The Road to Recovery: Janowski Fights to Pursue Hoop Dreams

Senior center Rose Janowski has always been fascinated by big gyms.

During her middle school days in Glover, Vt., she always loved traveling to arch-rival Barton's larger facility, a giant leap up from Glover's tiny gym, a converted town hall.

"The baskets were maybe a foot and a half beneath the ceiling, so you had to shoot straight on to make a basket," she says.

One of Janowski's fondest high school basketball memories is at the end of her junior year, when her team made it to the state quarterfinals-and lost.

"We got to play in the big, state gym where the final round was," she says. "It was the coolest thing, but we didn't get any farther any of the other years."

Maples Pavilion in Palo Alto, with its vibrating parquet and passionate, maroon-decked faithful, is a big-gym fetishist's fantasy. So when the Harvard women's basketball team marched into Maples for its first-round NCAA Tournament game against topseeded Stanford last season, Janowski was on cloud nine even before her team waltzed out with the biggest victory in its history.

"I feel like it was all a blur," she says. "I remember coming onto the floor for warm-ups, and it was just deafening; I could not hear a thing. I remember the last 30 seconds, looking up at the clock and going, 'Wow,' kind of being stunned. We screamed so loud that night. I don't think I've ever been more excited in my life."

Life for Janowski was a dream. And one day later, she woke up.

Stomach pains had plagued Janowski during practices leading up to the game, and they returned Sunday, the day after the upset. That evening, as the team enjoyed a victory dinner in San Francisco, Janowski could barely walk.

"I had no idea what was going on," Janowski says. "It felt like somebody was poking my guts and twisting them around."

Unfortunately, what Janowski felt was not terribly far from the truth. A small, benign ovarian cyst that had developed weeks before had shifted into a position where it was aggravating her Fallopian tube and cutting off blood flow.

That night the pain was so great that it caused her to go into mild shock. Athletic Trainer Maura McCarthy and Dr. Wilbur Boike-father of thenfreshman guard Kristen Boike-tended to Janowski and called an ambulance. She was eventually taken to Stanford Medical Center.

"[Janowski] was really pale, and she said she was having immense pains," says junior Laela Sturdy, who was Janowski's roommate that night at Stanford. "She wasn't passed out, but she was really not doing well. It was one of the scariest things, to see your teammate in that much pain and not know what's going on."

A cyst the size of "a deflated basketball" had postponed Janowski's freshman campaign nearly three years earlier. Now, one day after the best day of her basketball life, Janowski found herself on the verge of one of the worst.

"My doctor had told me that there was another cyst, but it was only small and that it wasn't going to bother me if I went out and played, so I didn't think of it," she says. "The night before the ambulance came, the thought flashed through my mind that it might be [the cyst]. But I thought, 'It's so small, what's it going to do?' I didn't really have that thought until I went into the emergency room and they started asking me questions about my history."

When Harvard's second-round game against Arkansas began the following Monday night, the Crimson was minus its starting center. Minutes after the opening tip, Janowski went into surgery, where doctors removed both the affected ovary and the Fallopian tube. Since her other ovary and corresponding Fallopian tube had been removed in the previous surgery, the operation left Janowski without the ability to reproduce.

"It was the same [type of] cyst that caused it [my freshman year], but instead of being so large, it was just in a difficult position. [The doctors] said there were cysts all around," she says. "So it was bound to go at any time."

Who would have thought that this story could have a happy ending?

Fully recovered and stronger than ever, Janowski is currently Harvard's leading rebounder (7.3 rpg) and third leading scorer (11.5 ppg). In the Crimson's season-opening win over Boston University, Janowski scored a career-high 29 points on 13-of-15 shooting, and sank two free throws in the waning seconds of regulation to force overtime.

She has muscled her way onto the blocks, rebounded with authority and finished with ease. Loudly and clearly, she has answered the question of who has the ability to fill the interior presence vacated by three-time Ivy League Player of the Year Allison Feaster '98.

