Don’t let anyone convince you girls basketball is anything but a full-contact sport.
Iola High’s Elza Clift and Keira Fawson can attest, all too painfully.
Both suffered broken noses in the early going of the 2023-24 basketball season, and thus will continue to wear protective masks for the foreseeable future.
Clift, a junior reserve guard, broke her nose during a Dec. 5 practice when she and teammate Kyndal Bycroft collided while going for the ball.
It was an inadvertent collision, Clift noted afterward.
“It definitely hurt,” she said with a chuckle. “I went into the locker room to look in the mirror, and said, ‘Oh, that doesn’t look right.’”
Fast-forward a week, to the evening of Dec. 12, when the Mustangs were warming up for a road game at Burlington.
Fawson, Iola’s starting center, was practicing post moves in front of the basket.
Little did she know teammate Bethany Miller, another post player, was doing the same.
“We both turned at the wrong time, and I caught her elbow right on my nose,” Fawson said.
The impact was a bit messier than Clift’s.
Fawson’s nose started bleeding almost immediately, as she retreated to the locker room.
“I looked in the mirror and saw that it looked really crooked,” she recalled. “So I popped it back into place.”
That part hurt as much as the collision, Fawson admitted.
“It was bleeding for a long time,” she noted. “Eventually, it stopped. Kind of. By the third quarter.”
At first, Fawson’s plans were to try to play that night.
