6:30 AM
On a spring afternoon in Austin, Texas, Asjia O' Neal walked into the Heart Hospital of Austin for her cardiology appointment, a twice-a-year routine she had been keeping most of her life. She lay down in the hospital gown and a nurse administered an echocardiogram and an EKG to check her heart rhythm and electrical signals. She made a small talk with the Texas volleyball team's physical trainer, DeAnn Koehler, who had driven her to the hospital, as she waited on the exam table for her doctor. They talked about the weather for the upcoming season and the debut of O' Neal, a middle blocker who redshirted her first season with the Longhorns.
The doctor held her results in his hands. He said there had been some changes.
It's not safe to play volleyball anymore.
O' Neal's mitral valve leak was a condition that she was born with that caused her heart to work harder to pump blood in the right direction, a condition that she already had undergone one surgery to correct. She was putting too much stress on her cardiovascular system. It was too dangerous for O'Neal to continue.
After that, O' Neal listened to every word her doctor said. She stared blankly at him. She couldn't process the urgent conversation her trainer was having with her doctor as she watched Koehler's mouth move.
She heard the doctor ask if she would consider other sports. Maybe golf or cricket? She was unable to respond.
She stood up and walked with him.
When O' Neal arrived back on campus, she called her mom from the sidewalk. A routine checkup turned into a nightmare for Asjia.
"We're going to get a second opinion," Mesha said into the phone. We're not going to run with what one doctor says, you hear me?
Jhenna Gabriel and Logan Eggleston were waiting for Asjia when she walked into her dorm room.
They asked how it went.
O' Neal cried and held her face as she remembered.
She underwent an open-heart surgery when she was 13 to be able to play the sport she loved at the highest level. She was poised to become an impact player at one of the elite programs, but she wanted to avoid a life without volleyball, because she wanted to avoid staring at her right in her face.
Gabriel handed O' Neal a piece of chocolate cake they had brought back from the Longhorns' last day of spring training.
It would have been impossible to know, but the hospital visit would cause for chocolate cake. The doctor that day identified that O' Neal's valve had worsened, started a chain reaction that could lead to celebrations for years to come. O' Neal's resolve to stay on the court only got stronger after he was told to walk away from volleyball. That would lead to another open-heart surgery and a long rehabilitation. That better-than-ever heart would help shape a more powerful athlete than ever before, one that will give Texas another shot at an elusive third NCAA volleyball championship this month. The Longhorns' Gregory Gymnasium doesn't matter as much as the arenas that matter.
A year ago, Asjia was home for Christmas with her family.
Asia O'NEAL has been a regular at big arenas. When she was a toddler, her father was at the peak of his NBA career. Two years after Asjia was born, O'Neal was named the league's most improved player, charming fans with his outgoing personality and promising career with the Pacers. She was on TV in her father's arms when she walked and talked after he took her to every game.
When Asjia was born, she had a mitral valve leak, which would require regular cardiology appointments and monitoring. Doctors told the O' Neal family that Asjia could lead a normal life.
At about 8 months old, she walked and talked, and began holding her bottle at 2 months.
She loved watching her father play basketball. She asked him to train her during the summer, but something didn't feel right. It didn't feel like she was meant to do that.
Asjia was like her father in many ways. A day before the spelling bee, Asjia ran around their Miami house, performing one-handed cartwheels. If she was going to have any chance of winning the spelling bee, she needed to study, said Jermaine. "I'm going to win it," Asjia said as he cartwheeled through the air. She won the title the next day, spelling the word "vegetable" on stage.
"I had tears in my eyes," he said. I remember saying, 'I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that,' and Asjia is the spitting image of me.
After the O' Neals moved to Dallas, Asjia fell in love with volleyball. Two girls asked her if she ever thought about playing volleyball. The school had an A, B and C team, but she made the school's B team. She had a lot to learn, but she loved the intensity, the ability to work closely with her teammates, and the speed of the game.
She was an immediate powerhouse because of her height and her excellent hand-eye coordination, even before she knew the game's nuances.
She was shocked to learn that her mitral valve leak had gotten worse in the past year. Her doctors told her parents that she was likely to have suffered from volleyball training intensity.
She needed a ring placed around her mitral valve. She had open-heart surgery when she was 13.
The news sent the two of them into a spiral, but Asjia had a different approach. She said to get it over with.
After being diagnosed with a heart problem, Asjia went to Boston for her first open-heart surgery.
"My daughter has a chance to be one of the best volleyball players in the country," O' Neal told the Boston Herald at the time. College coaches are interested in her. She has a valve that is leaking. I'm positive that everything will go well.
