1992-93 / The Times’ All-Valley Boys’ Basketball Team : It Pains Him Even More <i> Not</i> to Play : Sore Knees and All, Notre Dame’s Monte Marcaccini Has Season to Remember

Sometimes the cure is worse than the pain itself.

Monte Marcaccini’s knees are pain-free, finally. The remedy seems to have been Marcaccini spending the past 3 1/2 weeks not doing what he loves. Playing basketball.

“It’s hard,” the standout swingman from Notre Dame High said, “especially when I go by the parks. Every time I go by one I want to go play.”

The irony: Marcaccini’s knees, sore from tendinitis, got that way because of 17 solid months of playing basketball, a positive effect of which was to make Marcaccini The Times’ Valley player of the year.

“If I would have known after the summer that I should have rested, I never would have had a problem at all,” Marcaccini said. “But no one told me, so I just kept playing and playing.”

As a result, Marcaccini went from being a good high school player who attracted little college interest to signing with Indiana. He finished the season having led Notre Dame to the Southern Section Division III-A championship--the school’s first.

Bad knees and all.

“I don’t want to make a big deal about it,” said Marcaccini, a 6-foot-5 1/2 senior. “A lot of people play with pain. It stopped me from doing a lot of the things I wanted to do, but I felt like I played all right.”

Marcaccini scored 19.7 points and grabbed 11.4 rebounds per game, both team highs. He made Cal-Hi’s Division III All-State team, as well as two All-Southern Section teams--Division III and overall--and the All-Mission League team.

He led the Knights to a 25-7 record, and it could have been better. Notre Dame lost only once by more than seven--a 86-65 loss to eventual state runner-up Morningside in the semifinals of the Southern California regionals.

He did it all with a limp.

“He looked like an old man the way he was hobbling around,” teammate Ryan Stromsborg said.

Marcaccini is certain the tendinitis was a result of the nonstop banging of basketball. Last summer was the first since he began playing the sport that he did not return to Italy, where he was born. He stayed in Southern California to play in tournaments, showcasing his abilities to college recruiters.

It worked--he was recruited by some 50 schools--but as Notre Dame’s season began, he was paying for it.

“He started getting these huge lumps under his knees,” Stromsborg said.

Before the Knights even played a game, Marcaccini was forced to stop several times each practice to tape his knees. About a month later, he stopped practicing. Marcaccini would attend practices but simply stand on the sideline and shoot, saving his knees for games.

“I would rather play in the games and not practices, and I’m fortunate that Coach understood that,” Marcaccini said.

“It just got the point after our first tournament that the day after a game, he’d be limping around campus,” Notre Dame Coach Mick Cady said. “He needed a long time to recover. We finally decided we didn’t need him scoring 20 points in practice.”

Marcaccini, who averaged 29.8 points in the first four games after he stopped practicing, said the rest made the pain in his knees bearable, but the conditioning was what he missed most.

“I was out of shape,” he said. “I was getting tired in warmups.”

Marcaccini also was forced to play every game as the opponent’s No. 1 defensive focus. Signing with Indiana causes that sort of thing.

“Every game I went into, I had the best guy guarding me,” Marcaccini said. “Every time I come across the lane, I had help-side defenses on me. You can’t have a game where you just can go off for 40 points, because the team is always ready for you.”

Marcaccini sat out two games so he could be fresh for the playoffs. He was, and there is no better example than the Knights’ game against La Canada, the defending III-A champion, in the section semifinals.

Notre Dame trailed by 10 in the first quarter and nine at halftime.

“I said there’s no way we’re losing to these guys,” Marcaccini said. “They had gotten lucky with the threes (making six in a row) in the beginning. It was just a joke. I knew they couldn’t keep it up. I just said, ‘Give me the ball.’ They didn’t have anyone big enough to stop me.”

Marcaccini scored 16 of his game-high 26 in the second half and Notre Dame won, 58-52. He played the final minutes with cotton stuffed up his nose, which was bloodied from a collision under the basket.

“When he really stepped up in the big games it was typical Monte,” Stromsborg said. “I can’t even imagine what he would be like with good legs.”

Marcaccini is scheduled to return to the court April 17 in Fort Wayne, Ind., for the first of two all-star games featuring Indiana’s recruiting class against a team of recruits from other Big Ten schools.

All eyes in basketball-crazy Indiana will be on him, checking out the recruit that Bobby Knight signed after seeing nothing but videotapes. Marcaccini is used to that sort of pressure, though.

After all, he spent the entire season with fingers pointed at him, the guy with the hard-to-pronounce name who was going to Indiana. Marcaccini only wishes he could have given them a better show.

“I’d have liked to show people how good I can be and I didn’t really do that this year,” he said. “They can just watch me on TV next year.”