LOS ANGELES — As Iowa’s Saturday morning practice wound down in a UCLA campus gymnasium and players began to pack their gear, Taylor McCabe quietly picked up an orange basketball from a rack and slowly hobbled to a spot just behind the 3-point line.
Pushing off her right leg, the only one with a functioning ACL as of Jan. 25, McCabe’s recalibrated shooting form produced familiar results.
Swish.
Swish.
Again … swish.
The senior turned to an amazed-yet-not-surprised Hawkeye teammate and quipped, “You didn’t think I was going to shoot lay-ups, did you?”
Six days after a career-ending injury, McCabe has remained outwardly strong for her teammates.
But underneath, she’s admittedly crushed.
“It’s been pretty hard. What happened was obviously pretty devastating for me and my family,” McCabe said through choked-back tears, “but there’s still so much more that I can do.”
23 seconds turns into the longest day for Taylor McCabe
The play — and the day, given what happened to her sister — is at the front of Taylor McCabe’s mind. Without contact, on an innocent defensive cut, she felt her left knee give out, just 23 seconds into the Jan. 25 game vs. Ohio State.
McCabe, who had exactly no injury history in her college career — not even a sprained ankle — knew right away it was bad. She wound up reaching out to thank Ohio State’s Kennedy Cambridge, who was the first to help McCabe after she pounded her fist onto the Carver-Hawkeye Arena hardwood in frustration and sadness.
“I knew the second it happened,” she said. “I’ve really prided myself the past few years in being one of the hardest workers in the weight room and trying to be in the best shape on the team.”
After a trip to the trainer’s room and locker room, McCabe returned to the bench in plain clothes and an ice pack around her knee. She forced an outward smile through the inner pain.
Always thinking like a captain, McCabe knew her teammates were worried about her, and she wanted to reassure them that she was OK and that they could beat then-No. 11 Ohio State (which they did, 91-70).
“When it did happen, I really didn’t want people to panic,” McCabe said. “So when I came back out, them seeing me would bring a sense of ease.”
At halftime, she went to the trainer’s room — not wanting to be a distraction in the halftime locker room. It was then that she got a call from her father with jarring news. Her sister, Drake sophomore Peyton, had suffered a gruesome-looking dislocated ankle while playing two hours away in Des Moines.
“I was like, ‘Are you messing with me?’” McCabe said. “And he was like, ‘No, I’m being so serious. It’s really bad.’ I thought I was going to throw up right then and there.
“Sunday, I was mostly sick to my stomach about Peyton.”
That’s typical Taylor McCabe … more worried about others than herself.
Thankfully, Peyton’s test results returned a few days later and verified that she wouldn’t require surgery. She will miss 2-3 months and is expected to make a full recovery for her junior season at Drake.
Taylor McCabe, meanwhile, got her MRI results and the expected bad news that Sunday night. She then returned to Carver-Hawkeye Arena to meet with head coach Jan Jensen and position coach Abby Stamp. They talked for 45 minutes. They wept. They relived Jensen’s first contact with McCabe, when she was a tiny eighth-grader in Fremont, Nebraska.
The next day, McCabe broke the season-ending injury news to her teammates.
That’s when the finality and sadness of things kicked in.
“Monday is when this definitely hit me,” McCabe said, getting choked up again. “I never thought this was going to happen. Everything that I worked toward my whole life, and then finally getting my shot and my opportunity at Iowa … I feel like I was really getting back into my flow, too, and I know everybody had absolute confidence in me.”
An all-time 3-point shooter, ‘the epitome of a Hawkeye’
Despite McCabe’s one-legged 3-point accuracy, no, she’s not making a Spencer Lee-type return to the court without an ACL. While her teammates were practicing, she was rehabbing during this California trip in preparation for knee surgery.
“I’ve kind of made my peace with that,” she said. “Now I’ve got bigger battles to fight.”
Part of the heartbreak, as McCabe referenced, was that this senior year was supposed to be her time. She had to be patient as a freshman and sophomore, her upward mobility paused as the team’s shooting guard when Gabbie Marshall elected to return with a bonus COVID-19 year of eligibility for the 2023-24 season. McCabe was mostly seated on the bench in big games during Iowa’s back-to-back Final Four runs led by Caitlin Clark.
McCabe started 19 games as a junior, connecting on 68 3-pointers at a 40.5% clip, then worked even harder going into her senior season to make sure she was bulked up for the full-season grind. McCabe’s improved rebounding, passing and defense helped her become a more complete player. She started all 20 of Iowa’s games and averaged a career-high 8.1 points.
And in her final full game at Iowa, on Jan. 22, McCabe buried 4-of-8 3-pointers in 31 minutes in Iowa’s overtime road win at then-No. 13 Maryland. Jensen lamented McCabe’s absence as a calming on-floor presence after Iowa’s Jan. 29 loss at USC, the eighth-ranked Hawkeyes’ first loss in 10 Big Ten Conference games and third of the season.
