Hobart star Keirys Click’s best season yet almost didn’t happen.
After having surgery for a nagging knee injury, the Illinois recruit wasn’t sure she would be able to play this spring.
“I was really nervous I was going to miss my senior season,” Click said. “We were doing everything we possibly could.”
But Click ended up doing just about everything a hitter can do.
Click, the 2024 Post-Tribune Softball Player of the Year, batted .653 with 12 homers, 32 RBIs, 48 runs scored and 30 stolen bases. The senior shortstop tied the program’s single-season record for homers, matching Alyssa Janik’s total from last year, and extended her program record to 30 career homers.
Click also led the Brickies to their first sectional title since 2016.
“She had a fantastic year,” Hobart coach Steve Moss said. “Her career, the stuff she’s done, she’s just defined the Hobart program the last four years and changed the way we approach everything.
“The team followed her lead so much this year. The work and effort that she puts in just translated so well to everyone else. You can obviously see it with her performance and play. She’s so good at everything she does.”
Click suspects she injured her right knee during the second game of her junior season. She played the duration of the season, hitting .565 with 10 homers, 31 RBIs and 20 stolen bases, as well as her travel season last summer.
“Treatments didn’t work, and I continued to play,” Click said. “It finally got to a point where, after games, I couldn’t even drive home because it hurt to push down on the pedal. I couldn’t really run. It was just really hurting me toward the end of the summer.”
Click went to a doctor and was diagnosed with patellar tendinitis. As prescribed, she took off a couple of weeks and did exercises.
“I wasn’t getting better,” she said. “I felt I was getting worse.”
Click then had an MRI, which revealed a 50% tear of her patellar tendon, and had surgery in October. She wasn’t fully cleared until almost five months later, shortly before tryouts, after she initially had been told the recovery would be six weeks. She wore a straight leg brace for two months and was unable to walk.
“I lost all of my leg muscle,” Click said. “It was really bad. It took a lot longer for my recovery, but I got good right before the season.”
Click, who continued to get chiropractic treatment and go to physical therapy early in the season, said the intensive rehabilitation process had an upside, including more strength in her lower body. Even when she was wearing the brace, she said she still was doing upper-body and single-leg lifts.
“I had to work extra hard because I was coming off of the surgery,” Click said. “It was a big setback in my career. But I feel like because of all the hard work I did, it was just able to push me so much further and allow me to do so much more. I had that drive of having that setback, so I knew I had to come out stronger and harder. It was my last season to make an impact at Hobart, and that’s all I wanted to do — leave a mark on Hobart, this school and this town.”
Click, an all-state first-team pick, the Northwest Crossroads Conference’s offensive player of the year for the second straight time and a finalist for Miss Softball, is best known for her prodigious hitting. But she’s dangerous when she gets on base too.
“She was awesome last year, and everything she did this year topped that, just from the work she puts in,” Moss said. “A new element she added this year was her base running. She’s always been a good base runner, but she was much more of a threat on the bases this year. Just the idea of if you’re going to pitch around her, she’s going to make you pay on the bases. That was a big addition to her game in comparison to years past.”
Despite the injury, Click never stopped working on her game. Moss recalled Click being limited in January but still coming to practices.
“She just works harder than anybody I know,” Moss said. “She came off of the knee surgery in the fall, and she was swinging in her garage on a chair the very next day just so she could keep swinging. You see the results.”
Click missed wrestling season, however, after she placed seventh in the state at 152 pounds in her debut in the sport as a junior. She was given the option of waiting to have surgery until January, after the state meet, and she considered that.
“You’re thinking about it, but then we were like, ‘Let’s just do the October one just to be safe,’” Click said. “I don’t want to miss my senior season in softball if anything happened to go wrong. Thankfully we did the October one because it was supposed to take six weeks and it took almost five months to recover, longer than everyone expected.
“After my first year wrestling, I had experience, I got stronger. I was like, ‘I could go far this year.’ But we had to make the decision. It was really hard. It just came down to knowing softball’s my future and softball’s the thing I love the most. So I had to sacrifice wrestling for it. It was tough, but in the end, everyone knows softball’s my main sport, obviously, and I couldn’t risk missing it at all. I had to do everything I possibly could to make sure I had the best senior season I could.”
Winning the sectional title was especially meaningful to Click.
“We just had a really good team this year, and everyone just wanted it more,” she said. “This team just wanted it so much. I wanted it so much. It meant so much more playing with this group of girls that you grew up playing with your entire life and now it’s the last time you’ll be on the field with them. It just meant so much more knowing we’d make history and we’d be in school history forever.”
Click has etched her name in Hobart lore too.
“I just want to be remembered as someone you could tell loved the game when they were on the field and had so much passion and wanted to do so much for their team,” she said. “Yeah, my stats are good. But I just want to be remembered as someone who was a great teammate, someone who was fun to be around, someone who loved the game and had so much passion on and off the field.
“Stats are impressive, but it’s the teammate aspect and person aspect that’s important. I hope younger kids want to be like me because of how much I love the game, and I want people to look up to me for that reason.”