Heart Surgery and a Broken Hip Can’t Stop Lee Lady Flames Forward Tori Lentz

Cleveland, TN-(WDEF) The Lee women’s basketball team missed their defensive spark last night in Tori Lentz.
She was sidelined with an ankle sprain.
But the junior forward laughed off that injury because she has endured far worse.
During her career with the Lady Flames, Lentz has undergone heart surgery and suffered a fractured hip.
Lentz and her coach take us through this injury odyssey.
Said Lentz:”A couple of practices I noticed that my heart would feel like it was pounding harder than it probably should have been, but I just thought I had drank a lot of coffee that morning or something like that. It’s called like SVT supraventricular tachycardia. It’s really complicated. It just means that your heart races faster than it should because a part of your heart has developed like an extra node like an electric board, and so it’s just circulating more.”
Reporter:”When was this heart surgery?”
Said Lentz:”September of 2016 I think. It was probably a week after when I started to practice again.”
Reporter:”A week after?”
Said Lentz:”Yeah. I eased into it.”
Said Lee head coach Marty Rowe:”You know we really don’t let players take themselves out of practice. We want them to fight through things. She has got her own little special rules. If she gets to where she understands she starts to breathe hard, she has kind of given us the okay I’m getting out.”
Said Lentz:”I started to feel like a pain in my hip, and I just thought I had pulled a muscle or something from doing extra work. I got to the point where I was walking with a limp, and I would go numb when I got in a game. So I would just go on adrenaline.” Rowe:”Then she broke her hip. She played 16 minutes on a broken hip. 16 minutes on a broken hip. So the next day when they go to look at her hip, they want let her leave without a wheelchair.”
Said Lentz:”Whenever I got my MRI done, and they brought a wheelchair out, I actually laughed because I was like I walked in here. I played basketball game last night.”
Repoter:”Do you ever feel like you have an old woman’s body or something?”
Said Lentz laughing:”Yeah okay. The team they call me granny because of the heart and the hip. That’s my new nickname.”
Said Rowe:”I think you learn a lot about a person with how they handle adversity. How they respond to it. The way she has responded is amazing.”
Said Lentz:”I’m a very independent person. I like to do things on my own. I don’t like to ask for help. I like to be right. Those kind of things. I felt like the Lord kind of using those to teach me to give up the control, and that I can’t always do everything how I want to do it.”
Rowe:”When she goes in, she just makes us better. She gives us an energy lift. You know she’s just a gutty, gutty player.”