The road back: Sami Jahan recovered from knee injury
The Stingers basketball star is back in practice after ACL tear
Getting injured as an athlete can be devastating.
The physical pain and varying degrees of psychological anguish has proven tough enough to topple careers. The uncertainty of their healing process and not knowing whether they will be able to play to their full potential post-injury tends to trigger distressing thoughts. This is the uphill battle that Stingers men’s basketball star Sami Jahan has been fighting for the last 12 months.
Jahan spent the last 10 years building his life around the game of basketball. Growing up in Hamilton, Ont., his parents enrolled him in several different sports. He particularly enjoyed basketball, and at age 12, decided to pursue it exclusively. He played throughout highschool, eventually graduating from the Toronto Basketball Academy.
By the time Jahan finished highschool, he knew he wanted to play basketball professionally. He dreams of getting his German citizenship and playing in the EuroLeague. Before getting there, Jahan knew he would need to do post-secondary studies and play ball at a collegiate or university level. It was at this time that he decided to move 600 kilometers away from home, get his own apartment and enroll in economics at Concordia University.
Jahan remembers exactly when and how he’d gotten hurt: Feb. 17, 2024, in the second quarter of a game against McGill. He drove for a layup, but the lane closed and was no longer a viable scoring attempt. He looked for a passing opportunity, but when he stepped back, he felt a pain in his knee. The pain wasn’t excruciating, but he had trouble putting weight on his leg, so coaches sent him home and told him to rest.
“It was like a fever dream,” Jahan said. “I was having a great game, I had like 15 points in the first quarter [...] the best quarter I’ve ever had in basketball. [Then the] next moment I’m just sitting on the couch.”
The next day, he went to see Concordia’s rugby team doctor at the Stinger Dome. Athletic therapists performed tests on him to assess the damage, but they couldn’t come to a conclusion. A couple of days later, walking on crutches and accompanied by his father, Jahan got some MRI scans.
After a few days of optimistically waiting for the results, Jahan was dealt a crushing blow: he had torn his ACL, a ligament in the knee that takes nine months to a year to heal. This meant that Jahan’s season was over, and that he would miss most of next season as well.
“It was definitely a blow to our spirit,” Aleks Mitrovic, lead assistant coach, said. “But more so than losing him as a member of our team, we were just heartbroken for him to have to go through that.”
“It didn’t feel real,” Jahan said. “My whole life is…mostly basketball, and I never had a major injury. In my whole life I’ve never been out for more than 2 games in a row.”
It took him a long time to fully process what happened. But while part of him had trouble accepting his new reality, another part of him took initiative.
Wasting no time, he asked the medical professionals accompanying him what the next move was. A week later he was in the hospital, having his knee surgically repaired. Any minor bump or pressure on his leg after that was excruciatingly painful. What lay ahead was months of physical therapy, just to relearn basic motion, followed by even more months of exercises to get back his strength.
“Sami’s one of the hardest working players I’ve ever worked with,” said Leon Ortizo, a player development coach for Concordia Stingers basketball. Ortizo is also a good personal friend of Jahan’s, and they have been training together since long before his injury. “[He did] all the little things to speed up his recovery, eventually, those little things stack up.”
However, for him, the physical pain wasn’t even the hardest part.
“The mental battle,” Jahan said. “The thoughts—all the things that the world is telling you about your injury, about yourself. The physical part was never really crazy, but the thoughts like what could go wrong, what if I don’t come back the same, were really challenging.”
His time off, while boring, wasn’t all bad. He had a lot of free time, which he killed by playing the board game Catan with friends and binge-watching all of Breaking Bad. He even had the opportunity to take a vacation away from the city with his family.
By 2025, a lot has changed. His knee has healed, and can now take the force of regular play again. In January, Jahan started full-contact practices with the team, and could start playing whenever he wants. Even so, the Stingers point guard made a big choice this winter, deciding that he won’t suit up for the Stingers this season. However, this isn’t due to disinterest.
“I think not playing has given me even more fuel to the fire,” Jahan said. “I didn’t realize how much of a privilege it was to play university basketball, and now I have a better understanding of the value in it.”
U Sports athletes have five years of playing eligibility, but that eligibility can be extended to six years if the player misses a year due to injury. Jahan decided he would forgo his eligibility for the 2024-25 season so that he can do more for the Stingers next year.
While the Stingers men’s basketball team is missing one of its top scorers from the last half-decade, they’re fending for themselves pretty well so far. As of Feb. 8, the Stingers have a record of 10-2.
“How well the team has done, regardless of countless hurdles, is impressive to say the least,” Jahan said. “The work they’ve done makes me feel proud to be a member of this team.”
Since joining the Concordia Stingers men’s basketball team in 2019, Jahan has been a cornerstone of the squad. In four years of playing with the team, he has amassed career averages of 13 points, four rebounds and three assists per game, and has started in 45 of his 53 Stingers appearances. Jahan was especially dominant in the 2023-24 season, where he started in all 15 of his games, averaged 15.4 points per game, and amassed career high averages in rebounding (5.1) and assists (3.6).
Jahan said that his rehabilitation was a communal effort. His parents took turns driving from Hamilton to Montreal to visit him for the first five weeks of his injury. Members of the basketball community, both from Quebec and outside of the province, reached out to him to check in on his condition. His teammates and his friends were also of great support.
All that’s left for Jahan now is to keep doing what he’s doing: practicing with the team, staying in good health and keeping his head in the game, which for him, should not be a problem.
“He’s back to where he left off,” Ortizo said, “and I know he’s hungry to get better.”
This article originally appeared in Volume 45, Issue 9, published February 11, 2025.
