It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and every member of the ASU women’s basketball team is in the weight room trying to get stronger for the grind of the home stretch of the Pac-10 regular season.

That is, every player but one.

She stands alone at the free throw line inside of an empty Wells Fargo Arena. The sound of the ball echoes off the vacant seats as it hits the floor, and the shot then swishes through the bottom of the net.

That player is Dymond Simon.

Yes, she is still recovering from the second torn anterior cruciate ligament of her college career.

No, she has not logged any game minutes this year and will not see the floor again until the 2010-11 season.

But that doesn’t mean the redshirting point guard has stopped working.

In fact, it’s been quite the opposite.

“She’s just an amazing role model, because she truly is the hardest-working player in our program right now,” ASU coach Charli Turner Thorne said. “I’ve had a lot of medical redshirts, and I’ve had never had somebody this focused about getting better. Never.”

The road to recovery — again

It’s been almost a year since Simon’s breakout junior season — where she emerged into the Sun Devils’ leading scorer from the starting point guard position — ended abruptly when she re-tore the same ACL in her left knee that sidelined her for the end of her freshman season during ASU’s regular-season finale against Stanford on March 7, 2009.

Since then, Simon has had two surgeries to repair bones in her knee and then insert a new ligament.

But even though Simon has had three operations on the same knee before her 21st birthday, she said she simply felt different after her most recent time under the knife.

“I didn’t feel any pain at all,” she said. “The very first time this happened to me, out of surgery, the next day I was screaming, I was crying and just trying to take as much medicine as I could. This time around, I only had to take a pill maybe once, and that was an hour after I had the surgery.”

Then, the long rehab process that Simon has become all too familiar with began.

It started with having to rest while her knee was without an ACL and has gradually progressed to plyometric training, running and shooting. She hopes to be playing half- and full-court games by March.

“The younger players see her and admire her, but I don’t even think they’re even aware of how much she’s doing,” Turner Thorne said. “She does half her training before we’re even in practice, and then she trains all through practice, and then she watches film with [associate head coach Meg Sanders].”

And while her physical activity has been limited, Simon has taken the opportunity to take care of herself in other ways. She’s eating healthier, she’s paying close attention to her graduate schoolwork and she’s already mentally preparing for her return next season.

“Mostly I’ve just been concentrating [on] what my performance coaches taught me as far as visualizing your knee healthy [and] your whole body healthy,” she said. “That’s played a tremendous part in my recovery process right now.”

Simon admitted that rehabbing has been much easier the second time, but the injury has still forced her to sit out for what should have been her senior season, not to mention two Elite Eight runs in 2007 and 2009.

But not being able to play has allowed her to see the game from a whole new perspective.

Coach Dymond

Since the injury, Simon has spent ASU’s contests sitting next to coaching staff and studying the game from that point of view.

“It’s crazy what you can learn from a coach’s perspective,” Simon said. “It’s so cool for my coaches allowing me to sit by them — I don’t know many people who let their players do that. I’ve been able to do scouting reports with them, [and] we sit down and we watch and we break down film.”

While on the bench, she usually has a notepad in hand to document plays and she is often seen huddling with coaches outside the Sun Devils’ locker room at halftime and after games.

The experience of seeing the coach’s role from the inside should only pay dividends for Simon when she returns to the floor next year.

“I have way more of an appreciation because I didn’t know how much work that [the coaches] put in,” she said. “I see why Coach Meg called this play and I see why coach wants us to pressure. It definitely makes a lot more sense to me now.”

Simon has also been able to use her veteran presence to help ASU’s fresh crop of perimeter players that have all seen an increased role in her absence.

“[I tell them], ‘Just keep your head up, control the tempo of the game and just make sure you’re showing leadership out there on the court,” she said.

Making peace

When the Sun Devils took their already-daunting trip to Maples Pavilion to face Stanford two weeks ago, it also meant Simon had to return to the court where her 2009-10 season was taken away.

But instead of shying away from the place she was injured, she faced it head-on.

“I actually went back and stood right on the spot where I ended up laying on the ground,” Simon said. “My trainer Diana and I were playing around like, ‘Let’s hold hands, let’s make peace right now.’”
Then after shoot-around, Simon watched the film of that game.

“[I] saw how I got hurt and how I fell,” she said. “That was the first time I’ve seen that. I still haven’t even seen the fall I took [when I got hurt] when I was a freshman, so that was definitely a big step for me.”

A growing process

Simon still has a long road ahead before she returns to full strength, but Turner Thorne said she expects Simon to contend for All-American honors next season and set herself up to be a WNBA first-round draft pick because of the way she has handled her two serious knee injuries.

“She is a hard-working, driven human being,” Turner Thorne said. “She’s got to be [in the] top three of kids that have come in as a freshman in terms of their personal growth. I just mean it as a huge compliment to just her desire to grow as a person, and obviously her adversity expedited that.”

Simon agreed that the hardships have played a huge role in her personal maturation and looks at the chance to be a part of the Sun Devil program for an extra season as a positive rather than a negative.

“As a person, I think I’ve changed tremendously, and everybody sees it,” Simon said. “It’s definitely been a fun ride and although I thought it was going to be ending this year, I was definitely blessed to have another year. People say things happen for a reason, and I believe that.”