SPORTS

Class B girls basketball: Forgan's Destiny Alston keeps dream alive despite balky knees

Jacob Unruh
Forgan's Destiny Alston, right, drives against a Vici defender earlier this season. [Photo provided by Panhandle Illustrated]

FORGAN — Destiny Alston stood frozen beside her teammates with her hands on her head. Tears of joy started to trickle down her face as a teammate grabbed a once elusive trophy.

For a Forgan High School senior many expected to dominate the past four years, the moment her team won an area championship for the first time last weekend got the best of her.

“It's been a long time coming,” she said.

Alston was expected to rule Class B basketball and perhaps even more of the state throughout her high school career in a small northwest Oklahoma town. She had visions of gold balls and Division I scholarships.

But her knees failed her.

Alston enters Thursday's state tournament opener at Yukon High School with a torn anterior cruciate ligament, her fourth in as many years, that this time has only slowed her down. With surgery planned next week, she remains the team's on-court star and leader.

“She's as good as I've been around and as good as I've seen,” Forgan coach Travis Smalts said, fighting back tears.

“For her to have the luck that she's had, it's been heartbreaking. For her to battle through that and get her team into the position that she's got them in is hard to talk about it. It's very deserving for her.”

Alston was in the fifth grade the first time Forgan's boys basketball team won a gold ball as part of a run of three in four years. Even her older brother, Dee, got a ring.

Destiny was enamored with the tournament. The bright lights of State Fair Arena. The joy in the community.

She planned to out-do her brother in bigger ways.

“That was all I wanted to do,” Alston said.

As a freshman, she had earned national recruiting attention. Scholarship offers came from Baylor and Oklahoma State and Colorado State. Even Stanford and Notre Dame were interested.

And she was dominant, averaging more than 20 points while leading Forgan to the area championship game with just one loss. Three days before that game, her world changed.

She tore her left ACL in a practice scrimmage.

Forgan lost the next two games and missed the state tournament, but with the knowledge Alston would be back.

Until the next postseason when she tore her right ACL in the regional tournament. Again, Forgan failed to advance.

And Alston's dreams started to slip away.

Baylor and OSU both pulled their scholarship offers. Other interest disappeared.

Alston was crushed. Her family was already helping her brother in college. She was supposed to make things easier.

Still, she had two years remaining to prove her knees were fine. But the right one wasn't. She tore it again early her junior season. Two games into this season, it tore again.

Alston was finally mad at her knees.

Why had they failed? Why did this keep happening? Why her?

“It was heartbreaking,” she said. “Basketball is really honestly all I've known. I'm willing to sacrifice for it, I guess.”

Determined to get her team to at least one state tournament, Alston returned after a month. She's remained the team's most dangerous player, even a step or two slower.

“They've put in so much work and been let down so many times I figured, why not finish the season?” she said.

Alston still dreams of big things.

She believes next week her knee finally will be fixed for good. Her family sought a new doctor who believes a bone shaving from the first surgery is tearing the ligament. A bone graft is likely needed.

But first, she wants to achieve the goal she expected to happen much sooner.

“Thursday is going to mean everything to me and the girls as well,” Alston said. “We've battled through so much adversity that I think our girls should be happy to be there and have fun when we're playing on the court.”