HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. — On the evening of May 7, 2022, someone at the Coconut Beach bar asked if Savvy Simo might want a few shots.
Oh, yes.
Any preference?
None at all.
Here was a 23-year-old competing in the second event of her rookie season on the AVP Tour, one that was filled with all the hype and hope and promise one might expect from an All-American out of UCLA partnered with Toni Rodriguez, a 25-year-old who had never known a losing season in her lengthy tenure at LSU. It was a lengthy tenure for all the wrong reasons: two knee surgeries and another on her shoulder. She likes to joke that her knee is hardly hers at this point; a mixture of Rodriguez’s own DNA and cadaver and bolts and screws and whatever else doctors are putting in ligaments and bones after surgeries these days.
With all that experience under the knife, and the events that led her there, Rodriguez knew, before anyone else, that something had gone terribly wrong with her knee that May 7 night. Knew it the second she went to plant and something just … gave out. It wasn’t the excruciating pain she had felt the previous two times her ACL went pop, but there had been a pop, and the motion that caused it was a twist, and Rodriguez knew that a pop followed by a twist is far from an ideal combination for a knee.
“No one knew what was going on. I think in my mind when I sat on the bench, I was basically having a panic attack,” Rodriguez said on SANDCAST: Beach Volleyball with Tri Bourne and Travis Mewhirter. “After going through two ACL reconstructions, you never want to go through one, much less two, potentially three. I never want to do that again. It’s a lot of things that are going on in your head after getting injured. I was just freaking out on the inside.”
On the outside, she was surprisingly cool, to the point that Simo was, really, just confused, when Rodriguez mentioned, in the technical timeout, that something wasn’t quite right. What did she mean something was wrong? She was fine. They were fine. Losing, sure. But fine.
She wasn’t.
On the ensuing play, Rodriguez served and attempted to run up to the net to block. She only made it about halfway there. Her knee was done. She was done. The tears began flowing in a contagious stream: Rodriguez, then her mother, which made Simo cry, and when she delivered the news to their opponents, Kristen Nuss and Taryn Kloth,…
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