Mystics’ Alana Beard gets another chance, new perspective

Fourteen months ago, Alana Beard’s athletic future seemed bleak. She was 27 years old, a four-time WNBA all-star and the cornerstone guard for the Washington Mystics. But all that seemed jeopardized after Beard suffered a rare, serious ankle tendon injury not even her doctor was sure he could completely fix.

Two days after her surgery, Beard sat with her left leg encased in a cast and splayed across the back seat of Mystics vice chairman Sheila Johnson’s SUV as they were driven to lunch.

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From the front seat, Johnson turned to Beard: “No matter what, I am going to support you. But people are saying you won’t come back from this.”

If Beard takes the court Saturday night in Washington’s season opener at Connecticut, she officially will have done just that. Aside from lingering stiffness, Beard said the pain in her ankle is gone. On Friday, however, she sprained her left foot. Coach Trudi Lacey said the injury is unrelated to Beard’s ankle problem, but her status for the game is questionable.

 Despite this setback, Beard possesses a basketball career that has been sustained for the near future and a long-term plan for life after basketball.

“I don’t put a time limit on anything, as long as I do what I need to do and take care of my body,” Beard said of how much longer her professional playing career might last. “It just depends on stuff after basketball, when and if that starts to take off.”

A random injury

Beard used to videotape all of her workouts, which meant she had visual evidence of the awkwardness — and seeming randomness — of the fall in early April 2010 that necessitated her lengthy rehab process. She was striding sideways near the top of the key on the Mystics’ practice court at Verizon Center with a basketball in her hands when her left ankle rolled over.  

The team’s trainers initially treated the injury as a sprain, another of the many Beard has suffered during a life of basketball. But whereas normal ankle sprains occur on the outside of the foot, this tear — to the posterior tibial tendon, the primary tendon that holds up the arch of the foot — took place on the inside. James Nunley II, who performed Beard’s surgery, said such tears normally are found in soccer players.  

Nunley, chair of the department of orthopedic surgery at the Duke University School of Medicine, said the exact origin of Beard’s tear — which occurred above the ankle — has been diagnosed in only two or three other professional athletes. It’s a degenerative tendon injury typically found in overweight women in their 50s. Beard also had some loose pieces of bone in the back of the tendon, which Nunley believed was the irritant that caused Beard’s ankle to sprain atypically.

Regardless, Nunley had no previous practice fixing such injuries.

“I had huge concerns,” Nunley said. “If you don’t have experience with something because it’s so uncommon, then you can’t give somebody a realistic expectation as to whether they’re going to get back or not.”

And so Nunley told Beard what became a common refrain during that month: “This is bad. This is very bad. You may never play again.”