from St. Pete times

HUDSON — By around 9:30 tonight, Stacy Swezey likely will plop her aching body down somewhere and order an aspirin on the rocks. The ice, packs of it, will soothe her knees; the aspirin her throbbing shoulder.

Then, the Hudson junior probably will sit back and reflect on her team's Class 4A playoff showdown with Eustis much the way she played it — in pain.

Such is the postgame forecast for the Cobras' most battered player. The pregame outlook: Swezey, who dislocated her right shoulder late in the second half of Thursday's overtime triumph against Orlando Bishop Moore, is going to play.

"We think she's gonna be a go," Hudson coach Chris Rizzieri said Monday morning. "She was at practice with cleats on the other day ready to go."

Not that Rizzieri expected anything less from her standout, surgically mended sweeper. Long before her frightening injury Thursday night, Swezey had familiarized herself with physical adversity.

Sixteen months before, while practicing with her offseason competitive team at Hudson's Arthur Engle Field, Swezey tore the anterior cruciate ligament and meniscus in her right knee. Some online research led to a doctor in Houston, where a graft from her left patella tendon was used to repair the right ACL.

In essence, she had two surgeries for the price of one.

But she hasn't missed a match this season.

"It was difficult, it was challenging," Swezey, who endured a six-month rehabilitation, said early last week. "But after my surgery I was faster than I was before my surgery because I know my (sprint) times … so that's pretty cool. I've still got to ice them all the time. I ice them after every game, every practice."

Rizzieri said that, other than the scars, "you wouldn't even know" Swezey had been injured.

"I've had the operation myself on both knees," Rizzieri said. "When you're an athlete you go through that sometimes and you do what you've got to do to play, and that's what she did."

Tonight, she'll do it again. Swezey likely will have to wear some type of stabilizing shoulder brace. By game time, it still could be tender — unlike her resolve.

"She wasn't even overnight (in the hospital)," Rizzieri said. "They put it back in place about 1 (a.m.) and sent her home. It was pretty tender Friday but she's had all weekend. She's a go as far as we know."