Basketball
Favorite athlete: Brian Dawkins
Favorite team: Philadelphia Eagles
Favorite memory competing in sports: Making my first three-point shot in basketball during a SHYBA travel game. I was so happy I skipped off the court!
Most embarrassing/funniest thing that has happened while competing in sports: A few years ago for our senior night we gave our seniors capes to wear. One of them was pretending she was like a superhero and was trying to fly, but instead, she did a belly flop on the court.
Music on iPod: Country and alternative music.
Future plans: Attending Penn State University Park for the next four years.
Words to live by: “There’s no time to be bored in a world as beautiful as this.”
One goal before turning 30: To be married and have started a family.
One thing people don’t know about me: I was born in San Francisco, California.
By Mary Jane Souder
Ask Lynn Carroll to talk about Hailey Kaunert’s strengths on the basketball court, and the Souderton coach recites a lengthy list.
“She was a small forward and could drive to the basket,” Carroll said of the Souderton senior. “Her post moves were really coming along, and so were her moves with her back to the basket.
“She had decent range from the foul line. She was a great defender, a real workhorse.”
Unfortunately for Kaunert and the Indians, she was never really able to put her talents to use on the basketball court. After showing great promise on the varsity at the close of her sophomore year, Kaunert was sidelined for both her junior and senior seasons with torn anterior cruciate ligaments, first in her right knee and then her left.
It would have been hard to blame Kaunert if she had walked away from basketball when she went down with a second torn ACL. As a matter of fact, it would have made a whole lot of sense since basketball is just one small piece of her life.
But leaving the team was never a consideration.
“I always knew I would stick with the team, whether I thought I was coming back or whether I thought I wasn’t,” said Kaunert, an honors student who is the president of student council. “I had been with this team the past four years, and some of the girls I’d been playing with since I was eight years old.
“I couldn’t imagine not being at every game, being at all the team dinners, being at everything just because I love the game, whether it’s watching or playing it, and I just love the girls as well.”
According to Carroll, Kaunert, who calls herself the stat girl,’ was an integral part of the team.
“She does whatever we need her to do during games,” the Indians’ coach said. “She would do the book at away games.
“Hailey just adds positive energy when she’s in the room. She’s laughing and smiling, and I think the biggest thing she did – she was a supportive teammate. She was in a difficult situation where she was watching all her friends do what she wanted to be doing. She kept showing up. She was by far the loudest person on the bench. She really, really got into it, and she never stopped being supportive of them, and I know how much that means to them.”
Kaunert has been passionate about basketball since she first stepped on the court as a youngster.
“I played other sports up until my sophomore year, but I always loved basketball,” she said. “I just loved the game in general, and I had so much fun playing it.
“It was a big team sport, and because it was a smaller team, our teammates were a lot closer.”
The script was going as planned for Kaunert, who played jayvee as a freshman but was a swing player her sophomore year.
“She was starting to get legitimate (varsity) minutes,” Carroll said. “Last year we had her penciled in as the sixth man, and she probably would have gotten significant playing time.”
Kaunert never set foot on the court as a junior. She tore the ACL in her right knee on July 7, 2012, playing for her AAU team.
“I was just cutting off the sidelines, I twisted it the wrong way, and I heard a pop,” she said. “I had a feeling it happened because I had seen it before. It didn’t hurt as much, but I started crying just because I knew what I was in for.
“It was really hard. I love the game, and I knew I would have played a lot more on varsity, and I was really looking forward to playing with the girls again, but I always knew I could come back my senior season.”
That never happened.
On April 15, 2013, a week after she had received clearance to play, Kaunert went down at her AAU team’s practice. This time it was her left knee.
“I knew what I had done the second time because I had done it before,” she said. “To me, the second time was so much worse because I knew I could not play basketball again. I knew that I could not be looked at by scouts to play in college if I really wanted to.
“I knew my career was over. It was terrible. It was the worst feeling in the world because I worked so hard to come back my senior year, and I knew it was over in a second.”
Kaunert had surgery on June 10 and was projected to return for the second half of her final high school season. That didn’t happen either.
“When I visited my surgeon, he told me he wanted me to be smart because I already had torn both of them,” she said. “He wanted to hold me back, and by the time I would have been able to come back, there would have been only a few games left, and I didn’t want to take any risks at that point.”
This season, Carroll had Kaunert penciled in as the team’s starting four.
“She had really come along,” the Indians’ coach said. “She did everything she was supposed to do. She rehabbed, and she was really, really doing well.
“For her to really persevere and want to come back was so impressive, and I think ultimately made it more devastating that the time line didn’t work out for her. I give her so much credit for thinking, ‘I’m going to do this the second time.’ She very easily could have said, ‘This is not worth it,’ but she didn’t. That really speaks to her character and how she was raised.”
As for why it happened to both of her knees – the answer could be a matter of genetics.
“My doctor told me that the one bone (in my knees) was shaped in a different way, and it was much narrower than it was supposed to be, so it could have been that my ligament – when it twisted - didn’t have enough room to stretch so it just snapped on my bone,” she said. “It was unfortunate.”
Kaunert, however, found a way to turn a negative situation into a positive.
“I get really into the game because I love it so much,” she said. “I cheer as much as I can. I feel like when I’m cheering I’m contributing somehow. I loved it. I loved everything about it.”
Along the way, she also learned some valuable life lessons.
“It taught me that no matter what happens, there will always be somebody there to support you,” Kaunert said. “Luckily, I had an amazing support system with my teammates, my coaches, my family and my friends.
“It really did make me realize you can’t take anything for granted. Even little things like walking by yourself or something like that. It made me realize that just because I was pre-determined to tear my ACLs – you can’t really control what happens in your life, but you can control how you react to it.”
The way Kaunert reacted, according to Carroll, was remarkable.
“She was the go-to person for her senior project,” the Indians’ coach said. “They had a meeting after school last week, and she left the meeting early to go on the bus with us to Methacton.
“She goes non-stop. She could very easily have said, ‘I have too much other stuff going on. I love these girls, but it’s probably better for me to spend my time elsewhere,’ and she didn’t.”
As her senior project, Kaunert, the student council president, planned and was in charge of the 2014 Region F Conference for students to learn more about leadership skills and also how to better their student council.
An excellent student, she is a member of the National Honor Society and is active in SAVE (Students Against Violating the Earth) as well as the LINK Crew, which assists eighth graders transitioning to the high school.
“It definitely is tough to juggle everything, but honestly, I don’t know what I would be doing if I didn’t have so much stuff,” she said. “I love the stress, I love the amount of stuff I do because I work well under pressure. I love being a part of everything. I love being part of a community and a team.”
Next year she will attend Penn State University where she will major in business.
“She’s an outstanding role model in our program,” Carroll said. “It doesn’t get much better than a kid like Hailey.
“This is just another lesson for her teammates to watch somebody go through this and handle it the right way from beginning to end. It speaks to the kind of kid she is and her set of values. She made a commitment to this program, and she decided even though the circumstances were what they were to honor that commitment. She more than honored that commitment.”
