'This is not going to be easy': Injured De Pere basketball star Claire Bjorge will watch pivotal season from sideline

The De Pere girls basketball team’s quest to make a return trip to the WIAA state tournament this season already was going to be difficult after the graduation of reigning Fox River Classic Conference player of the year Jordan Meulemans.

It got even tougher when fellow standout Claire Bjorge tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee during an AAU tournament in July, ending what was supposed to be a big junior season for a guard who had established herself as one of the best in the area as an underclassman.

The Redbirds lost the heart and soul of their team — not to mention several other key seniors — in a two-month span and now have a young, inexperienced group that must pick up the pieces.

The 5-foot-8 Bjorge was playing with her Purple Aces AAU team at the North Tartan tournament in Minneapolis, putting together some finishing touches to a strong summer with her high school squad and the Aces.

But when she did a jump stop in the lane during a game that weekend and felt her knee buckle, her first instinct was that it was the dreaded ACL injury.

A female athlete is up to eight times more likely to sustain a torn ACL. Bjorge often had those types of thoughts in the back of her mind, but she set it aside by believing it wouldn’t happen to her.

For a while, it looked like she was correct.

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The athletic trainer at the tournament did tests on her knee and was certain it wasn’t an ACL or medial collateral ligament issue.

The knee was swollen but not very painful. Bjorge could run, so she did plenty of stretching to get her knee back to full motion. After getting evaluated by a doctor in Minnesota, she was told it was a hamstring tear and that she’d be out seven to 10 days.

Bjorge considered the diagnosis great news. Just a small bump in the road.

But she also had a weird feeling. The doctor said it was a hamstring even though she kept feeling things in her knee.

During the ride home from Iowa the following week where the Aces played their final tournament with her sidelined, Bjorge watched videos on YouTube about what an ACL injury felt and looked like. She looked up symptoms and had quite a few of them.

Bjorge went to see her doctor a few days after returning home. He didn’t like some of the things he was seeing and told her to return for an MRI the following morning.

That's when the bad news finally arrived. She had torn both her ACL and MCL.

Bjorge had surgery on her ACL on Aug. 5, but her MCL was able to heal on its own.

Just like that, a pivotal season was over.

“This is not going to be easy,” said Bjorge, who plans to attend each De Pere practice and game to support her teammates. “I’m not used to sitting on the bench, but it’s a good opportunity to learn the mental side of the game.”

Several people have reached out the past couple of months, which has helped. She has spoken to other players who have dealt with a torn ACL, including New London senior guard and fellow Ace Lizzie Steingraber, Sun Prairie senior guard Avree Antony and former Kimberly and University of Wisconsin-Green Bay standout Frankie Wurtz.

Wurtz’s advice to Bjorge was to take it one day at a time. Wurtz tore the ACL in her left knee during her senior season at Kimberly. After redshirting her first year with UWGB, she scored more than 1,000 career points and signed a professional contract to play in Europe.

“The process can be such a cycle of highs and lows, but when you focus on only getting your leg a little stronger each day and finding the little wins, I felt like that really helped me in the process,” Wurtz said. “The other big thing I always share is even if it seems hard now, you truly can come back mentally and physically stronger than you were before.

“It’s hard to see that during the process, but I feel like I grew so much through that injury. Looking back, even though it was a difficult time, it made me so much stronger as a person. That’s what I hope others can see when they go through the process, too. That it’s just a minor setback that becomes a part of their story.”

Bjorge has the talent to play at the next level and holds multiple scholarship offers, including from NCAA Division I schools in Evansville and North Dakota.

Everyone loves to play and compete, but there comes a point when there might be too many games in too few days in the summer.

“I think a lot of girls in the month of July who play in AAU would agree with me that it’s too long of a month,” Bjorge said. “I can’t even tell you how many games I played before I tore it in July. My knees, my legs, my body just ached. Everything was kind of just ready to give out.”

Bjorge sees some players with verbal college commitments opt out of the last couple of  tournaments. She understands why they don’t want to risk it.

There are so many others who don’t have that college future secured who feel the need  to impress scouts as much, and as often, as they can.

“You want to play in front of college coaches in July and you want to show them what you can do, but when it gets to the end of July, all these girls in the tournaments are just out of gas,” Bjorge said. “There is nothing left to give. I think college coaches notice that. It’s getting too much, but you want a good amount of games to put on for those coaches.”

The NCAA apparently agrees with Bjorge.

It has shaved days from the evaluation period starting next year. The July viewing period had been July 7-12 and July 20-25 but now will be July 7-10 and July 21-24.

“Nobody should ever take it easy when they are playing, but there is a lot of pressure there,” De Pere coach Jeremy Boileau said. “Especially during that viewing period, playing how many games in how many days? You are playing at a high level and trying to show what you got to people watching.

“An average week for a high school kid, you are playing Tuesday, Friday. Maybe three days in a week. But these kids are playing three, four games in less than a 48-hour period. Your rest is driving in the car, and you are going to play right away. … The other part is, when do you have time to work on your strength and prepare your body and lessen that risk?”

Bjorge didn’t have schools take offers away after her injury, although one of the coaching staffs told her this has happened to several players and they want to see how she returns. They aren’t going to ghost her, but it serves as extra motivation to show them and everyone else that she can be even better when she returns to the court.

The recruiting process has slowed, but it hasn’t stopped. Bjorge was set to make visits this week to Evansville and Maryville University and watch a practice at Eastern Illinois.

“Recruiting has always been so stressful,” she said. “It’s just a lot of mind games, ‘Oh, this girl committed, now a spot opened up there, but they aren’t interested.’

“Now I have this going on, too. It’s kind of like I have to keep my mind focused on just getting mentally and physically back, and keeping it going with college because there is an end goal of playing DI.”

Bjorge has proven her value on the hardwood, including during the run to state in 2021-22 when she averaged 15.7 points, 4.4 assists and 3.5 rebounds.

In two years on varsity, she has 746 career points. It’s 156 more than Meulemans had during the first two seasons of her decorated career in which she finished as the Redbirds’ all-time leading scorer with 1,874 points and signed a letter of intent to play at Butler.

Her basketball future remains bright, even if it’s on pause.

“It makes it more difficult as a team not having that girl who brings that leadership experience and trying to get other girls to rally around her,” Boileau said. “The good news for her is that her story, and her career in high school, is not over.”

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This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: De Pere basketball star Claire Bjorge will sit out after ACL injury