Inside Alice Kunek's year from hell

As the veteran forward prepares to make a fresh start with Southside, she reveals how she endured arguably the toughest twelve months of her life - and came back better for it.

Credit: Paul Kane/Getty Images

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What the hell is going on?

That was what Alice Kunek remembers thinking as she sat in a locker room of a stadium in the French city of Lyon, with blood pouring out of her mouth. You see, two of her front teeth had just been absolutely obliterated, smashed with so much force they’d become lodged up inside the palate of her mouth.

Kunek remembers the rebounding contest, where the force of an errant elbow was such that even her mouthguard couldn’t dull the impact. The moments from the court to the locker room were a little hazier. As she sat waiting, frantic conversations in French were echoing off the walls. She couldn’t quite understand what was being said, but didn’t need a translator to read the look of horror upon Julie Allemand’s face, as her teammate sat nervously beside her. Somewhat ironically, Kunek could only smile.

“Honestly, I was like, I'm just going to go like have a shower, I guess, because what else am I going to do?”

It’s the kind of mindset you can expect from someone who’s already experienced the most brutal breaks of the game, enjoying the highest of highs and enduring the lowest and lows in equal measure.

The sheer force of having two teeth shoved all the way to the top of your mouth would usually classify as a career defining kind of trauma. The kind of one-in-a-million moment so insane, so bizarre, so random, it becomes a major part of your lore.

For Alice Kunek, this was barely a blip on the radar of a year that included more than one freak injury and somehow, more than one axing from the Opals. While it might push most players to breaking point, it offered Kunek the kind of enlightenment you can only find from facing the most challenging trials of her life.