Comets Star To Sit Out Season
Swoopes Suffers Torn Ligament
She is expected to miss the upcoming season with the four-time WNBA champions.
The team said that she spent the night at Methodist Hospital.
Team physician Dr. Walter Lowe said that Swoopes also suffered damage to her lateral meniscus cartilage during a workout Monday night.
"This serious injury will require surgical reconstruction, and she will miss the entire 2001 season," Lowe said. "She's torn her anterior cruciate ligament, or the ACL, which is the main stabilizing ligament of the knee. She's torn her lateral meniscus, the cartilage that sits on the outside of the bones, and she's injured the joint surface, the end of the femur where the knee went in and out when it tore."
Lowe said that Swoopes' injury is the worst knee injury possible.
The combination of cartilage and ligament damage will force doctors to build a new ACL, an intricate process with a lengthy recovery period.
"I really felt for her as a person of what she's having to go through as a player, trying to think about how hard she'd been playing, how well she'd been playing," an emotional coach Van Chancellor said at a press conference.
"We go from a very experienced WNBA team to a very inexperienced WNBA team," Chancellor said. "We're going to meet Tuesday night, and we're going to get after it. This is the hand we've been dealt. We're going to deal with it.
"I thought we'd walk in a room, and just knowing her in her past, this has got to be the most disappointing thing to happen to her in a long time. I thought she was in a pretty good frame of mind."
Comets guard Coquese Washington was working out with Swoopes when she suffered the injury.
"Sheryl got the ball at the top of the key," Washington told a Houston television station. "She started to drive to the basket, but she never got in the air.
"You could tell the way she was screaming that she was in pain and it was serious. It was not pretty."
Female basketball players are eight times more likely to suffer that type of knee injury than men's basketball players.
Torn ACLs are becoming common in the WNBA.
New York's Rebecca Lobo missed the last two seasons after suffering consecutive ACL injuries within six months. Cleveland's leading scorer and rebounder, Eva Nemcova, missed last season with an ACL tear. She underwent another operation this week.
Swoopes led the WNBA in scoring with a 20.7-point average last season and was the defensive player of the year.
She had her best pro season last year. She led the WNBA with 2.81 steals, ranked eighth with 3.8 assists and was ninth in blocks and shooting percentage.
Swoopes joined the Comets in 1997 after giving birth to a son.
She was named the regular season MVP and Defensive Player of the Year in 2000, earned an Olympic gold medal in 1996 and another one in 2000, and was the first woman to have her own Nike shoe, the Air Swoopes.
The Comets earlier lost former league MVP Cynthia Cooper to retirement. Cooper will coach the WNBA's Phoenix franchise this season.
Swoopes, Cooper and teammate Tina Thompson all finished in the top 10 in scoring last season.
The Comets have won all four championships since the WNBA was formed.
Swoopes came into the league after an all-star career at Texas Tech, where she led the Red Raiders to a 58-8 record and the NCAA national championship in 1993.