"This past summer, especially, I worked on just going out with an attitude," Janowski says. "When I play at the [Malkin Athletic Center (MAC)], instead of saying, 'I can play with these guys,' it's like, 'I'm better than these people.'"

It is a new look for Janowski. Everybody knows the kid who eats, drinks and sleeps basketball; the girl who plays horse with herself in the backyard; the guy who goes to bed in his Laimbeer goggles. Until this summer, Janowski was never that kid. Until this summer, she never had the chance.

Vermont is to basketball as Indiana is to Ethan Allen. Janowski went to summer basketball camps and played Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) hoops, but the game was not bred into her the way it may have been for other players. Only one other member of her high school squad even went on to play college ball.

"We had a lot of people [in high school] who came to practice, did their thing, and didn't even think about basketball afterwards," she says. "You can't ask much more from a small farming community where they have other work to do."

"No matter how much experience you get in the game of basketball, if you come from the state of Vermont or a smaller, kind of rural, state, you're not going to have the Division I experience until you actually play Division I," she adds.

Janowski passed up scholarship offers from Syracuse and St. Joseph's-traditionally considered bigger basketball schools (with bigger gyms)-to attend Harvard, but still she was not prepared for the level of competition and physicality she faced.

"I was a skinny little bugger, and I got pushed around a lot," she says. "My first couple of weeks, just playing at the MAC, I was like, 'Whoa, what am I doing? Is this the right thing?'"

It did not help her adjustment that she was diagnosed with a cyst during a routine physical at the start of her freshman season. The enormous cyst, which bordered on being cancerous, had to be lanced, and one ovary and one Fallopian tube were removed in the process.

The operation was successful, but it stymied Janowski's progress on the court. The following summer she had to work to help pay off her tuition-the price of saying 'no' to Syracuse.

Two summers ago, she worked from 2 p.m. to midnight, lifting 40-pound metal parts on an assembly line. It did not leave much time, or energy, to focus on playing basketball.

It was not until last summer, when she took a job at the Harvard Law School, that Janowski was able to devote significant time to improving her game.

"I've had more time to play basketball this summer," she says. "Basketball was more accessible to me because a lot of people play it here."

The extra time has shown on the court. Besides a nagging flu that kept her out of the team's last game, against the University of Rhode Island, Janowski has been free of the injuries that marred earlier seasons.

"[Janowski's] physical presence has really peaked this year," says Harvard Coach Kathy Delaney-Smith. "Physically she's as strong as they come. I don't know that she'll be in a match-up this year with anybody who's stronger than she is. She's also very mobile and athletic for a 6'2" center. She's developed her lowpost moves so that she has more than one move, and she can finish."

As she lay in a hospital bed at the Stanford Medical Center last March, Janowski was able to watch the first two minutes of the Arkansas game before being taken into surgery. A physical presence is what Harvard needed, but she was the last person who could provide it.

"It was hard to watch that game because I knew they would be tired, and they would need that extra person in order to stay in the game," she says, "I knew that Arkansas was an easier team [than Stanford], and it just felt so hard to let [my teammates] down in a way. But there's a place for everything, and I can't linger on that too much."

She didn't. As if her teammates would ever let her. As if she would ever let herself.

"Rose is such a spiritual, deep, positive person," Delaney-Smith says. "And she has a very strong support network both from her own family and from close friends, and she knows the basketball team is part of that support network."

Janowski's ordeal is mostly over. She will never have another ovarian cyst and, if she can help it, her team will never miss her again.

"I'm on hormone therapy for the rest of my life, but I think it's a good trade-off to being healthy and being able to live a normal life," Janowski says.

Whatever may have happened afterwards, Janowski got to play, and got to win, in that big gym in Palo Alto. How could she not return to Cambridge with her spirit intact?

"It's motivating once you're able to get back on the road to improving basketball," she says. "It's like, 'I'm ready, I'm healthy now, I can go ahead and start it up."

The dream was as real as the nightmare that followed. And Janowski is all the better for it.