High Point’s Skyler Curran battles back from injury for chance at history

Nearly 40 years ago, Joe Curran earned the reputation as a sharpshooter in professional hockey’s minor leagues.

Now his daughter has earned a similar reputation – but not on the ice.

“Hockey’s not my sport,” said Skyler Curran, leading scorer on the High Point women’s basketball team that will play this week in the Big South tournament at Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte.

Basketball is her sport.

Actually, lacrosse and volleyball also were her sports when she was a student at West Forsyth High near Winston-Salem. Basketball won out, however.

If the Panthers are able to play into the semifinals or finals this week – or if Curran has an especially big game – she has a chance to set the Big South career record for 3-pointers.

And that’s not bad for a graduate student whose career hit a roadblock more than a year ago on a simple layup attempt.

Just a simply layup

“It wasn’t anything unusual,” Curran, a 6-foot guard, said of the play in which she suffered a season-ending knee injury. “I was going in for a layup. I planted my left leg, and then I felt it give.”

It happened against Elon University, in the opener of the 2021-22 season – what was to be her senior season. She’d played well in the game, hitting 5-of-7 from 3-point range and scoring 17 points. Those were her last points of the season.

Surgery followed, and then a nearly nine-month-long rehabilitation in which Curran said she learned a lot about herself and her teammates.

“I became more of a student of the game,” she said. “I sat on the bench all last season, and I watched and tried to learn.”

She said she learned more about the flow of the game and the strengths of her teammates.

Curran returned to the court late last summer and learned something else – that recovering from a knee injury takes some time.

“Really, I’m still recovering,” she said. “It’s taken a little more time than I’d hoped. I still don’t think I move as well as I should. But I’m getting there.”

You wouldn’t know Curran is still recovering from a look at her stats. She is averaging a team-high 14.2 points and 6.1 rebounds per game. For the season, she is shooting 40 percent from the floor, but that figure has been on the rise. She hit 69 percent of her field goals in two games last week.

Record within sight

Heading into last weekend, Curran had 296 career 3-pointers. That’s second on the all-time Big South list, behind the 314 converted by Charleston Southern’s Katie Tull from 2007-11.

Curran started playing basketball at the age of 5 or 6 and moved into AAU traveling basketball in the fifth grade.

“I was also pretty good at lacrosse and volleyball,” she said. “But my parents left it up to me. I really enjoyed basketball. Some of the best friends are people who were on my first AAU team.”

Along the way, Curran developed a long-range shot.

“At West Forsyth, I took a lot of my 3-point shots from deeper than the high school 3-point line,” she said.

She was a three-time all-conference player and earned all-state honors at West Forsyth.

Then again, athletic success runs in the family.

It runs in the family

Her father was a standout in college at UMass-Boston and then played several seasons with the Carolina Thunderbirds in hockey’s minor league. He totaled 61 goals and 124 points in the 1985- 86 season, earning Most Valuable Player honors in the now-defunct Atlantic Coast Hockey League.

And Skyler’s maternal grandfather, Frank Christie, was a starter on the 1991-92 Wake Forest team that reached the Final Four. Christie is in Wake’s Sports Hall of Fame.

“My parents have always been supportive of what I wanted to do,” Curran said. That included her choice of college, which she made before her junior season at West Forsyth.

“That was a huge weight off my shoulder, making the decision early,” she said.

Now, as she enters the last stretch of her college basketball career, Curran said she believes High Point is poised for something big.

The Panthers have gone 7-3 over the past five weeks and will be the No. 2 seed this week in Charlotte, earning an opening-day bye.

“I 100 percent believe we can win it all,” Curran said, who helped the Panthers capture the program’s first Big South Championship and NCAA tournament berth in 2021. “We have to continue playing solid team defense. If we do that, we can win it. We’ve been shooting the ball real well.”

There’s one more thing you need to know about Skyler Curran.

“I can get a bit chippy at times on the court,” she admitted.

Remember Joe Curran’s big 1985-86 season? He also received more than 100 penalty minutes that season.

“I guess that’s something else I got from my dad,” Skyler Curran said.