Life-Changing Experiences Allow Aurora Roberts to Bring Unique Strength to Lees-McRae
This is the continuation of a series of Body, Mind & Soul stories that highlights member student-athletes, coaches and administrators of Conference Carolinas.
BANNER ELK, N.C. - Lees-McRae’s Aurora Roberts has less than one year of college basketball experience. As for life experience, well, that's an entirely different story.
Roberts, a 5-foot-9 starting sophomore forward from Maplewood, Minnesota, has already faced enough adversity to last three lifetimes.
For a time, she appeared headed on the fast track to a promising basketball career. In fact, Aurora was so advanced as a young player, Tartan Senior High School summoned her to play on the varsity while she was still at an eighth grade feeder middle school.
“I was really skinny,” Roberts recalled. “I was probably 5-7 and weighed a buck twenty-five. But I was athletic and a workhorse. I loved the competition.”
Taught the sport’s finer points by her father (Craig Roberts), a former football and basketball player who attended Arizona State, Aurora took pride in her physical style of play.
“My dad is 6-3, 215 pounds and he used to really beat me up on the court,” she said. “He never took it easy on me. I think that’s why I used to play angry and enjoyed hurting people. I was nasty.”
The youngest of six children, Roberts also played pick-up games with her older brother and his friends. They forced her to elevate her game at a young age.
Her reputation in local high school basketball circles continued to grow in Maplewood, a suburb of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. However, Roberts’ life changed completely in July of 2017.
After playing in an AAU tournament in Chicago, Aurora began to feel sluggish and out of sorts. She took two days off when she returned to Maplewood. Her father, the tough taskmaster, then asked her to return to practice on a nearby court.
“We worked on making spin moves and I literally couldn’t do it,” she said. “My legs felt so heavy.”
They returned home, where her condition worsened quickly.
“I remember walking around the house,” she shared. “I couldn’t walk in a straight line and kept bumping into things.”
At that point, her father knew something was wrong. He rushed her to the emergency room at the local hospital, where blood and diagnostic tests came back normal.
“My dad is pretty old school, so he put me in the bath tub with epsom salts when we got home. I almost passed out and he had to help me get out of the tub.”
Aurora noted that her mother (Tonya Schaaf) could not help do the lifting, as she was recovering from stomach surgery. Little did Aurora know that her mom was suffering from cancer at the time, as her father chose not to share the news with her.
“My dad carried me to my bedroom,” added Aurora. “When he left, I slid off the bed. I lied on the floor and couldn’t get up. I didn’t want to freak out my parents, so I spent about 20 minutes on the floor trying to figure out a way to get up.”
Craig Roberts worked the night shift as a technician at 3M Corporation and soon left their home. However, before long, Aurora felt stabbing pains all over her body.
“My dad came home and took me back to the emergency room,” she said. “He carried me down 18 flights of stairs at our home to get to our car.”
Frightened beyond belief, Roberts was seen by a different physician at the hospital. Additional tests, including an eight-inch lumbar puncture procedure, confirmed her fastly-deteriorating condition. She was suffering from Guillain-Barré, a rapid onset muscle weakness caused by the immune system damaging the peripheral nerve system. Infection normally causes the condition.
“The only time I saw my dad cry was when he was sitting in the corner of my hospital room, watching them give me the lumbar puncture,” she recalled. “In order to do the procedure in my back, they had to get me in a fetal position. Since I could not move, it took three nurses to push me into that position.”
Aurora, who eventually became paralyzed from the neck down, remained in the hospital for the next six weeks.
“You could take a knife, stick it in the bottom of my feet and I couldn’t feel it,” she said.
Another complication of the disorder was digesting food. With her stomach not contracting to move food through the intestines, she continually threw up. It weakened her to the point that her weight had dropped from 135 to 112 pounds on a 5-foot-9 frame.
“My nerve endings were raw, which caused a lot of pain,” she added. “I was put on a lot of drugs, including morphine. I was on an IV for 10 straight days and wasn’t eating; just drinking.”
Eventually plasma treatments helped her recover and she began to regain feeling to her body. She was released on Aug. 5, 2017 from the hospital but her ordeal was far from over.
“I still couldn’t walk,” she said. “My arms were weak but I could move them. My legs felt numb, kind of like when you sit down for a long time and they fall asleep. They sent me to a rehabilitation facility.”
With rehab, her doctors told her it would take two to two-and-half years before she could play sports again. They also said that if she came back too soon she could cause permanent damage.
“In my mind, I was going to prove everyone wrong,” Aurora claimed. “I told them I was going to get back quicker. My birthday was Aug. 10 and I was going to be home on my birthday!”
A woman of her word, Roberts worked diligently to pass her final tests and she was allowed to return home for her birthday. However, she only had a matter of weeks to re-learn how to walk so she could start school on time.
“I told my parents, ‘I’m not going to school in a wheelchair!” Aurora said. “My parents thought I was joking. I told them y’all better hope it doesn’t come to this. Until I could walk, my choices were either a wheelchair or a walker. I went to an exercise therapist.”
She admits that she “was angry at the world,” but it drove her to complete the exercise regimen necessary to clear her for classes and walk again.
That 2017-18 academic year proved successful in the classroom for Roberts, however, she was not allowed to practice basketball during pre-season workouts. She was ordered not to run, jog or lift any heavy objects.
“My dad told the coach, ‘If she shows up for workouts, send her home,’” she said with a chuckle.
Her dad insisted she gain her lost weight back before she could play again.
