By Terry Mosher
Editor, Sports Paper
Somebody was looking out for Joey Blacker, Bainbridge’s six-foot-four shooting forward/guard. Blacker broke the femur in his left two days after the last day of school last summer and it didn’t look good for him.
“We were hosting the Rock Shootout, a high school basketball tournament, and we were playing Central Kitsap,” said Bainbridge coach Scott Orness. “It was one of the first games of the tournament and he just took a side step and his knee locked. It snapped his right femur. He got taken to Harborview (MedicalCenter) by ambulance and we weren’t really sure if he would ever play again.”
Blacker, though, not only played again, but he is the leading scorer for the Bainbridge Spartans this season. Through 15 games he was averaging 14 points. In fact, Blacker was cleared to come back on the basketball court in time to play fall ball for the Spartans.
“He’s our only senior in the program and he’s kind of our glue guy,” says Orness. “He keeps things real for the kids. He keeps everything in perspective. I can be pretty serious at times and he mellows me a little bit.”
The injury came in the first two minutes of the game against CK. He was running along side of a CK player who had just gotten a rebound, the player bumped into him a bit and Blacker jumped up and tripped on the back of the player’s foot.
“I lost my balance, took some steps in the air, tried to come down and when I finally landed my leg locked and it snapped,” Blacker explained. “It was a freak accident. Everything had to happen perfectly for it to happen.”
The accident happened at eight that night and 12 hours later he was having surgery. It wasn’t easy coming back, but Blacker was determined and by mid-October he was back to play what might be his last basketball season. Blacker is likely to concentrate on academics in college.
Blacker didn’t start out on the island. When his dad got a job in this area, the family moved to the island when Blacker was in the fifth grade from Walnut Creek in California (St. Mary’s College is located there). It was in Walnut Creek that Blacker started out playing basketball, as well as soccer and baseball (T-ball).
“My parents put me in everything,” says Blacker, who played football at Bainbridge his first two years. He thought about going out for football this past fall, but didn’t.
Blacker’s role with the Spartans is to shoot, especially threes. He had 25 points in a close loss to top-ranked RainierBeach (72-65) earlier in the season (RainierBeach blasted Bainbridge 96-35 in the rematch on Friday).
He is also a team leader who much is expected. And Blacker loves to play the game. When he was out with the injury he itched to get back in action. But he also lost something while being out. He had a chance to take another look at his life and came away with a different perspective.
“Not being able to move (during his recovery) it made me see things differently,” he says. “I am happy to be involved, happy to be part of things now. For a while I couldn’t roll over. It was maybe 10 days of having to just lie on my back. That was not comfortable at all. Then (later) I would be with some friends and I would want to be playing basketball. They wouldn’t let me. I’d say, ‘Let me play, let me play’ and they would go, ‘No, you can’t, you are hurt.’ ”
Now, Blacker has a deeper appreciation for life, and understands that basketball isn’t the only thing to enjoy. In fact, when he puts some thought into it, he feels he’s extremely lucky.
“I’m just happy to be alive,” he says. “I don’t want to be a drama queen, but if I broke my femur like 10 years earlier and nobody was around, I could have died.”
He was lucky in that some Bainbridge parents called the EMTs, carried him outside the gym to wait for the ambulance to arrive to take him to the hospital. Without that help, who knows?
Blacker missed his brother Casey’s graduation from college in at University of St. Andrews in Scotland. The family had planned on going, but when he suffered the injury he was out of luck. His dad, Roan, stayed back for several days until grandparents arrived from California to watch after him, and then he left for Scotland.
Blacker, a 3.4-grade point average student, will likely wind up at Western Washington or WashingtonState for his college education. He won’t be playing college basketball, other then recreational.
“If I was to play basketball in college it would be like at a D-3 or D-2 level, and I wouldn’t really want that,” Blacker says. “I’m not that good.”
Maybe he is good enough, but sometimes there are more important things in life to do then spend much of a college student life dribbling a ball. Blacker is determined to find those important things.