OSU guard spent most of final year battling ailments; only to come out on top

Opposing teams weren’t the only thing to double-team Oregon State University guard Casey Nash during the second half of her senior season.

The Pacific-10 Conference all-star also battled with two large kidney stones in her left side that kept the 6-foot-1 left-hander in constant pain throughout the final six weeks of the season.

“I’d had back pain and hamstring problems for about two years, so I thought they were just back spasms or muscle-related stuff,” Nash said.

After the Jan. 28 Oregon game it started to become a different pain, so she got a CT scan. Two large kidney stones measuring about 14 and nine millimeters, much larger than the normal five milliliter variety.

“Go big or go home, right?” Nash said.

She and the OSU coaching and medical staff kept her condition under wraps.

“I didn’t want anyone to know,” Nash said. “It was my senior year, and I just wanted to finish out strong. It was my senior year, my last shot and I had to give everything I could to get through it.”

She later broke her nose and split her lip at Washington, but returned for the second half of that game and gutted it out the rest of the season. She ended up leading the Pac-10 in scoring with a 20.0-point average and played 38 minutes a game.

Nash had laser surgery at Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center earlier this month to pulverize the kidney stones. They did not pass, however, and she underwent another operation on March 14 to clear the resultant blockage.

She was hospitalized for six days by the second operation, and that will prevent her from attending Thursday’s WNBA pre-draft camp in Cleveland.

“Coach (LaVonda Wagner) and I talked about it and since my surgery took a lot out of me we figured (attending the camp) might hurt me more than benefit me if I’m not at full strength,” Nash said. “So we’ve decided to go a different route.”

Nash is now healthy and regaining her strength. She’s working out again with a personal trainer, and has signed with agent Orlando Castano of Irvine, Calif., to pursue professional opportunities in the WNBA or overseas, where her husband, former OSU guard J.S. Nash, is playing professionally.

Castano is also the agent for former OSU center Kim Butler, Nash’s teammate in 2005 and 2006. Butler is now playing in Israel after beginning her career in Greece last fall.

“Orlando will get my name out there and all my stuff together,” Nash said.

The Connecticut Sun and several other WNBA teams have shown interest. She hopes to get invited to a training camp somewhere; they open in mid-April and the season starts May 3.

“Maybe she makes it, maybe she doesn’t,” Wagner said. “That helps her down the road with her original goal, which is to play overseas. She has more than a legit chance to play pro ball in a venue we talked about last year, overseas. That’s where a lot of players go, and do well.”

Nash is left-handed, which raises her value, can play guard, wing or forward and played well against top competition.

“She executed against Stanford, Texas, Cal and Arizona State and those are the coaches that are talking to the scouts,” Wagner said.

The kidney stones and broken nose were actually the second and third medical obstacles Nash overcame last season. She had a flesh-eating virus in late November and early December that took a golf ball-sized chunk out of her left ankle and briefly spread to her face.

“It was a strain of staph infection,” Nash said. “It was sick, it made a huge hole and my ankle was nasty. We just didn’t want people to know.

“It seemed like my toughest year physically because I got everything thrown at me but I just dealt with it as it came.”

Wagner said trainers constantly monitored Nash and she was never a medical danger to herself or anyone else.

“It would have been easy for her to say, ‘I don’t want to do this,’ ” Wagner said. “She was in a lot of situations where she just could have sat down and given in, and it would have been OK with her staff and teammates. Casey was extremely tough for us. That’s one of the reasons I have a tremendous, tremendous amount of respect for her.”