“He said I couldn’t play in games until I weighed 145 pounds. I was eating like a football player! I kept forcing myself to eat more and more.”
Eventually she got the green light to return before the season started, although her usual 40-minutes per game workload was trimmed to less than 15 minutes in her comeback sophomore year.
“I was so slow,” she admitted. “My vertical (jump) was zero. I was used to getting steals on defense but now I couldn’t even stay in front of slower players.”
Just as Aurora was starting to turn the corner on the hardwood, her world came crashing down yet again. Her mother’s stomach cancer had grown worse and she passed away on Easter Sunday her sophomore year of high school.
“My dad didn’t tell me it was serious until the very end,” she said. “I guess he wanted to protect me. My mom was admitted back into hospital the day before she died. I woke up the next morning and my house was empty. My dad had been gone all night. When he came back, he told me to get dressed and we went to the hospital. My mom was sitting in bed on life support. We just said our goodbyes.”
The self-reliance taught by Aurora’s father immediately kicked in, however.
“My alarm clock went off,” she remembered. “My dad heard me getting dressed. He walked into my room and said ‘You know, you don’t have to go to school, don’t you?’ I just told him, ‘You want me to take the bus or are you going to drive me?’”
Heartbroken but determined, Aurora attended classes that Monday and never missed a day of high school after that.
And with long hours in the weight room and the basketball court that summer, Aurora’s extraordinary athleticism returned.
“I felt stronger and better than ever entering my junior year,” she said.
Displaying her all-around game, the defensive-minded Aurora averaged 12 points, eight rebounds and four steals per game in earning all-conference honors at Tartan Senior High School that junior season.
With plans to graduate early after the first semester of her senior year, Aurora and her father traveled to several elite basketball camps in Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota and other states in hopes a college recruiter might deem Roberts worthy of a scholarship.
“I wanted to graduate high school by Thanksgiving then work to save up money to be a regular college student. But my dad wanted me to go to one final basketball camp in Georgia just in case.”
Keith Jennings, the fourth-year Lees-McRae head women’s basketball coach who enjoyed a past NBA playing career with the Golden State Warriors (1994-95) and Denver Nuggets (1996-97), shares his side of that story.
“My assistant (Jaterra Hurst) saw Aurora at the camp,” Jennings said. “She called me up and said, ‘I think we got one here who could help us right now!’ When I watched the video she sent me, I was amazed. I think the stars just aligned for us. We asked her to join us soon after that.”
Aurora accepted the offer and enrolled in classes at Lees-McRae after Christmas 2019.
“I had told my players that she was coming at mid-season,” said Coach Jennings. “I let them know so they had a chance to perform, but I also told them that Aurora does some things on the court that they weren’t capable of doing. The best players will play.”
Jennings, who played under future Hall of Fame coaches Don Nelson and Gregg Popovich in the NBA, appreciated Roberts’ well-rounded game immediately. Eventually she earned a starting job at the tail end of last season.
Utilized as both a guard and forward, she showed glimpses of her enormous potential in a particular game against Southern Wesleyan. In only 20 minutes of play, Aurora scored nine points on 4-of-6 shooting. She grabbed four rebounds and had two steals.
While her half-season averages of 3.1 points and 3.4 rebounds in 19.1 minutes were somewhat modest, Jennings predicts a great future for Roberts. In fact, he has already penciled her in as a starter this upcoming season.
“Aurora brings such energy every day,” said Jennings. “She’s going to play a pivotal part on this year’s team. She came here as a diamond-in-the-rough but her athleticism already separates herself from most players. She’s also great on the academic side and as a great teammate.”
Jennings also praised Roberts’ mental and physical toughness and her eagerness to improve through studying and hard work.
“With everything we threw at her last year, she handled all of it and grew as a player,” said the coach. “By the time she’s done here, I think she might be one of the best players this school has ever had.”
In listening to Jennings, it’s also clear that he and his prize pupil have formed a special bond.
“You can just tell she loves the game by looking in her eyes,” he said. “She really wants to take advantage of the opportunity I’m giving her. I also love that we ‘trash talk’ each other all the time. She’s as competitive as I am. These days, you see a lot of players who just want to be the star and take all the shots. Aurora is different. She‘s all about the team and winning. I definitely love seeing her every time she comes through my office door.”
Jennings also said Roberts is very mature for her age, probably due to her harrowing experiences in high school. Aurora credits her father for molding her into a self-reliant and tough-minded person.
“I owe a lot to my dad,” she said. “He always pushed me to be better. If I had a good game in AAU he would never tell me I was good. It might have frustrated me at the time, but looking back, he did the right thing. He kept me humble and gave me a thick skin. Now, it doesn’t really bother me if a coach or opponent yells at me. I’ve heard things 10 times worse from the man who brought me into the world!”
Confronted with life-changing events such as temporary paralysis and her mother dying at an early age also help shape the young woman Aurora has become.
“Going through that, I learned that some people are stronger than others,” she said. “It kind of changed me as a person. No one wants to have a bad game, but to me, it’s not the end of the world. Some view basketball as their life, but I have found value outside of basketball. Failure no longer bothers me. I don’t fear it because I’m still living, I’m strong and I’m unbreakable.”
Roberts is majoring in psychology at Lees-McRae College and, of course, plans to graduate early so she can pursue a master’s degree. She hopes to pursue a post-basketball career in trauma psychology.
Considering her own life experiences, it sounds like a logical choice.
Bob Rose is a longtime sports public relations executive who has worked for the San Francisco Giants, Oakland Athletics, the NFL Cardinals, Cal, Stanford and other organizations.
