Liedel rediscovers love of basketball by helping Mason team

ERIE – Joey Liedel has been in love with basketball since he was a little boy.

But his love started to wane.

That’s what happens when your love causes you pain.

A little over a year ago, Liedel was considering walking – or limping – away from the game.

After coming within 6 of the state record for career 3-pointers (334) and averaging 24.2 points per game and scoring 2,202 points in four years on the Erie Mason varsity team, he was at a crossroads.

It was painful every time he tried to work out or play a game.

“At one point in my head, I was not sure if wanted to play the game again,” he said. “The joy wasn’t there. For a minute there, I lost it.”

His hips were the problem.

“There was extra bone in my hips, right in the socket,” he said. “The doctors said it was from overuse. It just kept getting worse and worse.”

Like a Hallmark movie, it appears this love story will have a happy ending.

Double-hip surgery in the fall of 2021 seems to have eliminated the pain. And helping to coach Mason’s varsity team this season has renewed his love of basketball.

Liedel is in the process of looking for a new college home.

“It’s been a really rough process,” he said. “It’s been about a year (since the surgery). I am just starting to turn the corner where I feel the surgery did help. I’ve just started reaching out (to colleges). My first goal was to get healthy. Now, I’ve started reaching out to people.”

While Liedel was home trying to get healthy and pondering his future, Mason coach Kevin Skaggs offered him a chance to join his high school team as an assistant coach.

“He truly loves being around the team,” Skaggs said. “And we love having Joey around.”

Skaggs said Liedel was a shadow of his former self when he joined the team in June.

“It’s been so much fun watching the progress,” the coach said. “When he came back, he didn’t have that explosiveness and couldn’t turn his hips. … It’s taken this long, but all of a sudden you can see it coming back. It’s really exciting.”

Liedel often runs with the scout team during practice. During games, he keeps stats and participates in strategy discussions during timeouts.

“It’s been fun,” he said. “They are all good kids. I love being around Mason and Coach Skaggs. It’s the perfect fit. … It’s a joy being around the game again. I am just there to help when they need me. I try to make them better.”

Liedel first noticed the hip problem during his sophomore year in high school.

He managed the pain throughout his career at Mason, but it got worse during his first season at Division 1 University of Detroit-Mercy.

Liedel appeared in four games for the Titans, even hitting a 3-pointer against Notre Dame. He decided to transfer to Lake Superior State after getting just 15 total minutes of playing time.

The pain was holding him back.

Finally, he could not take it anymore.

During the fall of 2021, Liedel decided to have surgery on both hips spaced about a month apart.

“They basically scraped bone off my hips,” he said.

He spent several weeks on crutches, then slowly started working into his training regimen.

“I’ve been waiting a full year for the hips to really recover,” he said. “For four months, I was off the court. That’s the longest stretch I’ve taken off basketball since I was 4 years old.”

These days he works out two or three times per day.

“It’s usually about three to five hours a day,” he said. “I do lifting for an hour, then do a shooting workout. That’s 1,000 shots, so it takes about an hour to an hour and a half. Then I do a skill workout where I work on ballhandling and moves.”

Just recently he has started to see his game come back.

“It all started to come back and the joy came back, too,” he said.

Liedel could have returned to Lake Superior in the fall and worked out with professional trainers with the aim of returning for the second half of the season.

But he nixed the idea.

“I felt like I would have been cheating the game,” he said.

So now he is re-starting his college career. It’s almost like he has opened up the recruiting process again.

Part of that was because of advice from Skaggs.

“He called me and he was crying,” Skaggs recalls. “He said, ‘Coach, I can’t do it. I’ve got no explosiveness and it hurts. I don’t feel ready.’ I said, ‘You know your body. You’ve got to let this thing heal. The worst thing you can do is not be ready.’”

Liedel is now ready and believes he will know the right college when he sees it.

“I am open,” he said. “I want to do some visiting and find the right fit. … I want to decide in the next month or two. Windows are closing. I want to find something I like and jump on it.”

And when he makes that jump, it finally will be pain free.

This article originally appeared on The Monroe News: Liedel rediscovers love of basketball by helping Mason team