It wasn’t even an official practice, and truth be told, Koby Klaus would have been wise to sit this one out.
On Oct. 2, 2016, Klaus joined several other players, including a handful from De Soto, for the Sunday open gym session at Grandview.
“The week before, I sprained my ankle, and I probably shouldn’t have been playing,” Klaus admitted. “But these other guys came out, so I decided I wanted to come out and play.”
While driving for a layup, Klaus came down on someone’s foot and twisted his right knee, although Klaus said he initially thought he just knocked knees with another player.
“It’s not a big deal to bump knees, it happens all the time, and I just thought that’s what happened, but it never really went away,” Klaus said. “I wore a brace on it for a few days, but that didn’t really help.”
Klaus eventually saw a doctor, and a few days later, he got the news: A torn ACL. The injury would require surgery, which took place on Oct. 31, and with the likelihood of a six-month rehabilitation period, Klaus would miss his entire junior basketball season.
“When we told him, he was really upset,” said Koby’s dad, Jim Klaus, a junior varsity coach with the Eagles. “He pretty much knew that he had something really wrong, but until you find out for sure, you can always hope it’s something else. He kept trying to tell himself that there wasn’t anything wrong, because after a little bit, he was able to walk on it and stuff, but he was just lying to himself. There was no stability to the knee.”
It was a huge blow to a Grandview team that had won 13 games during the 2015-16 season and 15 the year before that, with Klaus leading the way in points and assists each season. In fact, Klaus, who had eclipsed the 1,000-point total before the end of his sophomore campaign, finished that season fifth in scoring in the entire St. Louis metropolitan area, averaging 22.7 points, and eighth in assists at 6.44 per game.
“We were devastated for the most part,” said Grandview coach Chris Miller, whose team went 3-21 without Klaus last winter. “We were going into practice, and everyone was kind of looking around thinking, ‘Well, what do we do now?’ You don’t want to ever say that one kid is your focal point, but he makes such a big difference for us, and he would for anybody.”
But that devastation paled in comparison to what Klaus was going through.
“Probably the third game (Grandview) played, it finally hit me – I finally realized that I’m not playing at all this season,” he said.
“It was just hard. It was emotionally hard for him,” Jim Klaus said. “It was funny, though. As soon as he was up and able to move around, coach Miller teased him that he was the best manager he’d ever had, because he was getting water for the boys when they were coming in for timeouts, he was washing clothes, the uniforms, cleaning up the locker room, cleaning up the offices. It was whatever he could do, just so he could stay close to the game and stay close to the team.”
Klaus said probably the most difficult part of the whole ordeal was regaining the strength in his leg. And adding insult to injury, Klaus contracted mononucleosis right around Christmas.
“He was really struggling there for a while,” Jim Klaus said. “He went from about 170 pounds to less than 150 during that time.”
“It’s definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever been through,” Klaus said. “Going through all of that, going through all of the rehab, strengthening it back up, and I lost a lot of strength in my other leg, too, because I was off of both of them.”
But all that would have been a lot harder, he conceded, if it had happened during his senior season.
“Watching the guys play every game, just really wanting to get back out there, that was probably the biggest motivation for me,” he said.
It wouldn’t be until June before he was able to get back on the court with his teammates, albeit on a limited basis, during a team camp at St. James. Not long after, Klaus was seeing game action at point guard with his AAU team, the St. Louis Gateway Basketball Club, playing a trio of tournaments in Spartansburg, S.C., back home in St. Louis, then out in Las Vegas.
“I was very pleased with his play those few tournaments, because he was out there playing with kids who were just super quick, and even though he had lost a half a step and hadn’t gained it back, he was still really hard to guard,” his father said. “He’s just got this knack of being able to set people up and just blow by them.”
Klaus also has a work ethic that helped him grind through all of the rehab, all of the workouts with a personal trainer, to be ready to lead Grandview for his senior season.
“I tell you what – the kid works unbelievably hard,” Jim Klaus said. “I’m just so happy that he’s come back, and he’s earned everything that he’s gotten. There’s nothing that’s been handed to him. With this knee injury, there’s a lot of kids who just kind of end up off the grid after something like that.”
Instead, Klaus has worked his way back among the area’s top players. Grandview has opened the season 3-1 after winning two out of three games during the Rolla “Duke” Herbert Tournament at Crystal City, and averaging 26.7 points per game, Klaus ranks fourth in the region.
“I guess he’s ready to play,” Miller said.
And ready to take his talents to the next level. While he missed out on prime recruitment time during his junior season, Klaus said he’s eager to prove to college coaches that he’s back to 100 percent.
“Coming into the senior season, I’m hoping to start off strong, get some colleges in mind, and just keep moving forward,” he said.