She's not talking about surgery. My mother and I are talking about surgery, but she's talking about volleyball.
The doctors closed Asjia's chest after operating for five hours. She would need six weeks of rest before she could play. She will have another six weeks of monitoring before her chest bones heal completely.
She probably wouldn't have had it if she didn't play sports. She needed it because she wanted to play sports.
It's all a blur to Asjia. I was young. I went out there and played and felt great after recovering so quickly.
She was back on the volleyball court after being cleared to play. She received her first college letter when she was 14. She was excited when she saw Texas head coach JerrittElliott at her matches. She wanted to be a part of Texas' success. During her sophomore year, she committed to the Longhorns.
She had an intuition on the court.
I've always asked her how she knows, and she's like, 'I don't know, I just know.' "I know how to do it, it just happens."
She was an athlete, but she had grace and flexibility.
"She's a master," said Asjia's club coach.
Asjia thought her medical issues were behind her as her future began to take shape. She could play the sport she loved and her heart was working better.
She didn't know that her chest would be sawed open again. The problem was worse this time.
Asjia O'Neal, who stands at 6 feet 3, has impressed coaches and frustrated opponents with her fluid movement and her ability to anticipate.
Something is very wrong. After one of her first spring practice sessions at Texas, Asjia told Mesha that she didn't know if she could do it.
She barely stayed on the court during her first week of training. The level at which Texas played was much higher than she was used to, but all the other freshmen did it, so why couldn't she?
She couldn't get through four hours of practice at least once a week, and she had to be pulled off the court. Running on the treadmill or pedaling was not an option. She could run 10 minutes before she felt light-headed.
She had a congenital heart condition, but she didn't want to use it as an excuse, so she pushed herself, sometimes to the brink, before Koehler noticed her struggling and made her leave the court.
She never wanted to accept that her heart condition prevented her from doing things that other people could easily do.
Her question was even more pressing because her echo and EKG results didn't show anything out of the ordinary.
O' Neal said that the doctors were like, "Oh, it's the same as it always has been." I'm wondering why I feel this way.
During practice, her teammates wore heart monitors to watch her heart rate and compare her to people without a heart condition. Her heart was working hard to allow her to play.
On the last day of spring training, O' Neal's doctor told her that she shouldn't play volleyball anymore. The previous tests didn't show her condition was getting worse.
The O' Neals sprang to action. In order to get the best treatment for his daughter, who was diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat in the summer of 2013, Jermaine called every doctor he knew in the NBA. The Cleveland Clinic in Ohio has consistently ranked No. 1 in heart care in the U.S. News and World Report's Best Hospitals. She could play out the season, but she would have to go to Austin every three months for her cardiology appointments, and the results had to be shared with her doctors at Cleveland Clinic.
After sending Asjia's latest reports to Cleveland Clinic, the family received an urgent call from Asjia's doctor.
Asjia needed to get to Cleveland as soon as possible. Her heart condition had worsened.
"I didn't know, because it was the same protocol, and I would feel bad, but I would feel better," said Asjia, who had a.413 hitting percentage and averaged 1.48 kills per set through the first 19 matches of the season. I thought it might be the reality of playing sports.
When she was told that they'd have to fly to Cleveland, she wondered if she'd miss her next game.
After a day of tests, including injecting dye into her heart to see the direction of the blood flow, and other athletic tests to monitor her heart at the highest exertion levels, her doctors confirmed the O' Neal family's fears.
She needed to have another operation. They found a second leak in her tricuspid valve, as her mitral valve leak had worsened.
When they are exercising, athletes convert their cardiac output -- as we call it -- or circulation, they multiply that by at least five times. The doctor who performed O'Neal's surgery said that the heart would be pumping at 20 liters a minute instead of five.
After the doctors left the room, Asjia turned to her parents and said she wanted to finish the season. One more month is what it is. Nothing will happen to me.
I'm not going to die on the court.
They walked into the office and asked if she could finish the season.
"Yes, she can finish the season," Asjia said. She's had what she has for more than a year.
She hit.778 with seven kills and five blocks in the Longhorns' loss to Louisville in the NCAA regionals.
After the Texas Longhorns season ended, O' Neal went to Cleveland Clinic to have her heart cut open again.
The University of Texas has known O'Neal to bring a lot of emotion to the team.
On the morning of January 14, 2020, two months before the country was shut down by the Pandemic, O'Neal was wheeled into the operating room with her parents, brother, and coach by her side. O'Neal was in control until that morning. She kept telling herself that she had done this before, and this would pass. She was very nervous as the time neared for the surgery. Doctors told her that recovery would be more difficult this time. They reopened the same incision and used a bone saw to open her chest.
