It’s the knees.

“They literally drive me insane.”

The right one tore as a senior in high school. She went up for a layup, landing with a torn ACL, MCL and fractured femur.

There are fine days, but never good ones. Then there are the hard ones, the ones where every turn and tweak feels wrong, when it’s tough enough conquering the mental game and she has to rid her head of the doubts.

“You’re OK, you’re going to be OK. Trust your body. Trust your strengths. Trust your skills,” Corinne Ozanne reminds herself. She battled back from a torn ACL before, once in the seventh grade. But it was harder the second time around.

“I feel like it’s a lot harder to do, maybe because I was already through it,” Ozanne said.

In two years she’s gone from crutches to walking without a brace to fielding to being slotted as Syracuse’s fourth batter in her freshman year. She still battles her knees, but Ozanne leads the team with 16 RBI and earned the trust of head coach Leigh Ross to bat clean-up, something Ozanne found intimidating at first, but has grown into as the season progressed.

The Orange (12-16, 1-2 Big East) will again depend on her offensive output Thursday in a doubleheader against Binghamton starting at 3 p.m. SU will play again in three weekend showings against Big East competitor DePaul in a Saturday doubleheader at noon, as well as Sunday at 11 a.m. at Skytop Softball Stadium.

It’s nerve-wracking, but they need the long ball when she’s at bat, and she knows it. Like they needed the long ball against Harvard, when she smacked a pitch six rows into the Carrier Dome bleachers, careening over the outfield before landing in the hands of a waiting fan.

She’s always had athletic capabilities beyond her years — and defiant of gender.

At 3, she grabbed the glove and began pitching the baseball with her dad. They connected that way.

“That was the way Corinne and I related to each other was by playing sports,” said her dad, Keith Ozanne.

At 6, she refused to shoot on the basketball hoops that were lowered to six feet at the YMCA, returning to the regulation 10-foot hoops, where she shot one foul shot after another.

At 10, she was the only girl to be invited to a little league baseball camp in Williamsport, Pa. Competing against boys, she earned the Distinguished Pitching Award.

“When we were bringing her home she just pulled it out and said ‘Hey, look what I got,’” Keith Ozanne said. For all her athletic talents, her dad said she’s never been one to flaunt them.

In college, she faced another setback with another knee surgery in the fall of 2012. But as the season progresses and Syracuse heads into the thick of Big East play, the Orange is hoping it can turn its youthful talent into wins.

“We work hard, we just got to find a way to start proving it,” Ozanne said of Syracuse.

The intimidation of batting fourth in the lineup has eased, she’s seeing the pitches with a bit more clarity and she’s feeling more comfortable in the box. Even her dad, a lifelong Connecticut fan, is coming into the idea of Ozanne in Syracuse.

“It was a little hard for me to see her in her Syracuse uniform to begin with,” he said. “We’re actually starting to bleed a little orange now.”

Published on April 4, 2013 at 1:05 am

Contact Debbie: dbtruong@syr.edu | @debbietruong