The New Yorker:

The basketball player has been central to the fight to end amateurism and improve gender equity in the N.C.A.A., and her story underscores the way that college sports are changing.

By Louisa Thomas

At twenty-four years old, Sedona Prince is starting her seventh year of college basketball, but she has only played in seventy games. Last year, her first at Texas Christian University, she averaged roughly twenty points, ten rebounds, and three blocks, but she missed a long portion of the season with a broken finger that required surgery. Before that, a torn ligament in her elbow ended her time at the University of Oregon. And, prior to that, she was forced to sit out her first season at Oregon after transferring from the University of Texas following a horrific leg injury. That broken leg had kept her off the court during her freshman year, at Texas, after she had been one of the top recruits in the country—at six-foot-seven, a dominant presence inside. The injury left her with tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills. In retrospect, Texas might wish it had just paid them.

In 2018, Prince had broken her leg while playing for the U.S. U-18 national team, in a game in Mexico the summer before her freshman year. After leaping to block a shot, she came down on her opponent’s shoe, and her fibula and tibia snapped. She flew back to Austin, had an operation to place a rod and two screws in her leg, and, according to ESPN, began rehabilitation with a University of Texas athletic trainer the next day. She immediately began an aggressive rehab program. At the time, her coach told the media that there was a chance that she might be back before the end of the season, calling her recovery “very encouraging.” But, in fact, her fracture, under the stress of so much rehab, wasn’t healing properly.

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