These days, recent Quincy University graduate and former basketball student-athlete Deana McCormick is working toward her special education teaching certification for grades K-12. But McCormick’s determination to return to the top of her game after suffering a brain hemorrhage during her freshman season is a lesson for all ages.

McCormick arrived on the Quincy, Illinois, campus in the fall of 2002 fresh off a state high school championship and made an immediate impact. She started each of the Lady Hawks’ first 16 games of the 2002-03 season, averaging 8.4 points and 5.1 rebounds. Then in January, her life took an unexpected bounce.

Although she remembers not feeling well, McCormick made her way through the late evening practice on January 19, got a bite to eat and headed back to her dorm room.

"The last thing I remember is telling my roommate that I had a terrible headache," she said.

McCormick passed out and was rushed to a hospital. Two weeks later, after doctors determined the Lady Hawks’ star power forward had suffered a brain hemorrhage, she underwent surgery to repair a subdural hematoma, or blood clot, in her brain. As sobering as the news was, McCormick said the only thing she wanted was to be pain free.

"I think everybody around me was more scared. I was in so much pain. I couldn’t sit up. I couldn’t open my eyes," she said. "I remember sitting in the office when the doctor told me I was going to have surgery and thinking that it doesn’t matter as long as it relieves this pain. It was horrendous."

McCormick came through the procedure feeling 100 percent better and determined to play basketball again. Having suffered no physical setbacks due to the hemorrhage except that her balance was a little off, she spent the first weeks of her long journey on strict bed rest. When she returned to school a month after surgery, she was under the daily supervision of teammates, coaches and athletic training staff. She was prohibited from driving or even dribbling a basketball.

"The most frustrating thing for me was I knew what I could do on the court and in the classroom before the injury and it didn’t come that easy to me anymore. So to me, it was a competition with myself," McCormick said.

It was a competition McCormick clearly had no intention of losing. Eventually she progressed to light weight training and, by late spring, running. She returned to the Lady Hawks bench for her sophomore season but didn’t see much playing time. Throughout, McCormick, in concert with the coaching and medical staffs, was cautious — headaches and any sort of physical contact involving her head prompted an immediate visit to a doctor.

However, a sign that her recovery was on target came early in her junior season, when McCormick turned in a double-double with 19 points and 11 rebounds — both career highs at the time —-in a game against Kentucky Wesleyan.

By the time the 2005-06 season dawned, McCormick, then a senior, was ready. She averaged 13.3 points and 6.2 rebounds a game and shot 57.5 percent from the field on the season en route to capturing first-team all-Great Lakes Valley Conference honors. Behind McCormick, who led the team in scoring and field goal percentage, the Lady Hawks earned their fourth straight invitation to the NCAA Division II women’s basketball tournament.

McCormick credits her teammates, the coaching and athletic training staffs, and her physicians for her full recovery.

"I wanted to play and I knew that I could. Not everybody around me thought so. But, I am thankful that I had a supportive coaching staff, trainers and physicians who allowed me to take that step. I would not have recovered the same way academically and socially if I had not begun to play basketball again," she said.

McCormick graduated from Quincy in May with a degree in special education. As she embarks on the next stage of her life, she’s armed with a special kind of insight that isn’t found in books.

"Nobody knows what you can do until you try it. If I had done what everybody said I should have done and just sat there and watched the next three years then I don’t think I’d be the person I am now," she said. "Don’t ever give up on what you want to accomplish."