KSHB 41 reporter Tod Palmer covers sports business and eastern Jackson County. Share your story idea with Tod.
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Tressa Barnes thought injury ended her college basketball career 24 years ago.
Diving along the sideline to make a pass for the Calvary Warriors volleyball team, Barnes suffered a torn ACL in her right knee.
“My body went this way, and my knee went that way,” Barnes said. “It just popped, and people in the crowd heard it.”
It was the second time she’d torn the ACL in that knee.
Doctors told her she could keep playing “and have a knee replacement when you're 30,” which might impact her ability to be active with children, or she could give up competitive sports.
“I grieved,” Barnes said. “As any student athlete does, you grieve when you know that your career is over with. It's like a death.”
But earlier this month, fate — and the pursuit of a master’s degree in counseling — intervened, leading Calvary University’s small gym to erupt with cheers during the Warriors women’s basketball team’s season opener when Barnes checked in with 3:39 remaining in the first quarter.
On the day she turned 43, and only steps away from the spot on the same court where she’d lain in a heap in October 2002, Barnes returned to the sport she loves as a 43-year-old graduate student.
“I remember it was literally right here,” Barnes said, pointing to a spot on the floor as I interviewed her Wednesday morning, “and I was thinking, ‘OK, I'm done.’”
Barnes, who also teaches at Calvary and let me know about her comeback in a news tip to the station, was classified as a full-time graduate student when she re-enrolled for the fall semester.
“I jokingly said to her, ‘Oh, so I could play basketball?” Barnes, who tore the ACL in her left knee after college, said of the registrar’s office, “and we kind of laughed about it.”
But after relaying that joke to Warriors senior Tyonna Garcia and head women’s basketball coach Cameron Coleman, it was no longer a laughing matter.
“It took a little bit of arm-twisting,” said Coleman, who was hired in April 2025 and also serves as assistant athletic director. “... If you know anything about Tressa’s journey, you know she’s had some injuries, so she was a little bit hesitant about getting back on the court. But I just told her, you know, how much of a blessing she would be to these girls.”
Coleman was correct.
“To be honest, I was excited,” Garcia said. “... I think I was the first person she told that she had eligibility.”
She’s had Barnes as a teacher and knew her from around campus.
“She just brings the light,” Garcia said of Barnes. “Honestly, she brings a light. She brings inspiration with her.”
And a high basketball IQ as a veteran of the sport.
“It's been amazing,” Coleman said. “They’ve got nicknames for her. They call her ‘Mama T,’ so she's kind of taken a motherly role on our team.”
Barnes, now a stepmom to 8- and 13-year-old girls, embraces the role, even if joining the Warriors comes with a level of trepidation after three ACL tears.
“Every practice, every game, is just a thought process of, how am I going to move? What am I going to do?” Barnes said.
But checking into Calvary’s 75-65 win against Randall University from Moore, Oklahoma, felt sublime.
“Just stepping in on the court, it literally took me back 24 years ago, and I was like, ‘I'm here. This is a dream,'" Barnes said.
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