Wehry, is my kind of girl!

[Theoldguy]

Great story below on my kind of girl, Annie Wehry! Annie is smart, beautiful and oh so very athletic, she is a poster girl for Notre Dame Academy, and one day will be that "Woman who makes a difference".

 

From NKY.com

 

Will finds Wehry a way

 

Out of basketball, Notre Dame junior finds a new love on softball diamond

 

BY TOM RAMSTETTER | TRAMSTETTER@ENQUIRER.COM

 

Annie Wehry has long been denied the chance to play what was her favorite sport, basketball, for Notre Dame Academy.

First it was a torn anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee as her freshman season ended and again before her sophomore season started. As a junior this season, Wehry was cut from the team not long before suffering a torn meniscus in the same knee.

Basketball was out. No problem, time for a new favorite sport.

 

"Softball's my favorite now," Wehry said.

Since picking up a softball for the first time since she was a seventh-grader, Wehry has been inspiring her new teammates and coaches while earning a starting job in the Pandas infield. Wehry starts at shortstop or second base.

"She wants to be here," Notre Dame softball coach Sara Becker said. "She puts in extra effort every day. She always wants that one extra ground ball, that one extra swing. It's really refreshing to see that. She dives for the ball. She really wants to be here. I love that as a coach."

She had wanted to be on the court, though, leading the Pandas varsity team as she did on the freshman team two years ago. That's when disaster struck the first time.

"Her freshman year she started every basketball game for the NDA freshmen," Annie's father, Mark Wehry, said. "In the second-to-last game of the year, sicker than a dog, she played against Cincinnati Mercy and in the fourth quarter blew out her ACL."

Determined to return, Annie went through surgery and rehab. She showed up for tryouts as a sophomore and faced disappointment a second time.

"I was doing great and then the first hour of basketball tryouts the next October, I re-tore the same ACL," Annie Wehry said. "I sat out that whole season and rehabbed and had surgery and everything."

Annie had never suffered a serious injury before her freshman year. Now she was looking at rehabbing a torn ACL for the second time in less than a year.

"She was pretty devastated, as you could imagine," Mark Wehry said.

She became the statistician for the varsity and junior varsity basketball teams after that while completing her rehab and speed and agility training. Annie was ready to go when basketball tryouts arrived last fall, but her hopes of getting back on the court were dashed again. It wasn't an injury this time. Seemingly too old for the junior varsity team and too inexperienced for varsity, she was cut.

"I think it was because I was a junior and I missed my whole sophomore year," Annie said. "So I didn't really have that much experience. I didn't think they wanted to keep juniors on JV. I think that's why.

"At first I was pretty upset about it because I was coming back from an injury. But then, after a week or so, I thought there are more important things than that. I focused on school a lot more, and then softball started up."

Softball didn't start for her, however, before she was tested once more with an injury to her left knee, this time a torn meniscus.

"I was just walking down the hall one day and I tore it," Annie said. "So I had surgery to fix that.."

Annie said she was told the rehab time from a torn meniscus is usually about a month. Given her history, however, she was a special case and needed two months. While certainly a setback, it wasn't the six to seven months she needed to recover from her torn ACL.

In the first inning of her first varsity softball game against Dixie Heights, Annie turned a double play on a line-out to end a bases-loaded threat. In her third at-bat of the season, she ripped her first varsity hit against Scott and the Pandas won their first game. That started a three-game winning streak.

Annie's play has impressed her coach.

"She has some work to do," Becker said. "She hasn't played softball in a while. Fielding, she's stellar. She gets to everything, pretty much. She's an athlete in general. Once you're an athlete, you kind of pick up on things a little bit quicker than most people."

While she's adapting to the new game, Annie has to maintain the health of her left knee.

"They always want you to keep your quad and hamstring strong," Annie said. "That's really all you can do. I've just been lifting and running and keeping in shape."

She says the fear of further injury comes up only once in a while.

"Every once in a while when you're covering second and somebody's stealing and diving into your legs, it kind of crosses my mind," Annie said. "Anyone's always at risk no matter what. They say that my leg's just as strong as anyone else's."

But her dad says it's her heart that's even stronger. "You can't imagine all she's gone through," Mark Wehry said.

[Coachg13207]

Great story ,Old Guy .Thanks for posting it .Best of luck to this young lady .