FAYETTEVILLE — Covid-19 finished the Arkansas women's basketball season before the Razorbacks could make their long-awaited appearance in the NCAA Tournament, but for Jailyn Mason the season ended about five months earlier.
Mason, a senior from Mason, Ohio, was preparing to finish her last season of college basketball on a high note.
"When you're a senior you're starting to plan out more of your life" Mason said. "I was going to graduate, finish my senior year off with a good season and then hopefully go play overseas or somewhere here."
Instead, Mason spent her season watching the Razorbacks - ranked for the majority of the year - from the bench with an ankle injury.
During Mason's time at Arkansas winning hasn't always been guaranteed. During her freshman season the Razorbacks went 13-17 and won just two games in the SEC. Her sophomore season, the first under then-new head coach Mike Neighbors, saw a similar record 13-18 and 3-13 in the SEC.
It wasn't until her junior season in 2018-19 that the Razorbacks started having success. They made a run to the championship game in the SEC Tournament and won twice during the WNIT. With most of the same players coming back, Arkansas was expected to compete with the top of the SEC in 2019-20, but Mason's season ended before the first game was played.
"We were doing mostly scrimmaging and competition over anything," Mason said, "just trying to make sure we were in shape and prepared to go the way we needed to go."
Mason stepped to the free throw line and after she jumped for a rebound she landed awkward.
"I didn't twist my ankle or anything. It just kind of felt off when I landed," Mason said. "I tried to run and it just was not happening for me. So I came out for a little bit."
Mason continued to practice for the next week, trying four different taping methods and different treatments to see if anything would help. After a week, Mason and team trainer Natalie Trotter decided it was time to get an MRI. The scan revealed Mason had torn a tendon.
Now she was faced with a choice: have surgery and fix the injury, but have a longer recovery period, or get a Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) shot and get on the court sooner, but have an increased risk of injuring herself again.
A PRP shot is an injection of plasma into an injured part of the body, according to Web MD. According to the website, a doctor draws your blood, separates the platelet rich plasma from the blood with a machine, and then injects the plasma into the injured area.
For Mason the PRP shot was a way she could get back on the court with her team, but it wasn't a guaranteed success.
"I would have had to been out for 4-5 weeks," she said. "No weight or anything, and then rehabbing for a couple of weeks after that to make sure my ankle was functioning the way it was supposed to... The only problem was it wasn't 100 percent effective. I could still tear it some more if I twisted it the wrong way (or) ran it the wrong way."
After discussions with her mom and Neighbors, Mason decided that season-ending surgery was the best option for her.
"When you have surgery it just gets fixed right then and there," Mason said. "I didn't want to start a season and then end up losing most of it or all of it due to tearing it some more. so I figured why not go ahead and get the surgery."
After Mason was ruled out for the season, Neighbors said the decision had been thought out well.
"If you know this kid she's got a computer laptop full of questions and she checked the boxes off," Neighbors said. "We've been talking about it literally every week since it happened: How do you feel? What do you think? Let's not rush this. We could have easily said at the beginning of the year, 'She's redshirting the entire year,' but that's just not Jailyn Mason."
Mason took the recovery process one day at a time, setting goals to keep her motivated.
"First was to get through surgery the right way," she said. "Then when I went to rehab I had to make sure that I focused mostly on rehab and try not to move too far ahead so quickly."
During the rehab process Mason had to sit on the bench, something she's not familiar with after starting every game during her first two seasons at Arkansas.
"I had to do a lot of self searching and positive reinforcement because it was something that I had never dealt with before," Mason said. "I have a passion to maybe go into coaching one day so to sit there and see how our coaches actually do it, up close and personal. That was really interesting for me."
Mason didn't just sit on the bench, though. Once she was cleared to practice she took on many identities.
"Now she's practicing full speed as the other teams best players," Neighbors said during the season. "So far she's been (SEC star players) Chennedy Carter, Zia Cooke. She's kind of enjoyed that role."
"I really paid attention to who I was going to be playing as when we did our scout team," Mason said. "I just tried to gather their tendencies as much as possible and do what (assistant coach Todd Schaefer) told me what was mostly what they did."
Mason said that acting as another person improved her game because she got to work on things that maybe weren't in her arsenal. It also provided some competition in practice.
"I got to beat up on my teammates and they got to beat up on me," she said, "but it was always a fun competition."
"She kicked our butt the other day in practice too," Neighbors said at one point during the season. "It was that kind of moment when you're like man what would of happened if she were playing 38 minutes a night right now."
Although she was playing, Mason could feel her teammates despair when the NCAA Tournament was canceled a week before it was scheduled to begin.
"When we got that call and everyone saw on Twitter or Facebook or whatever that the tournament had been canceled, you could kind of feel in our group messages and in our phone calls that everybody was extremely disappointed," she said.
The preparation for next season hasn't ended for Mason. She's currently working out and getting shots up at an outdoor YMCA in Tennessee.
With a number of players expected to return again, Mason expects the Razorbacks goals to grow even bigger next year.
"I see a lot of growth," she said. "We kind of played with a chip on our shoulder and I think that that's going to be even bigger this year because we were robbed of an opportunity to play in the NCAA Tournament. So there is a big goal that we're going to have for next year."