Susan Harman

Your Prep Sports

Emma Koch calls Wednesday’s game at Iowa a “full-circle moment.”

The Dartmouth senior forward was a key member of West High’s 2018 state championship team. She also won state tennis titles in singles and doubles.

Her trip to New Hampshire and subsequent return to Iowa may be a rhetorical full circle, but its perfect arc has been disturbed a few times.

Koch tore an ACL before she committed to Dartmouth in the fall of her senior year and missed West High’s whole season.

She tore her meniscus before she ever suited up for the Big Green.

That was shaved, and she said it was a pretty quick recovery. But then a month into practice she re-tore the same ACL and missed her freshman season.

Back after the arduous rehabilitation, Covid-19 wiped out her sophomore season when the Ivy League elected not to play during the pandemic.

“That sophomore year was very frustrating,” Koch said. “But I think the team did a really good job of coming together and still playing together.”

She came home to Iowa City for a while and took classes remotely.

Two of her teammates (Allie Harland and Karina Mitchell) joined her.

“We were able to take classes together and work out together, which was very nice,” Koch said. “Also it was a bit of a blessing to give me more time to recover from the injury my freshman year.”

Finally, she got on the court as a junior, playing in 24 games and starting 10.

She averaged 3.8 points per game and 4.2 rebounds. But she sprained her ACL and had surgery in the spring.

Now as a senior Koch is a starter and demonstrating her reputation as a rebounding machine.

She averages five points and 7.5 rebounds per game.

“I think a lot of it is confidence, just getting my feet under me. Last year I hadn’t played since I was a junior in high school, which is a really long time ago,” she said. “So the ups and downs that came with that were pretty obvious last year. And I think I had a lot more fear of getting re-injured last year. This year, my senior year, I kind of looked at it as my last opportunity to have fun with my teammates and, hopefully, have an impact on this program.”

Koch, the rebounding whiz, confessed that the biggest adjustment from high school is she has to box out on rebounds.

“In high school I could just jump up and sometimes be more athletic than the girl I was going against,” she said, somewhat embarrassed. “Here it’s very hard to jump higher than everybody you play. I think I really went back to the fundamentals.”

Watching her play you can see the high school player she was.

She runs up and down with abandon, arms and legs flying like a gamboling Great Dane puppy. She wears a brace on her left knee and doesn’t have the same speed she had, but she hits the deck regularly and bounces back up.

She congratulates her teammates and urges them on. She is still Emma.

Because of her numerous surgeries she lives with pain and said matter-of-factly that it’s just a matter of managing it for the rest of her life.

West Athletic Director B.J. Mayer, who was Koch’s basketball coach at West, said her decision to pursue her athletic and academic interests at an Ivy League school made sense.

“She’s very intelligent. She’s been successful in the academic field,” Mayer said. “She always rose to the challenges in academics and in sports as well. She was ready for big things because of her drive, her intelligence and her will to compete and be really good at those things.”

Mayer believes that those very characteristics have enabled Koch to handle the rotten luck of seemingly continuous injuries.

“Absolutely. When she was in high school she was always in the gym, working to get better,” he said. “But she never forgot her studies. She was a straight-A student. She was just striving to the be the best she could be. That helps her not only in high school and college but in life as well.”

Koch’s major is biomedical engineering, which requires rigorous science and math classes.

She is completing a five-year program in four years in addition to being a Division I basketball player.

Even though Koch’s high school career was cut short, she and her teammates memorably won the 5A state championship in 2018.

West High first defeated West Des Moines Dowling and Caitlin Clark, 63-53.

In the semifinals West High defeated Indianola, which was led by Maggie McGraw (ISU) and Grace Berg (Drake).

In the final West High beat previously unbeaten City High, which featured Ashley Joens and three other Division I recruits, 56-45.

Koch fit perfectly in West High’s balanced attack, doing whatever was needed close to the basket.

West High, which featured five Division I recruits, had a chance to repeat if Koch were healthy, but that’s where the circle began to take some thumps.

Koch’s experience in high school and club ball was always with winning teams, but Dartmouth has struggled.

Her first two seasons the Big Green was 13-40. This season it is 2-10.

Some Ivies like Columbia and Princeton have competed with bigtime schools, but Dartmouth has a ways to go under second-year coach Adrienne Shibles.

“It’s hard to see all the work behind the scenes not translate into wins,” Koch said. “We know we have to scrap and fight every game to get a win. I don’t think our record reflects the huge strides we’ve made from last year. The games have been so much closer. I think the team is gelling really well. We take little wins as they come, and we’re having fun. I think that’s what basketball is supposed to be. I love my team.”

The emotional maturity in that statement shows where Koch is coming from and where she’s going.

As Mayer pointed out, it takes time to build a program at a school like Dartmouth that doesn’t give athletic scholarships, has high admission standards and is not really in the transfer portal business.

Dartmouth’s schedule includes Ivy League schools and generally smaller eastern seaboard schools.

The largest crowd it has played before is 1,842 at Drexel.

On average Dartmouth plays before 665 people. The school tries to play non-conference games against teams located near players’ hometowns, and Koch was grateful to Iowa for having helped arrange the game.

“It’s going to be interesting,” Koch said. “It’s going to be a very different environment than what our team is used to just in terms of the large gym and a big crowd. Plus a lot of my team hasn’t been to the Midwest. But for me it will feel like a full-circle moment having grown up here and watching games in the arena. It will be a real challenge for us.”

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