Alexnder and Woodard Battle Back Together
12/18/2025 1:26:00 PM | Women's Basketball
Injuries are part of every athlete's life, with the journey back to health rarely following a straight path.
Michigan State women's basketball forwards Isa Alexander and Juliann Woodard learned that firsthand last season, each finding something small to keep steady during a year they never expected to spend on the sideline.
Alexander had missed almost two full seasons — first with a Lisfranc tear three games into 2023-24, then with a right ACL tear five days after she was cleared for 2024-25. It was hard to be injured, again, and need to sit out.
Alexander's source of comfort came in the form of Cash, the 1-year-old son of associate head coach Kim Cameron, who traveled with the team often.
The 6-foot-3 redshirt senior — and the oldest player on MSU's roster — started picking him up during road trips, at first to give herself something to do on the sideline. Before long, "Cash Time" meant walking her laps with him in her arms, a simple routine that kept her mind from wandering during rehab hours.
"Hanging out with him was really fun," said Alexander, a Keswick, Ontario, native who earned her undergraduate degree in kinesiology and is now pursuing a Master of Science in athletic training. "I think it also helped me mentally, like staying present, not just sitting there and spacing out for an hour or whatever we're doing at away games."
Meanwhile, Woodard found solace in a guitar. The 6-foot sophomore grew up in the country, in North Vernon, Indiana, where fishing filled empty afternoons. But this type of emptiness, missing playing basketball and being at her healthy best, demanded a different kind of patience.
She was out, and working her way back from the left ACL tear she suffered in January — an injury that cut short a freshman season in which she dropped 17 points in her sixth college game and already looked like a fit in head coach Robyn Fralick's program.
 Freshman teammate Jordan Ode also played guitar, so they stayed up late together while Woodard tried to make her fingers behave. She is still figuring the strings out.
 "It's so hard. It takes so much time, too," said Woodard, an interdisciplinary studies in social science major. "(Basketball) has always been the most stable thing in my life … I had to learn who I was without basketball, which had never happened."
 Woodard underwent surgery in early February. By the time she started showing up to rehab every day, Alexander was already in deep with Associate Director of Athletic Performance, Claire Sporer.
 Healing turned into something they did together.
 They spent months side-by-side in the weight room, long enough for Sporer to joke with them and for the players to, without fail, "annoy" her on purpose. That banter brought levity to a room built for strain and carved out small mercies in a stretch of months that offered very few.
 "We really became quite a trio," Sporer said.
 Woodard had a front-row seat to watch the veteran in the room work back from two years of misfortune and treated that as a blueprint, proof that this long, winding road would lead somewhere for her, too.
 "I know mentally, it helped Juliann out a lot to have Isa. They were connected. They were going through it together," Sporer said. "She had somebody that she could look to, like, 'Hey, you've gone through this, and this is where you are now.' It just gave her a lot of hope that everything was going to be OK at the end of it."
 The Spartans kept winning last season - 22 games and an NCAA Tournament trip for the second straight year under Fralick - while those two logged what Sporer calls some of the hardest hours in sports.
"I would argue, at any given point, they are doing more than the healthy players are," Sporer said. "It's lifting every day of the week. It's extra conditioning. It's extra workouts with coaches while they're still in practice."
Watching her recovery unfold from start to finish appealed to the side of Alexander that studies how bodies work, and the day-to-day rhythm with Sporer came with the things she will remember most: the inside jokes, the long talks, the game-day bit where the two would mess around in the background of pregame videos.
And on the road, when rehab sometimes just meant another lap with Cash.
"Shout out to Cash, man. Love him," Alexander said.
 Two seasons on the sideline also changed how Alexander listened. She now has a clearer sense of why her coaches say certain things in certain moments.
"Being able to put the pieces together — what I see on the court, what I see off the court — I think that's going to really help when I start getting back to playing fully normal," Alexander said.
She grabbed nine rebounds in MSU's exhibition win against Michigan Tech, her first game action in more than 700 days. Three weeks later, she exploded for a career-high 20 points on 9-for-9 shooting in just 11 minutes against Western Michigan as the Spartans improved to 4-0.
Woodard checked into a game for the first time in more than nine months against Eastern Michigan on Nov. 9 and knocked down a 3-pointer. She followed that with 17 points on Nov. 20 against Eastern Illinois on 6-for-8 shooting — including 5-for-6 from deep — and seven rebounds.
"For fans watching, one day they're out there and they're ready to play again. I think there's a real misconception, just how much hard work is put in during the nine months leading up to that," Sporer said.
 They're both back, in different ways.
 Alexander is imposing her will in the paint, and Woodard's shots are falling again. The team looks whole in spots where it wasn't down the stretch last season.
 The people who held them together are still around. Sporer, teammates, coaches, even Cash.
 "This is a part of my story," Woodard said. "It will forever be self-discovery in loving myself and learning how to love other people the way they need outside of basketball, and just leaning on my people. I've never learned how to lean on my people until now, because I didn't have a choice. They're going to be my people for the rest of my life, and I can't thank them enough."
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