FOUR-TIME ALL-STAR KATIE Power hasn’t ruled herself out of making a return from a lengthy knee injury during Kilkenny’s Littlewoods Camogie League campaign provided her team-mates emerge from their group and reach the latter stages of this year’s competition.
The Piltown forward broke her kneecap last October during an innocuous incident in training ahead of Kilkenny’s All-Ireland championship group game against Waterford. Power had returned only weeks earlier from a spell on the sidelines with a badly damaged finger that required several surgeries.
She subsequently missed Kilkenny’s All-Ireland-winning campaign and is yet to play a competitive minute of camogie, or indeed actively participate in team training, since that freak incident in October.
However, Power is at least mobile again and, after over seven months out, she’s tentatively eyeing a return to action — perhaps even as soon as mid-summer, all going well.
“Look, last year was a bit of a disaster to probably put it mildly but I’m looking forward to this year,” Power said at a press conference to officially launch the Littlewoods Ireland Camogie Leagues. “It can only get better for me personally.
“I’m back on grass doing a bit of running. Obviously, I’m not back with collective training. I’m there when the girls are training but please God now, I’ll get back to some action hopefully during the summer.
“I’m back doing straight-line stuff the last three or four weeks. It’s great, people are saying, ‘You must be fierce sick of watching training.’
I’m delighted to be doing that because last year, I was rocking up to training and I had to get a lift off someone and had to get help getting out of the car and I was on crutches. Now, I feel like I’m part of it again and feel like I’m doing something. Look, it’s a slow process and I’m under no illusions on that. I was told that when I was coming back, but I’m delighted to be back doing something anyway and baby steps are better than no steps.
Power, a personal trainer based at TJ Reid’s TJR Health and Fitness facility, hasn’t yet pucked around much but says that “hopefully in the next couple of weeks, that’ll be incorporated” into her own training.
Currently, she meets with Kilkenny’s fitness trainer 90 minutes before each team session to continue her long road back to the field of play.
She then observes her team-mates from the sideline, just as she did as Brian Dowling’s women fended off Galway to claim All-Ireland success in December.
But even though her own progress is slow, steady, and partially swollen, Power hasn’t given up on joining them even for the precursor to their O’Duffy Cup defence. She believes it possible that she could sneak some minutes towards the end of the league campaign, but only if Kilkenny extend that campaign by making it out of their three-team group with Dublin and Offaly.
“It depends on how well the girls do,” Power said. “They’ve only two group games and then it depends on if they get out of them.
“I don’t have a date. The physio hasn’t set me a date, the management haven’t set me a date because there’s still two screws in my kneecap and it’s harder to recover than obviously if they weren’t there.
“I am still swelling a small bit so with that recovery, sometimes it can 24 hours, sometimes it can take 48 hours. So, I don’t have a date.
“Ideally, I’d love to get minutes in the league but it will depend on how the girls get on and how the recovery stays going as well I suppose.”
New research conducted by Littlewoods Ireland reveals 89% of the population cannot name a current camogie player, but Littlewoods Ireland is determined to change that. The Littlewoods Ireland Camogie Leagues begin Saturday 15 May. Littlewoods Ireland and the Camogie Association will be live streaming a number of games throughout the Leagues for free across @LWI_GAA Twitter. #StyleOfPlay
