Georgia Tech forward Zaire O’Neil keeps an unusual memento in her wallet. It’s a screw, about an inch long, and looks like you might buy it at Home Depot.
It was once drilled into her knee to repair a torn ACL.
“I just keep it, a little friendly reminder,” she said.
Anyone who sees it might be reminded of O’Neil’s toughness and commitment to the Yellow Jackets, who play rival Georgia Sunday at 2 p.m. at McCamish Pavilion. Despite the extreme discomfort that the screw caused O’Neil, she still played through it and, in fact, never missed a game once she returned from her ACL rehabilitation last December.
Without the hardware in her knee, and now being a year and a half out from her ligament tear, O’Neil is playing at a much higher level and might be the Jackets’ biggest hope to improve to 4-0 by ending the Bulldogs’ five-game winning streak in the series.
“She’s back in form,” coach MaChelle Joseph said. “If you look at the points, her scoring, her minutes played, it’s pretty impressive. She’s definitely back to herself.”
O’Neil is averaging a team-high 11.3 points per game and is shooting 52.0 percent from the field in 22 minutes of play. They’re all improvements on her full-season numbers from last year, when she scored 6.6 points and shot 45.2 percent in 14.2 minutes per game. She also averages 4.7 rebounds and says she is running the floor better.
“This year, I feel 10 times better,” she said. “I actually feel like myself.”
O’Neil tore the ACL at the end of her freshman season, making a jump stop in a practice just prior to the Jackets’ appearance in the WNIT in March 2015. She returned in mid-December last season, a recovery of about nine months.
As ACL rehabilitation practices improve, nine months isn’t an unusual timeframe, but O’Neil could also have chosen to redshirt. She said the decision to play last year came down to the last minute. She acknowledged that playing last year “might not have been the best decision,” but that she went after what she wanted and that it was a learning experience.
That wasn’t the hard part, necessarily. It was the screw in her knee.
“It definitely was causing pain,” she said. “After games, it was like I could barely straighten my knee because that screw was kind of locked in there. It made it really tough.”
Still, O’Neil played in the final 24 games of the season. O’Neil said she could even feel the screw through her skin. It was removed in April after the season.
She stayed out of live-action situations in the offseason, instead focusing on individual drill work and developing her agility. She said she also dropped 10 pounds and lost body fat. The first time she played with teammates in a scrimmage was just before the team began official practice in October.
Pain free, lighter, better skilled and farther removed from her surgery, O’Neil looks like all of the above.
“This year, I feel 10 times better,” she said. “I actually feel like myself.”
O’Neil’s experience may prove beneficial down the road. Her career ambition is to design sports gear such as ankle and knee braces. O’Neil, from Newark, N.J., recognizes there’ll always be a market.
“Just seeing how people get hurt a lot, that’s something that will probably never change,” said O’Neil, who is majoring in literature, media and communications with a minor in physiology.
O’Neil believes she can design something better, something that remains comfortable even when the wearer gets sweaty. She aspires for a product that “can still be fashionable and still get the job done.”
Sunday, the Jackets will be counting on O’Neil to be similarly functional.
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