At long last …
Overcoming adversity is a part of life.
But for Maddie Osborn, it has become her life.
Perseverance, resilience, resolve. They have been words to live by for Osborn, a senior at Grove City High School whose penchant for leaping over hurdles might make her more resemble a track star rather than a basketball standout.
“Your perspective kind of changes,” Osborn said. “You don’t take it for granted because you know [basketball] can be taken away.”
Osborn, who plays for the SLAAM AAU organization, is a talented hooper with a few college scholarship offers, a feat made all the more impressive considering she has played in just over two dozen games in three seasons and won’t play in another before graduating next spring.
Injuries have plagued Osborn, a sharpshooting 5-foot-7 guard who burst onto the scene as a freshman when she averaged 13.1 points per game and helped Grove City reach the District 10 quarterfinals.
But just when it appeared like Osborn was on the road to stardom, her travels were derailed in the summer of 2024 when she tore the ACL in her left knee during an AAU tournament in South Carolina, an injury that cost Osborn her sophomore season.
However, Osborn would fight her way back, so much so that she was on top of her game to begin her junior season last December. She was named MVP of a season-opening tournament at Mercer and appeared to be poised for a big season.
“She looked great,” said her mom, Amber (McFeely) Osborn, a former basketball standout herself who is the all-time career leader in assists and minutes played at Slippery Rock University.
But then, four games into Maddie’s comeback campaign, it happened again.
“I knew and she knew,” mom recalled.
In a game against Moniteau, Maddie, who was wearing a knee brace, suffered a non-contact injury while going up for a layup, an injury that turned out to be a torn ACL, again in her left knee.
“I knew as soon as it happened that it was definitely torn,” Osborn said. “It was that feeling. It was just a reliving-the-moment type of thing.”
The thing was, this recovery would be a lot more complicated and involved than the first.
For Osborn’s first surgery, the surgeon performed a quad graft reconstruction of the ACL, a procedure which includes tunnels that are drilled into the femur and tibia. The Osborns used a different doctor following the second ACL tear, one who said the placement and the diameter of those tunnels likely contributed to it shearing off so easily the second time.
This ultimately led to Osborn needing not one, but two additional surgeries — one that involved a bone graft being inserted followed by another ACL surgery.
“If she wanted to play in college, which she does, the doctor said you need to get this done and filled in with a bone graft,” said Amber, a coach for SLAAM who is also both a boys and girls assistant coach at Grove City.
Maddie had that procedure done in January, but the problem was that she would need another four to six months to rehab before the ACL repair. She was able to do it in less than five, undergoing surgery on May 27. But with ACL recoveries often taking at least nine months, that meant that Osborn would also miss her season.
“If she wouldn’t have had the bone graft done, she would have been back for her senior season, but she will miss that,” Amber said. “It wouldn’t be smart to rush it, so we just have to use our brains.”
As you might expect, that was devastating news to Maddie, a gifted shooter with terrific court vision who was hoping to not only play her senior season, but also with her SLAAM teammates and in front of college coaches this AAU season.
“For me, it was definitely hard, but it was way harder to find out that I wasn’t going to play my junior year of AAU,” Osborn said. “High school definitely does mean a lot to me, but AAU is where my heart’s at. Those are my people.”
Maddie is still around her people, though. She regularly attends SLAAM practices and tournaments, as well as open gyms at Grove City.
“I’m doing pretty well. I feel like I’m at peace kind of because I feel like I’ve kind of been through this before and kind of know what to expect. I’m not in too much pain, so that’s a plus,” said Maddie, the oldest of Doug and Amber Osborn’s five children.
This is a teen who simply loves the sport of basketball. Her family, which lives on an 85-acre farm on the outskirts of Grove City, has a half-court on their property in addition to dogs, chickens and even two peacocks.
Maddie is now rehabbing again with hopes of playing in college, which would be an incredible feat considering the multiple ACL tears and the fact that she will have played only four games across her final three high school seasons.
And she has a pair of scholarship offers, too. Slippery Rock and West Liberty each offered Osborn early on in her school career, and, despite the major knee injuries, still want her to continue her career at their schools.
“They told her, ‘Your offers are still there and we have a jersey waiting for you,’” mom said. “Both have been really good, because there’s a lot of coaches that will yank [the scholarship]. And you can’t blame them. Their job is to win. But this just proves that there are still good people and people who believe in the process of stuff.”
Add Duquesne coach Dan Burt to that list. Duquesne has always been a dream school for Maddie ever since she attended her first college camp there. She was named player of the week and still has a picture of her and Burt shaking hands as he handed her the award.
Burt invited Maddie to visit Duquesne the day before her May surgery, a meeting that included some tremendous — and surprising — news.
“His first question to me was, ‘Do you still want to play?,’” Maddie remembered. “And I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I want to play. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to.’ And then he said, ‘Well, you have a spot on my team.’”
“It was unexpected,” Amber said. “Maddie started crying. I cried. Dan got teary-eyed. She has a long way to go for her to recover and be at that caliber to play, but for a coach to believe that she could be there at that level was pretty incredible.
“It’s just something we really appreciate and respect from Dan. He said to take as long as you need to decide, but he said that spot’s there.”
For now, Maddie is focusing on her rehab and recovery, a spot she unfortunately has been in before.
“I’ve done it one time, so I know I can definitely do it again,” she said. “[The first ACL recovery] definitely helped prepare me for this one for sure, just knowing it does get better eventually.”
Amber got emotional when speaking about what her daughter has been through, but she is hopeful that Maddie will fully recover and return to the court at some point.
“We don’t know how she’s going to come back,” mom said. “It’s an opportunity to see what she can get out of herself, and I think she’s learned a lot about herself and what the human body is capable of if the right pieces all fall into place. She said that taste she had of being healthy and playing, she’d do anything to do it again, so that’s the goal.”