That makes me sick.
She got wheeled away after hugging her family and her coach. When she went under, she remembered hearing "Started from the Bottom", a song her nurses picked for her when she told them she loved Drake.
During her first open-heart surgery, O' Neal placed a ring in her mitral valve. Dr. Najm replaced it with the biggest ring he's ever put on a woman, according to Mesha. She had a leak in her tricuspid valve. Asjia was hooked up to a heart-lung machine to keep her blood flowing while her heart was stopped so she could have her valves repaired.
In Asjia's case, Najm made an unusual decision. Instead of opening up her heart to replace the valve, as would be the norm with cases like hers, Najm re-repaired her mitral valve, removing tissues around the valve before placing the bigger ring.
She would have to commit to subsequent surgeries if I replaced her valve with a Prosthetic one. I didn't want her to have to take blood thinners as an athlete.
He walked out of the surgery about five hours later.
He said that he thought he had produced a good piece of art. She will never know how bad she felt until she feels better.
The clock in front of her bed read 10pm and she had a fire in her throat. She didn't have a sip of water for almost a day, and she couldn't for a while longer to prevent fluid from building up in her body. When she walked around the hospital with a walking aid, the doctors told her she would be discharged.
On the first day after the operation, she couldn't sit up, couldn't engage her core in any way, and her parents had to sit her up. She had fluid in her chest, which is normal after surgery, but she had to work her core to cough it up.
"They would always try to make me cough, but it would hurt so bad to cough, because my chest is broken," O' Neal said.
On the second day, she slowly sat up and walked a few steps. She was able to walk farther on the third day. On the fourth day, she was able to make one round. The doctors signed her papers.
She was planning her comeback all along.
O' Neal is a career.390 hitter at Texas, and she was averaging 1.92 kills per set this season.
The set by Jhenna Gabriel is tight. The referee blows the whistle after she pushed the ball over the net. A violation has been called. Point Oklahoma. Texas' lead is now one, 22-21. A few minutes ago, the score was 22-17. It is anyone's set now.
Gregory Gym erupts in boos when it hosts 4, 295 people for a match against Oklahoma. Texas lost its first game of the season a week earlier, and there's still worry in the air.
O'Neal looked at the official who made the call and wondered what was going on. The referee is talking to the man in the mask. He called the captain to question the call.
O'Neal's right foot landed on the Sooners' side of the net as she pushed the ball over. Point Oklahoma.
Mesha says that her daughter looks upset while sitting in the bleachers behind the Oklahoma side of the court. Mesha has missed only one home game this season, and she sent over her parents to watch her daughter play.
The next point, O'Neal gets a kill. She stares at her opponents, her palm wide open, a nonchalant shrug, wearing the same number her dad wore for most of his career. Her hair is on fire as she walks over to her teammates. The Oklahoma attack was blocked by O' Neal.
On Texas' second set point, with the fans on their feet, Gabriel and O' Neal connect on a perfect slide attack, and a smile creeps across O' Neal's face after she gets the set-clinching kill.
She's the biggest hype man on the court, and you can see every emotion on her face. She brings a lot of energy to the team and we feed off of her.
It's easy to forget that just 22 months ago, she couldn't sit up, let alone elevate her body to make a kill. She was home in Dallas for six weeks after her surgery. The coronaviruses shut down sports after she returned to the gym. She returned home and worked with Koehler to rebuild her chest. She liked training on her own timetable and set up a home gym. She walked on the treadmill, then she ran on an incline, building her cardiovascular strength. She did band work and mobility exercises.
"I had a lot of dialogue with her doctor, probably even more than she knows," he said. Was there anything we should be looking out for?
He said she's fine to push herself, she can go as far as she wants.
It was difficult to tell how far she had come in her rehabilitation because she trained alone. She could see how she compared to her teammates when she returned to campus in July 2020. She could push herself to run 30 minutes on the treadmill, something she couldn't imagine doing before surgery. She was beating people in races when the team began doing conditioning and agility training in the sand. Before the surgery, a long warm-up exercise that included yoga postures like downward dog and sugarcane would leave her winded. She could do the entire routine on resting heart rate.
She called her mom crying after her first sand workout. She said to Mesha that she couldn't believe how he felt. This is it? I've been struggling for a long time, and this is how everyone else feels after a workout?
She was playing at a low capacity before the surgery. She's in the high 90s now.
Teammates were amazed.
Gabriel told O' Neal that he had just had his chest open. It was crazy.
Five Longhorns were named to the All-Big 12 volleyball first team. The player of the year is named by the conference.
