Gone but (not) forgotten: The painful odyssey of Ellie Dague
Last week I texted a couple of college coaches at the Division 1 level with a simple query: “Were you guys recruiting Ellie Dague Ellie Dague 5'10" | CG Henning | 2021 State MN before she got hurt?” This reply was typical: “I don’t remember. Who did she play for? Is she a 2021?” That, at its most succinct, is the dilemma facing players who have been absent from the court for an extended period of time due to serious injury. Two years ago there were plenty of D1 coaches who knew Ellie’s name. Today the big guard from Henning is in the process of rebuilding her game and her name.
Dague’s injury odyssey is a complicated one that began with a high ankle sprain followed by a torn ACL, another painful yet mysterious knee problem and – finally – an answer to the mystery. The result was more surgery, another missed summer of AAU basketball, and a whole lot of mental anguish. Now, a dozen games into the high school season, Dague is quickly returning to form. She’s averaging nearly 20 points per game and Henning is 11-1
“It feels great to be back out there,” Dague said when we talked at the Granite City Classic over the holidays. “Last year I couldn’t move and the game wasn’t fun because I was always in pain. It’s not fun to go from being good and being able to move to not being able to move and just playing blah.”
How much did it hurt? “It would depend on how I stopped,” Dague said. “If I stopped sharp on it was just a shooting pain. Eventually it got so bad where I couldn’t straighten it without it spasming everywhere. I was just done. I had to take it out and then rehab.”
The ‘it’ Ellie referred to is something called a ‘cyclops lesion’ which is what doctors eventually figured out had been the source of the pain. Also known as ‘localized anterior anthrofibrosis,’ the cyclops lesion is a painful anterior mass that arises as a result of the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction. According to the medical website Kneeguru, a cyclops lesion is a fibrous nodule resembling an eyeball – thus the name ‘cyclops’ – that is localized in the middle of the rounded part of the femur. Basically it hinders the extension of the knee causing sharp pain. Bottom line: it hurts like heck.
The morning after surgery, Dague felt great, and she has been doing well ever since. She spent the summer rehabbing to get ready for her junior year. Ellie played volleyball this fall while wearing a brace. When basketball started in November the brace was gone, and Henning is a very different team as a result. “I am a way smarter coach, obviously!” Henning coach Mike Hepola said with a laugh. “The biggest thing is teams can’t press us much when she’s in there because she’s so strong with the ball. And she’s such a weapon… Just her presence out there, her ball-handling. It’s immeasurable. There are no words to describe the difference between when she’s on the court and not on the court.”
“She’s right back there.”
A search of the Prep Girls Hoops website for stories about Ellie doesn’t turn up much. That’s because when we switched from the old Northstar Girls Hoops platform all of the stories prior to that floated off into cyberspace. Going back to 2017, however, we wrote a ton about Ellie during the AAU season between her 8th and 9th grade year. She was an elite prospect – top 5 in the state – and a unique, intriguing talent well worth paying attention to.
After watching Ellie perform at such a high level all summer I made a trip to Henning to see Ellie play a high school game in December of 2017. The town of 810 hardy souls is located about 35 miles north of Alexandria. The game was actually in Sebeka, another 45 miles up the road, and Dague was brilliant. She had already put up nearly 30 points midway through the second half when she went down with what was obviously a serious ankle injury. Henning ended up losing by four and the ankle would prove to be a problem all winter. I never did write about my trip.
After the game, despite being in agony and on crutches, Ellie took the time to talk, tears streaming down her cheeks, and thanked me for coming to watch. I felt terrible. It turned out to be the beginning of a two-year rollercoaster ride. In the spring of 2018, Ellie tore her ACL during the first weekend of the viewing period while playing for Ruth Sinn’s North Tartan team.
Over the past year and a half I would run into Ellie’s dad Chris at AAU events and the question was always the same: “How’s Ellie doing?” Hepola would also check in with me from time to time with an update on the latest medical news. Dague was on the bench for most of the Sinn team’s AAU events in 2018 and again this past summer, but you never got the feeling she was going to return any time soon. There were moments when she just wanted to be done with basketball.