She’ll finish her Iowa career No. 11 all-time in 3-pointers (172) and a fraction of percentage below the school record for 3-point accuracy. McCabe made 40.66% of her 423 attempts, good for second all-time behind Kristi Smith (40.75%, 2005-09) and ahead of third-place Marshall (39.15%, 2019-24).
But McCabe will be remembered for more than numbers.
“She’s the epitome of a Hawkeye,” Jensen said. “She’s an excellent student. Just a great young woman. In this culture, she stayed the course. She was willing to be developed, her freshman year, her sophomore year, and just held strong. Such a great example. Your heart just aches for her.”
McCabe briefly wondered if she should leave Iowa after limited playing time her first two seasons. But after conversations with people close to her, she realized that she would be foolish to leave behind all the relationships she had built and the opportunity ahead of her.
That’s why the left-knee injury stung extra-hard, because she didn’t get to fully finish that playing journey that she patiently and diligently worked for.
“I weighed like 130 pounds (as a freshman), and I could shoot the crap out of the ball,” McCabe laughed. “I knew that that meant something, and I knew that the coaches saw the potential in me. I can’t thank them enough for bringing me here. This program has meant everything to me, and the culture that we have is unlike any other, and the support and love from the coaches, the support staff, my team, my teammates, each and every year, has just been something special.
“Obviously it was not the ending I anticipated. I don’t know how I wanted it to end, but definitely not like this. But you can’t always control everything in life, so I know that I still have a role in this team. It just might look a little different.”
Engineer or coach? What’s next for Taylor McCabe
McCabe’s four years at Iowa have been a blur, as she’s zig-zagged around Iowa’s campus while juggling high-major athletics and a demanding college degree.
“If I didn’t have a moped,” McCabe said, “I don’t know what I would do.”
She’s an engineering major with an art minor. Even in her final senior semester, she’s taking 16 credit hours of school. She plans to pursue a graduate degree in structural engineering and maintains a sparkling 3.83 GPA.
“Yeah, I worked pretty hard for that one,” she grinned. “I’m kind of a perfectionist.”
McCabe has always envisioned becoming an engineer someday.
But she also is intrigued with becoming a basketball coach. With Sydney Affolter’s graduate-assistant term being one year at Iowa, there should be a staff opening for next season. McCabe’s first choice is to continue grad school at Iowa while assisting Jensen and Hawkeye women’s basketball next season.
“I can see myself going into coaching. Especially now, if I get the coaching bug, I could see it,” McCabe said. “But I’m also wired sooooo mathematically and analytically; my brain is the brain of an engineer. So, we’ll see. I’m going to have a lot of options.”
Short-term, as McCabe joked with her dry sense of humor, the coaching part has begun a little ahead of schedule.
She now goes from a crucial player on the top-10 Hawkeyes to becoming a sideline voice for what’s become a very young roster. She knows what she didn’t know as a freshman and sophomore, and she’s trying to relay those things to girls like Addie Deal and Taylor Stremlow — who will have to shoulder the biggest workloads in McCabe’s absence.
“A lot of them really have looked up to me, and so it’s really cool to see that they’re still coming to me and asking me questions,” McCabe said. “And I know I can be a bit of a mentor and just guide them. I’m sort of becoming a position coach at the 2.
“Building so much confidence through that work and preparation was a big deal for me, and I know that that can be replicated. So I’m just going to keep passing them all the lessons and knowledge that I’ve learned.”
McCabe is a believer in finding her purpose, which now has shifted. At the same time, she’s processing personal heartache and a playing career that’s over with the Hawkeyes.
She is grateful for being a part of unforgettable women’s basketball moments amid Caitlin Clark-mania. She is grateful to have played for two years under Lisa Bluder and then to see her main recruiter, Jensen, become the successor. McCabe loved the opportunity to be roommates with fun teammate Lucy Olsen during the Villanova transfer’s one year at Iowa. She is grateful to have played with her best friend, Hannah Stuelke, for four years.
And McCabe remains optimistic that more memories are yet to come.
“We’re still going to have some more special opportunities,” McCabe said. “I know this team. And this team … they’re not done yet, I’ll put it that way.”
Hawkeyes columnist Chad Leistikow has served for 31 years with The Des Moines Register and USA TODAY Sports Network. Chad is the 2023 INA Iowa Sports Columnist of the Year and NSMA Co-Sportswriter of the Year in Iowa. Join Chad’s text-message group at HawkCentral.com/HawkeyesTexts. Follow @ChadLeistikow on X.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa’s Taylor McCabe opens up about ACL tear, what’s next | Leistikow
Reporting by Chad Leistikow, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
