St. Joe's Avery Marz Savoring Return To The Court

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Life can change in an instant. It is something we're all aware of, but for most it seems like a vague concept as we roll through our day-to-day grind.

But for St. Joseph's University senior guard Avery Marz, life changing in an instant isn't simply a concept.

The story starts in August of 2014 as Avery was moving into her dorm as a freshman.

"We went to lift up a fridge in my dorm and I felt like a tweak in my knee," Marz tells KYW Newsradio. "I was like, 'That's weird,' but I'm an athlete, just kind of used to these things. So I kind of just brushed it off, sat down on my bed and lifted my legs up and it was within five, ten seconds it felt like a gust of wind had come at me from the right side and knocked me directly on to the ground. The beds were high in my dorm room, so it was a pretty decent fall and that kind of took my breath away for a second. Then I realized that I wasn't able to move my left side and so I just pushed up with my right side, kind of sat upright, looked directly at my mom who was across from me and I said, 'Mom, what's going on?' and at that time I was actually only talking out of the right side of my mouth because my whole entire left side of my face was completely dropped because all the muscle and all that stuff was lost immediately, and my mom, seeing that, she knew right away. So when I said, 'Mom, what's going on?' she said, 'You're having a stroke.'"

She was rushed to the hospital. The stroke had left the left side of her body temporarily paralyzed and it was unclear at first how much and or how fast she would recover.

"Every stroke is different," she says. "Some people have the same stroke and still recover differently. Obviously, being an athlete, that was on my side. They knew I had the determination and just the athletic ability and muscle on the right side of my body to kind of work with certain things and progress faster in rehab. But there was never a time when they told me, at CHOP anyway, that you were going to play or you weren't going to play. They kind of just gave me every possible tool they could to help me recover."

And as you can imagine, the recovery was was a slow and deliberate process.

"It was very difficult to deal with," Marz says. "Mentally I really just, I don't want to say checked out, but I tried to push that whole mental aspect to the side and strictly focus on the physical every day. I would have days that I would have mental breakdowns and get really upset. But for the most part I focused so much on the physical of just let's get this back [because] I have to. If I want to live a normal life, if I want to do the things that I set out to do, not even basketball wise, because to begin with that was not something that was in my mind at all. Just because I couldn't got to the bathroom by myself, I couldn't shower by myself, couldn't get out of bed, simple things. Not even going out in public, I could not do anything. So I think having it be that drastic really pushed me, because it was like, if you want to be normal, you have to do these things and that was a big thing I strived for in the beginning was just to be normal. That's something that I really tried to hold on to was just getting back to my normal self."

Marz says that there were some very difficult times as she worked her way back.

"There was like a two-week period," Marz says, "when I just had gotten home and I was still going to rehab every day, but I was able to go home and stay in my own bed. I just, I would go to rehab and I would come in my room, turn the lights off and go to bed. I did that for about a two-week span. My mom allowed me to do that. I didn't necessarily notice what I was doing, but my mom did. She told herself, 'I'm going to give her these two weeks, this is something that I knew was going to come at some point, I'm not going to push her past her limits. I'm going to allow her these two weeks, but after these two weeks, I'm going in that room turning on the lights and this is no longer happening.' That's what she did. She came in, I think it was a Friday or Saturday at the end of the week and she said, 'You know what . . . no. You're not going into your room, you're not sleeping today, we're going out and we're doing this.' And that's the first time I went out in public."

Marz says she and her mom ended up going to the Target down the street from her house.

Slowly but surely, Marz made progress, getting movement back throughout her body. She went back to school and eventually the idea of getting back on the basketball court became a focus.

"I would say summer league was a big thing for me," Marz says. "I first played in summer league [in 2016] and it's just a league that we do, Hatboro-Horsham I believe is where it is. It's just very lax, it's nothing serious. You have a championship and that kind of thing, but there's only two Division I players on each team, so you kind of mix up, there's Division II and Division III players and it's really good competition and it's fun. And I told myself I was going to do it. I knew I was very nervous. People there I knew from high school, too, so they were like, 'Avery's back, we're going to watch her game today.' So the nerves and the excitement at the same time and then finally stepping out on that court and doing okay. I didn't do great, I didn't score 100 points, no one does, but just being out there and having fun and feeling like I was an athlete amongst athletes again, was a time that I really felt like, 'Hey, I can do this.'"

Marz traveled with the Hawks to Italy this past summer and played in exhibition games over there. She finally made her regular season debut on November 12th when the Hawks visited Niagara and scored her first collegiate basket, a three-pointer adding an exclamation point to her long journey back.

"I shot two before that and I missed," Marz says with a laugh. "I went 1 for 3 from three that game. It was nice, because it wasn't forced, it was in [the] offense, if I didn't score, I didn't score. That was something I told myself, 'If I don't score for the rest of my career, I don't score for the rest of my career, but I'm out there and every day I'm out there it's a miracle. That's something I do remind myself of every day. But obviously, getting that pass, Mary Sheehan, one of our freshman passed me the ball, pretty wide open I would say. I mean someone closed out, but it wasn't anything too difficult. When it went in, it was really just a feeling of relief, like, it's over with, I don't have to think about my first point again. Sometimes when its such a build up for things to happen, it happens, the excitement's over and you're like, 'Thank God it's over.' That's how I felt about it."

Marz is a captain for the Hawks and so far this season she has played in seven games, making one start. It's been an incredible road for her and she says she has changed as a result of everything.

"I definitely have," she says. "I've matured a lot, my mom's happy that I have. I think I've matured a lot and I just have a very different perspective on situations and just my life in general. I really don't take any day for granted, I don't take any time I step on the court for granted. I still complain, just like everyone does, if we're up at six in the morning and running, I'm like, I don't want to be here. But I definitely just look at things differently and know that I'm really blessed to be where I am, to be a Division I athlete and to get the education that I'm receiving by being a Division I athlete. So I really just have no complaints overall and I just look at a lot of things differently."