“That definitely crossed my mind,” she admitted, “because I didn’t want to get hurt again and have to rehab it again. Rehab is hard. If you don’t go through a knee injury, people don’t quite understand until you have to do it. It’s every day. It’s constant. You have to work on lifting your own leg again and just work on jumping and landing and walking. It’s hard.”
It has also been worth it. When I heard Dague was playing volleyball this fall that was a great sign, as were reports that she was back playing basketball at a high level in early December. In St. Cloud I saw it for myself, and it was impressive.
“She’s right back there,” Hepola said of Dague’s quickness, which is always a concern when a player returns from ACL surgery. “We’ve had her on some pretty good guards who are real quick and she sticks right with them. That’s the other thing: I think she’s a better defender than she was two years ago. She uses her quickness, she uses her body. She has done a great job with that and I think that is just maturity and Ruth’s influence on her.”
How does her effectiveness compare to before?
“I think her outside shooting is getting better and she’s relying on that a little more, whereas early on it was totally drive-and-dish,” Hepola said. “To me she’s more versatile. She’s like, ‘Hey, if you’re going to sag off me because I can beat you off the dribble then I’m going to hit the three in your face.’ When she has an off night shooting she’s going to go for a bunch of assists and rebounds and impact the game that way. That’s huge.”
Her own evaluation is, not surprisingly, slightly more critical.
“It depends on the game,” she said, when asked for a self-assessment. “These last two games I have played better but I still have work to do, I still have moves to make, different moves that I used to be able to get. I have to shake off the rust and work and get it back.”
In December Dague broke the Henning career scoring record with 1,304 points. After making her varsity debut in 7th grade, she had hit the ground running as an 8th grader, averaging 19.5 points a game. Despite missing 31 contests over the past two seasons, Ellie’s career numbers through Jan. 2 are awfully nice. In 91 games played, she has scored 1,376 points, shooting 43 percent from the field and 72 percent at the free throw line, with career averages of 4.6 rebounds, 3.2 assists and 2.3 steals per game. With North Tartan Ellie proved she could be equally effective against the best players her age in the country. The question is, will coaches remember?
The summer ahead
Dague will return to North Tartan in 2020, although it isn’t clear yet whether she will be a member of the top EYBL squad with former teammates like Wayzata’s Jenna Johnson Jenna Johnson 6'2" | PF Wayzata | 2021 State #52 Nation MN (Utah) and Mara Braun Mara Braun 5'11" | CG Wayzata | 2022 State #21 Nation MN , and Cassidy Carson Cassidy Carson 6'0" | CG Eastview | 2021 State MN (South Dakota) of Eastview. It’s more likely she’ll end up on the Elite team. Either way Ellie will have the opportunity to show college coaches that she is still a worthy candidate for a scholarship. Big guards like Dague are hard to find. She can handle the ball with either hand, beat pretty much anybody one-on-one, run an offense with poise and precision, and provide the kind of on-court leadership coaches crave.
“She’s basically ambidextrous,” Hepola said. “Going all the way back to 3rd grade people would come up to me and ask, ‘Hey is she right-handed or left-hand?’ Even at that age you couldn’t tell. Sometimes in the gym she’ll go around and shoot 3-pointers right-handed and left-handed. If you were a scout you wouldn’t know. She shoots it with perfect form both ways.”
Most of the schools that had shown early interest in Dague eventually moved on over the past two years. When you are gone as long as she was gone, people forget about you. “Yes they do,” said Ellie, who understands her new reality all too well. “I have about three teams that have stuck with me, that have stayed in contact with me,” she said. “Two of them have come to watch me this year.” One is the University of Minnesota.
When AAU season arrives Ellie will be ready to refresh everyone else’s memory. In the meantime she’s more concerned about what Henning can do as a unit. “As a team we are definitely trying to get to state,” she said. “We watched our boys get to state last year and have success there. Our volleyball team went to state this year, too. When we won the volleyball sections we immediately said we wanted to do it in basketball. That’s something the Henning girls have never done before.”