College interest in Salpointe's Taliyah Henderson stays high as she battles back from knee injury

Taliyah Henderson was excited.

In front of her stood a baseline full of college coaches at the Hoosier Heat basketball event in Indianapolis this past July; it was just the opportunity she’d been working on since her last big tournament in Texas.

They already knew she could play defense. That’s one of her calling cards. And despite averaging nearly 19 points per game during the 2022-23 season at Salpointe Catholic, she had been working to improve her shooting, too.

She spent countless hours in the gym — getting up as early as 5 a.m. — to improve on driving to the hoop, pull ups and post ups. Henderson knows that being a 6-1 wing at the next level means she needs to be even more of a versatile player.

Around five minutes into her game with AZ Supreme, her AAU team, her opponent hit her left leg; all her weight was on that leg at that moment. It buckled.

“It wasn’t the first time I had injured it, but it was the first time I knew something was really wrong,” Henderson said.

She was right. Henderson tore her medial meniscus. A few days later after returning to Tucson on July 13, she had surgery.

As Salpointe Catholic’s 2023-24 regular season kicks into full gear this week, Henderson is on the sidelines cheering on her teammates.

The Lancers have been without the services of the top player in the state and the No. 34 ranked player in ESPN HoopGurlz Super 60 for the Class of 2025. Recently, she was on the Top 20 forwards in the nation by Sports Illustrated. She is also AZ Preps reigning Southern Arizona player of the year.

While her recovery is coming along on schedule — she was only wearing her large cumbersome knee brace for school and crowds just two months after surgery — Henderson and her family decided it would be best for her to come back when she is fully in basketball shape and ready to go. As of Tuesday afternoon, that meant in a few weeks. Most likely in early January for the heart of conference play.

These past couple of weeks, she started going up against live contact in practice — the final hurdle. Still, it was controlled and situational, according to Salpointe Catholic coach Joe Luevano, who has been intentional and cautious about her return to play from the get-go.

His main goal throughout recovery is for Henderson to “return playing until she is potentially the healthiest and best version of herself that she’s ever been.”

That means no extra pressure for Henderson to get back on the court quickly.

“She can just focus on getting healthy,” Luevano said. “It’s tough. Even though it wasn’t necessarily categorized as a major injury, it is a major injury, especially at her age, and especially for someone who has the aspirations that she has in the longevity of her life and as an athlete.

“We want her back when she’s 100%.”

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It helps that Salpointe is one loaded team. In the junior class alone — a group of players who won a championship when they were freshmen — there are a number of Lancers who also will be playing college basketball in Sidney Anderson, Hannah Williams, Allison Even and Jordan Watts. Jolee Nelson, Naomi Schoenhage, Ava Dagnino and Sienna Espinosa round out that special class.

“I’ve been asking a lot of coaches who have been coaching Tucson for a long time,” Luevano said. “I believe it is the most talented individual class at one school at one time in Tucson history.

“I could be wrong with that. I mean, I don’t know ‘80s and ‘90s history as well. But it is an incredibly special class in terms of how talented they are,” Luevano added. “All of those kids are all high academic. They’re all hovering somewhere around a 4.0 (GPA). It’s a really incredible group and Taliyah drives that a lot.”

Henderson is a two-sport athlete who has won seven state championships in all — six in track, with four of them in individual events. She said that even before she started playing in that game in Indiana, her leg felt “wonky.” She just brushed it off as typical aches and pains.

After she fell, she was in a little pain and discomfort and was ready to push through that to get back into the game.

“It honestly felt like my kneecap was shifting inwards — like everything in my knee was just shifting,” Henderson said. “And for times it happened before it shifted back because my meniscus was able to pull it back down. But unfortunately, not this time. It felt a little uncomfortable. I did try my 100% hardest to try to get back in. I tried to take off my knee brace try to fix it to hopefully help but unfortunately, that was not the case. I was not able to walk for probably about a week.”

Yes, this had happened before. Just a few weeks before at another camp. It was a game she didn’t even have to play and she “had a little feeling in her gut was like, ‘Maybe you shouldn’t go in.’”

But the Lancers were losing, so she had to help her teammates.

“I was like, ‘Oh, just go ahead for a few minutes.’ I ended up jump stopping and someone ran into me and my knee popped,” Henderson said. “I went to go get looked at by the trainer and they said it was an MCL sprain at the time. I was I thought it was OK to play. My dad is a physical therapist, so he helped me work through it, we got a knee brace so that I could still play. And unfortunately, that was not the case.”

With her own personal physical therapist at home — that’s dad, Anthony — she was doing extra workouts during recovery. Mainly band work and isolation for other body parts – hips, glutes, hamstrings, quads – and work on her right leg to balance things out.

Throughout recovery, those college offers didn’t go anywhere. The coaches kept calling to check in with her and came to Tucson to see her (BYU in September). She received an offer from Oregon in November and went on unofficial visits to Michigan and Arizona this fall.

Her decision on where to play on the next level will come soon enough. For now, her focus has been on baking, sketching and painting and one other thing: getting back onto the court.

“I’m coming back sooner rather than later and I will be definitely better than ever,” Henderson said.

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