Texas was runner-up to Kentucky a year ago. She missed a game in 2020 but came back eight months later and finished the season with 222 kills and 113 blocks. The Longhorns will need her in order to end their title drought that dates to 2012 because she brought a lot of kills and blocks into this year's NCAA tournament. The Longhorns opened the tournament with a sweep of Sacred Heart and are the second seed. Rice is on Friday.
She has the ability to change the team's personality more than anyone else. She can get feisty and competitive, and we need that.
O' Neal, wearing a burnt orange Texas long-sleeve shirt, bandana and black sweats, is sitting at an outdoor table at Civil Goat Coffee in Austin on a sunny November day. In between bites of her food, she shared her story with moving hands. Even though she knows Asjia's story, Mesha is paying close attention, nodding at times, and adding her perspective here and there.
As Asjia wraps up her story of her second surgery, she puts down her spoon, her gel manicure, and glints in the sunlight. She points to three healed holes in her chest. During her open-heart surgery, three tubes were inserted into the holes to collect fluid.
On her last day at the hospital, her doctor walked in and said "This is going to hurt" as he prepared to remove the tubes. After her first surgery, she remembered how hurt she was, and the tubes were bigger this time. She would have to be awake to be pain free. She felt the tube leave her body and she cried. The doctor went in again after a break. O' Neal's lungs were filling up with fresh air and she was able to breathe.
She was hesitant to show her scars after her first surgery. She didn't want to draw attention to her differences. She embraces them both on her social media and in real life.
I'm proud of the moment and coming back from it, so I'll wear whatever. "I'm going to show my scars, I don't care," O' Neal said. I think it's important to acknowledge that it happened. I'm better because of it.
O'Neal's voice gets louder at the end of the sentence, like she really wants people to hear her. A fan is walking over. I heard the word "volleyball" and wanted to say hello. He loves watching Texas play.
She smiles and says thank you.
O' Neal is proud to be an inspiration for Black girls who want to play volleyball.
O' Neal felt the same need to be heard after George Floyd's death. She organized meetings with her teammates. She said that things had to change within the University of Texas. She has a younger brother and he could be in the same situation as George Floyd. That was not acceptable.
Gabriel said that she didn't care about hurting anyone's feelings. "She said what was needed to be said."
The Longhorns' Black Lives Matter video campaign was orchestrated by O' Neal. "All lives can't matter until Black lives matter," she says in the video.
She surprised herself by taking the conversations about racial justice to various communities within UT. Her voice made a difference on campus. The physics, math and astronomy building was renamed after Robert Lee Moore Hall, which was named after a mathematician who was known for his racist treatment of African American students. Heman M. Sweatt was the first black student to be admitted to the UT Law School, and he won a Supreme Court case that paved the way for integration at colleges and universities across the country. UT renamed Joe Jamail Field after Earl Campbell and Ricky Williams, and put up a statue of the Longhorns' first Black football letterman, Julius Whittier.
Like many other athletes, O'Neal faced backlash on social media, with comments on her profile like "I'm never going to buy a ticket again."
"If that's how you feel, do what you want with your money," O' Neal says matter-of-factly. If you find something that offends you, then you're free to disagree, but you have to get off the train.
The Honda Inspiration Award is given to student-athletes who have experienced extraordinary physical and/or emotional adversity.
"Asjia is a spitting image of me, but she is a much better version of me," said Jermaine, who went straight from high school to the NBA. She can use her voice to make the world a better place at 22. She believes in speaking about her beliefs in an educated way. She does that at a high level. I told her that she was much bigger than a volleyball player.
She finished her undergraduate degree in corporate communications three years ago and will play volleyball for Texas as she finishes her master's degree in sport management. She would like to play professionally overseas. She wants to inspire young girls that they can do anything. She gets messages from Black mothers on social media about how they want their children to play volleyball after watching her.
"Seeing little girls come up to me and they're not just one background, not just white girls, and they're like, 'Oh my gosh, I'm so inspired to be you.' " I am a big fan of your team. "That's important, I love seeing people that look like me."
I think having that imagery for young girls is incredible, regardless of my accomplishments on the court.
The O' Neals were in Waco to watch Asjia play. Posters with Asjia's face and her jersey number were all over the stands as Jermaine sat in the bleachers. Two families from Indianapolis and Kansas City introduced themselves to him. One of the parents said they flew down to see your daughter. It was important for their daughters to watch Asjia play.
It's special to be put in that position, all the hard days and hard nights.
Her father didn't say much. Asjia was willing to open her heart twice to make sure that happened.
