NEWCASTLE basketball prodigy Isabel Palmer is desperate to hit the ground running when she returns to the University of Texas.
Most of all, the 19-year-old wants to play pain free.
Palmer will have surgery next month to remove "metal work" from the ankle she had surgically repaired after snapping a lisfranc ligament at the Australian championships in February 2019.
The former Australian Institute of Sport star battled through her freshman year in the NCAA Division One program in constant pain.
Palmer played 27 games for the Longhorns, averaging 11 minutes and contributing three points, one assist and one rebound per outing.
Given the injury-interrupted start to her college career, they were numbers she expected to put up.
"The whole season, it was hard to function properly," said Palmer, who has been home for two months due to the COVID-19 pandemic which shut down the US. "If I went in there fit, I could have competed a lot more. I was basically checked into the game to shoot threes. It was frustrating. I was getting MRI's done and they were showing up nothing. Mentally it was very challenging. I am normally pretty level headed...I thought I was going crazy."
Once home, Palmer had a bone scan and will undergo minor surgery on June 27.
"I have a screw and a tightrope with buttons on the end in my ankle from the last surgery," she said. "The surgeon is talking about removing the tightrope and leaving the screw in because it is embedded in the foot. In a couple of weeks, I should know if that is what was causing the pain. Within a month, I should be progressing back to full fitness. I hope to be 100 per cent when I go back to college. I want to go in injury free."
Palmer originally injured the ankle playing for NSW against Victoria in the dying seconds of the national championship final.
"I dived on a loose ball on the ground and a couple of Victorians landed on my leg and it twisted," she said.
She scored 20 points in the decider and was named player of the tournament.
"I had never been injured before," she said. "I felt so good at the national 20s. I had worked for a couple of years and felt really good. My goal is to get my foot right, go back to Texas fit and fight for a starting position."
Texas finished third in the Big 12 Conference last season and had arrived in Kansas for the conference tournament when COVID-19 reached flashpoint in the US.
"We were to play the next day and it got cancelled," Palmer said. "We all flew back to Austin and then I went to my grandmas in Florida. From there I flew to Houston and then on to Sydney."
Palmer's younger brother Brendan, a talented basketballer, has type-one diabetes and on arrival Isabel spent 14 days quarantined in an apartment in Adamstown.
" I came from such a hot spot and went to so many different airports in a week," she said. "I didn't want to put Brendan at risk. There was a grass patch out the back and I had a window and everyone who wanted to see me came around and sat on chairs. I had company all the time."
Palmer is studying a degree in exercise science at Texas and ankle struggles aside enjoyed her first year at college and can't wait to return, most likely in July.
"The school has 52,000 students enrolled and it was a big change from Australia," she said "There are two Aussies in the whole school. We get about 3000 people to our games, some schools get 10000. The most I had played in front of was 200 max. We went to Kansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Iowa...it was cool to see real America.
"The workload is pretty intense. The NCAA allows colleges four hours a day to train and you have to log how many hours you so, that includes film, weights and everything. Class finish at 1pm and we would race to be at practice for 1.30pm. We would do an hour of film, 30 minutes of weights and then on the court until 5.30. We had school work on top of that. It was different, but it was cool."
