Third Time A Charm
Tagged in: National Teams, Tall Ferns
Basketball will get Kate McMeeken-Ruscoe to the Beijing Olympics, but it was a basketball that almost put her out of contention.
During a practice session two days before the New Zealand Tall Ferns were due to assemble for the first time in Canberra in early April, McMeeken-Ruscoe accidentally stepped on a basketball, hyper-extending her left knee.
“I gave all the tendons and ligaments in my knee a good tug, they said everything but tear my ACL. I took that for a good sign,” the 28-year-old two guard said, the day before the Tall Ferns depart for Beijing, her first Olympics.
Coming off a calf muscle tear that saw her miss the final three weeks of the Christchurch Sirens inaugural season in the Women’s National Basketball League (WNBL), she immediately feared the worst.
“Once I knew the extent of my knee I wasn’t too worried. It was just when I injured my knee, I thought ‘oh, no, it’s my ACL’.
McMeeken-Ruscoe sat out the first training camp in Australia and missed the Good Luck Beijing Test Event in April, all the while secretly fearing she would be watching TV One’s Olympic coverage from home for the third straight Games – missing out on Carl Dickel’s 2000 team and Tom Maher’s four years later.
“For Athens I was in the top 14 and was one of the last two cut. That was a killer because I’d been outfitted and had a map of the Olympic village. It was tough.
“Sydney was so long ago. I made my debut in 1998. I was one of the young ones in the team and just didn’t quite make it.”
She passed a fitness test on the eve of the Tall Ferns six-game European tour in May, performed well, then held her breath until coach Mike McHugh named his Olympic squad following the team’s final training camp in Christchurch three weeks ago.
“To be completely honest, the first reaction was relief,” said McMeeken-Ruscoe, who has taken time off her job at New Zealand Cricket to head to Beijing.
“Because I’d been through it before and I was just trying to keep my emotions in check. I don’t think I was really happy about it until the next day. When he read my name out, then I could breath.
“It wasn’t until the next day that I really started enjoying it, then I was happy.”
Now a decade on from her international debut, McMeeken-Ruscoe joins former captain Noni Wharemate and captain Aneka Kerr in providing leadership for a squad that has an average age of 23, alarmingly young for international level, let alone an Olympics.
Asked what could be expected from this Tall Ferns group, McMeeken-Ruscoe chuckled, “the unexpected I guess.”
“We’re still a young team, we haven’t been together long. I think we’re going to be a lot smaller than most teams so we’re working on things defensively and not letting teams get comfortable against us.
“We need to be a team of defenders. We’re working on our fitness a lot . . . If there’s a loose ball, then we need to get it and we need to do the little things that will help us be competitive on the court.”
McMeeken-Ruscoe will have plenty of support from home from her basketball-dominated family – mother Jane McMeeken captained New Zealand in the 1980s, father Matt Ruscoe played internationally in 1977 and played and coached in the National Basketball League, brother Luke Ruscoe plays for the Canterbury Rams and cousin Brook Ruscoe was Under-21s MVP in March and a current member of the Junior Tall Blacks.
