Olivia Miles has fought back from a knee injury. She’s set to return in Notre Dame’s star backcourt

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — There were plenty of days that Olivia Miles felt the pangs of frustration building alongside the pain and soreness, all part of the Notre Dame All-American point guard’s push to rehab her way back from a serious knee injury.

Sometimes it came during the exercise she hated most: lying on the ground, wrapping an elastic band around her foot and pulling it over her shoulder to force her surgically repaired right knee to bend farther than it wanted.

“Just a lot of discomfort,” Miles said. “It’s also tough because you know you’re not playing.”

Those moments are now small steps in the climb back to this moment. On the verge of the payoff. Within weeks of returning to college basketball for the first time since February 2023. Now she’s set to play with Hannah Hidalgo, the freshman who rose to stardom in her absence, and form a backcourt formidable enough to make the Fighting Irish a strong contender to reach the sport’s final weekend.

The road there will include pushing through a demanding ACC race that will feature an N.C. State team that reached last year’s Final Four, the addition of perennial power Stanford from the Pac-12 and a host of teams that reached last year’s NCAA Tournament like Louisville, Virginia Tech, Duke and North Carolina.

The Irish need Miles. She’s ready.

“I just continually worked on: ‘This is happening for you, not to you — this is happening for your career, for the better of your body,’” Miles said Tuesday during the “ACC Tipoff” preseason basketball media days. “I feel like I was able to come back as a result stronger, both physically and mentally, and just more confident.”

Miles is a 5-foot-10 floor leader with excellent passing vision, yet she also works on the glass to lead the break and has the valuable skill of taking over games without launching shot after shot.

She became the first men’s or women’s freshman to post a triple-double in the NCAA Tournament in 2022, and was putting the final touches on a season that had made her an Associated Press second-team All-American when she crashed to the baseline after her right knee buckled on a drive at Louisville in the 2023 regular-season finale.

Miles, who writhed on the floor and yelled in pain that grim Sunday, had suffered a torn anterior cruciate ligament. She later returned to the bench to celebrate a win that clinched the ACC outright regular-season title — her right leg wrapped in a bandage from thigh to ankle — but missed the postseason and ultimately all of 2023-24.

The weeks leading up to this season are giving her the chance to build rapport with Hidalgo, who ranked as one of the nation’s top scorers (22.6) on the way to becoming a first-team AP All-American and leading the Irish to the ACC Tournament title while Miles could only watch from the sideline. It was a star-making season for Hidalgo, who joined fellow freshman JuJu Watkins at USC in offering a pair of we-got-next potential for women’s college basketball at a time when Iowa megastar Caitlin Clark was closing her college career.

Coach Niele Ivey looks at the two as “interchangeable guards” who have the ability to help each other: Miles to take some scoring weight off Hidalgo, Hidalgo to help Miles build back to elite form.

“I guess that’s the big question everyone always asks, is how it’s going to work out,” Hidalgo said of meshing their talents. “I think the puzzle pieces go together perfectly. And I know Coach Ivey, she recruits puzzle pieces. She doesn’t just recruit a whole bunch of different great players. We all fit together well.”

Then again, that’s an easy task compared to what Miles has faced in her recovery.

It was a slow march from barely being able to jog at the start of preseason practices, then eventually building up to doing some light 5-on-0 noncontact work before ultimately being cleared in February. Along the way, her rehab work to improve her knee flexibility and restrengthen progressed — leg lifts, squats and leg presses, that cursed elastic-band work — in a grueling march from checkpoint to milestone and checkpoint again in her recovery.

“This injury is like a wave,” Miles said. “I always compare it to that, because one day you’re going to feel great and the next day you’re going to come in sore and not being able to move. ... I’m trying to stay balanced. But yeah, there are days when I come in and I feel so good and I’m like, ‘Yeah I’m back.’ But then there are other days where I’m like, ‘Maybe I still need a little bit more work.’”

The good news was Ivey knew what to watch for considering she tore each of her ACLs during her playing career with the Fighting Irish. That included those days when Ivey could just tell that Miles was a little down from the look on her face after a rough rehab workout.

“When you come back from ACL injury, there’s like like a two- or three-month gap that you’re in the same spot,” Ivey said. “You’re actually physically improving. But you don’t you know. ... You still like you feel like you’re stuck in the same spot. I know she had a couple of those moments.”

Ultimately, Ivey said, it’s about Miles taking the time to build back the trust in her knee and the confidence “that everything’s going to be OK.”

Miles sounds like she already believes that.

“I mean, I feel better than I’ve ever felt,” she said.