After yet another battle through rehabilitation and recovery, Fu was ready to return to the lineup this spring. But fate had other plans, as two days before her projected return she once again fell victim to injury. This time it occurred off the field.

“[One] night, my knee gave way under me,” Fu said. “[I felt a] sharp pain, and I found out the next day it was fractured.”

At that point, Fu’s prospects for a return to the team looked bleak.

“I called Cherry once I found out she had fractured her patella again this year,” Coach Allard said. “We found out two days before we were to leave for our trip to North Carolina. I asked her whether she wanted to travel and she said ‘Yes, I want to do whatever I can.’ I never questioned whether she would quit at that point. I knew she was committed until the end.”

This dedication typified Fu’s attitude toward the team.

“I give Coach a lot of credit for allowing me to stay with the team,” Fu said. “The first decision I was faced with was whether to play this year. I said yes, because I love the sport and I love the game. The second decision was whether to continue with the season once I got hurt. The answer was again that I love the sport and that’s why I stayed with it. I could sense that this was going to be a very good team and I wanted to give to it what I could.”

Not everyone was as optimistic. The number and severity of her injuries made some ask Fu about the possibility of giving up softball.

“The doctor said, ‘[if] you go out there [and] trip over a base [or] bump into someone, you could seriously hurt yourself again,” she said. “Our manager said [the same thing] would happen even if [I] were healthy. So I got a bit more confidence to fight the doctors and tell them what I wanted.”

Her team was similarly supportive, understanding that Fu would have little opportunity to contribute on the field.

“She’s put so much heart into this program and because she has not been playing, all her hard work and dedication to the team are often overlooked,” tri-captain Lisa Watanabe wrote in an e-mail. “I know it’s been rough for her dealing with all the injuries she has had here at Harvard but Cherry approaches it with such a positive outlook. She works extra hard and often goes against what the trainer says to speed her recovery.”

Last weekend, Fu returned to the line-up against Dartmouth, just in time for the last weekend series of her career. She came away without a hit, but accomplished something that the box score is incapable of recognizing. Cherry Fu came back, as she always does, and did so against all odds to reclaim her starting role on the Harvard softball team, if only for a day.