Track stars persevere

By Rocky Higginbotham / Sports editor

May 05, 2006 01:32 am

— It was 87 degrees and muggy at Meridian High School’s Ray Stadium Thursday afternoon — where the heat from an afternoon rainstorm and a little football practice across the street made it feel like August.
On the track at MHS, however, Dionne Knight and Josh Johnson had enough energy for a playful race.
Over the next two days, Knight and Johnson will represent Meridian and Southeast Lauderdale in the MHSAA state track meet. But regardless of where they may place in Pearl this weekend, the fact that the two are competing is astonishing.
Prayer and practice.
That’s what Knight’s mom — Shari George — says has gotten her daughter this far. The same can be said for Johnson. Because without both, I just don’t see how either of them could have ever hit the track this spring.
Knight, a sophomore at Meridian, will compete in the 100m and 200m dashes Saturday during the Class 5A track and field state championships. She also ran the 4x100m and 4x200m relays and was an alternate on the 4x400m relay team.
Amazing considering Knight spends an hour — and sometimes two — EVERY day in rehab because she was recently diagnosed with scoliosis, just months after undergoing a couple of surgeries.
Johnson?
A senior, he will run in the 800m event as the lone representative from Southeast Lauderdale today in the Class 3A state championships. And he’ll do it with a steel rod more than two feet long inside his leg — the result of a broken femur he suffered in a car accident not quite 17 months ago.
Johnson was on his way home on Highway 19 South when he fell asleep at the wheel and totaled out a 1996 Firebird.
“The engine was in my passenger seat,” he said. “It was pretty bad.”
That was on Dec. 11, 2004 — right about the time the first semester of the school year was ending. But Johnson spent his Christmas break in the hospital, then missed three more weeks of school.
But by March of 2005, he was up and running — and back on the track. He made it to the South State meet last year, and will run in the state meet for the first-time ever after finishing third in this year’s South State event.
“It’s an amazing accomplishment for this young man considering he was in a terrible car accident where he almost lost his life,” Southeast coach Ty Trahan said. “Amazing.”
But as bad as the wreck was then, to hear Johnson speak about his recovery is just as amazing.
“It doesn’t bother me too much ... didn’t slow me down,” said Johnson, who is headed to East Central Community College on a soccer scholarship.
Scholarships will have to wait another couple of years for Knight — but it’ll be hard to argue with her resume — and with her ability to fight adversity.
Knight suffered a ruptured appendix last fall — and was later diagnosed as having an ovarian cyst the size of a fist. During surgery, it was discovered she had no cyst after all — instead, toxins from the appendix rupture had calcified to her organs.
Wearing a scar from hip to hip, Knight eventually got back into school and back on the track.
“Day after day, she would come home in tears and in pain, going straight to bed,” George said. “We often wondered if she would be able to continue.”
She did — only to suffer from swelling in her shoulder and lower back that eventually led to the scoliosis discovery.
“It really is something,” George said. “I am not only proud because she has advanced this far ... but because she stuck it out.
“She hung in there ... God is on her side.”
Hard to argue with that.