The path that Reagan Ables has taken to become a contributor to her Columbus North girls basketball team her senior year has been anything but smooth.
But while a wave of injuries and confidence issues threatened to derail a once-promising career, Ables isn’t one to throw in the towel.
Instead, she went to work. She went to work on her strength, her confidence and her game, and the rewards are beginning to show.
“I definitely think I took more initiative this summer in going at specific things that I knew I needed to work on, one of them being strength, so I lifted with my brother (Riley) every day and sometimes multiple times a day,” Reagan said. “That really helped because he was able to push me. Then, I played on a travel team that would have practices a lot, and they were very individualized. So I would carry a lot of that over.”
Overcoming injuries
Reagan started playing basketball in fourth grade, and when she was in fifth grade at Parkside Elementary, she had to choose between basketball and cheerleading. She picked basketball.
Reagan played her fifth- and sixth-grade years before she started having trouble with her foot as a seventh-grader at Northside. She had surgery after the season, and while she was off her foot, she lost a lot of strength and skills. As a result, she started off weaker her eighth-grade year, but progressed as the season went along.
Her freshman year, Reagan began having issues with her foot again and almost lost a toe because of a MRSA infection.
“It was pretty painful,” Reagan said. “The physical pain was pretty bad, too, but I guess the mental strain of that was kind of bad.”
Once the infection healed, she had to have surgeries on both feet because of Tarsal Tunnel releases. That set her back again going into her sophomore year, when she played on the junior varsity.
“I feel like from your eighth-grade to your freshman year, it’s a big difference,” Reagan said. “It’s a big change in the way that you play and the way that you’re expected to play, so I lost a lot of strength physically mostly in my legs, and that’s always hard to come back from.”
The spring after her sophomore year, the COVID-19 pandemic hit and sent schools into e-learning mode. Riley, a former North football and basketball player, was home from Indiana University and put Reagan on a daily lifting regimen. They lifted in the basement of their home until gyms reopened, then went to Total Fitness to lift.
“I think that was probably one of the biggest factors because physically, people have noticed a change in the way I look,” Reagan said. “When I come out and play, I play stronger, and I just feel like that helps my confidence.”
Gaining DistinXion
Between her sophomore and junior years, Reagan joined the DistinXion travel team. DistinXion is headed by Luke Zeller, the 2005 Mr. Basketball from Washington who went on to play at Notre Dame and in the NBA.
Because of COVID, most of Reagan’s practices with DistinXion were virtual. She played in some tournaments, but her confidence level plummeted.
Things didn’t get much better for Reagan her junior year, when she was back on the JV team. Her parents Brent and Amy were ready for her to give up basketball, but even though she was seeing minimal varsity action, she decided to stick with it.
“I think a lot of it stemmed from physical issues,” Reagan said. “I knew I was weaker than most players, and I knew that I hadn’t had the skill development as many players because I had missed a pivotal time, and I kind of let that get to me instead of just going out and playing. I played like I was weaker, and I played like I was less developed.”
But then this spring, things finally started to turn around for Reagan. She started developing more confidence through DistinXion.
“I think over the summer was a big time for my confidence to change,” Reagan said. “With Luke Zeller, they have a lot of different aspects. There’s faith-based, there’s mental-based and then there’s playing-based, so a lot of them that I worked on were mental-based. So there’s like a mental-trainer that really helped me work on my game and really getting down to the deep reasons why I had low confidence, which stemmed from having surgeries and missing out. So I moved past those and kind of worked on just playing in the moment.”
That carried over into the June period when high school coaches are permitted to work with their teams in practices and play games against other schools. North assistant coach Ron Patberg pointed out to the team how much Reagan had improved since the end of her junior season.
“Knowing that she improved a lot during her junior year on JV, she had a chance to really contribute on the varsity level,” Patberg said. “So we spent a lot of extra time just trying to talk about situations in games and where she could improve to really help us this season, and I think she’s done that.”
Playing a role
While Reagan’s offensive numbers this high school season aren’t eye-popping, she has played a key role off the bench in all nine games for the Bull Dogs, who are 6-3 going into Tuesday’s game against Seymour.
“I’m extremely proud of what Reagan has been able to accomplish,” North head coach Brett White said. “She’s experienced some adversity in her four years in our program with injuries. I kind of have a soft spot in my heart for girls who love the game, and Reagan is one of those people. She really loves basketball, she’s a really good teammate to the rest of the people on the team, she’s encourage and positive and now, she’s getting some time on the floor, as well. What she’s been able to accomplish is nice for her, but it’s also a good sign of what some of the girls in our program that stick with it are able to do.”
White, who is in his first year as head coach after nine years as an assistant at North, said Reagan is a leader both on and off the court.
“She’s one of our more vocal people and has a good understanding of what it means to be a leader,” White said. “She’s encouraging, but knows how to hold people accountable at the same time.”
Reagan realizes that this is her last shot at organized basketball, and she’s making the most of it. She plans to go into nursing and is leaning toward attending IU.
Meanwhile, there’s another not-so-tiny twist to the Ables story. Reagan and Riley have an older brother Bryce who took Reagan to one of her eighth-grade games when their parents were out of town. Reagan’s eighth-grade coach, Brooke Ballard, caught Bryce’s eye, and they began dating and now are married.
Brooke now is in her second year as an assistant coach on the Columbus East girls coaching staff. Last year, the Bull Dogs and Olympians did not meet because North was in quarantine at the time the regular-season game was scheduled. But Thursday night, they’ll battle at North’s Memorial Gym.
“It’s kind of like a running joke,” Reagan said. “We asked my brother which side he’s going to sit on and who he’s going to cheer for. He said he’s going to come to my side because I’m playing, but we’ll see how it goes, how she likes that. Either way, we’re still family, so it should be fun.”
