again, it’s been a challenge — it has not been easy — but I think what helped me through all of this is the 12 women who play for Ryerson,” Sue Stewart said. “And being around this environment again has helped me to take my mind off of my situation and put it on basketball again.”

“Her smile is coming back,” her mother said. “I can see that.”

Courtesy of Sean Fitz-Gerald 
National Post