SIOUX CITY | Coach Mike Power doesn't mince words when describing Briar Cliff University senior basketball player Kela Cihak.
"I've coached for 25 years," Power says, "and Kela Cihak is the toughest kid I have ever coached."
Tough mentally. Tough physically. Tough emotionally. Cihak, he says, has the highest pain tolerance he has seen among his players the past quarter-century. A third-degree sprain that may keep other players off the court for a week, if not longer, doesn't sideline his 2013 point guard.
Mental toughness? Cihak hadn't played point guard in college. That didn't stop her from tackling the assignment this season. Cihak sacrificed her own points and a few more turnovers in her quest to get the Chargers to play at a higher team level.
"She's a team-first person, no doubt about it," Power says.
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Emotionally? A rock. On the rare day Power gets in her "grill" she responds not by withdrawing, but by charging back with more determination.
A family tragedy early in her basketball life probably helped steel the foundation upon which Kela Cihak stands in this sport. She was a seventh-grader on the night of Jan. 23, 2004 when her father, Tim Cihak, collapsed and died, victim of a heart attack. The elder Cihak, then 42, was coaching a junior varsity basketball game at Avon High School in Avon, S.D. Young Kela sat in the bleachers.
Tim Cihak, a prep football star at Avon who went on to play at Northern State University in Aberdeen, S.D., had just returned to teaching after spending years in the brick-laying industry. As Kela and younger brother Marshall approached their prep careers, Tim Cihak eyed the local classroom as a way to be closer to home while they played. He landed a teaching position and two coaching jobs in Avon the year he died.
Says Kela: "I remember that night a friend tapping me on the shoulder and asking me, 'Kela, what's wrong with your dad?'"
An aunt quickly took Kela and Marshall into the school's auxilary gym. From there, the two children went to an uncle's residence. A bit later, their mother, Cindy Cihak, called to say Tim had died.
There were no pronouced heart issues in the large Cihak family. His nine siblings were stunned at the news, knowing Tim watched his diet closely and didn't smoke. A heart attack? It couldn't be.
Kela grieved, helped bury her dad and took a Rosary that Cindy fashioned from roses that covered his casket. She prayed, she talked and she kept competing, briefly part of the varsity rotation at Avon, something that's permitted for South Dakota seventh- and eighth-graders.
"I played in my first varsity game on the Tuesday night of the week my dad died (he died on a Friday)," Kela Cihak says. "I got in for a minute at the end of the game and scored on a lay-up."
When the high school's head coach apologized for a putting Kela in the center of a controversy involving his varsity roster, Kela, per custom, charged back. Because of the head coach's decision, her father got to see his daughter play varsity basketball. No apology necessary. To this day, she's extremely thankful her father's last sight of her in basketball was that in a varsity uniform.
Since that time, there's hardly been a time when Kela Cihak wasn't at the center of a varsity basketball rotation. Even during her freshman year at Briar Cliff, Power said she played the best basketball of anyone at the NAIA Divison II National Women's Basketball Tournament. What's more? She was coming back from a knee injury.
She followed a highly successful prep career by earning "Hustle" and "Most Improved Player" laurels at Briar Cliff in her first three years. Two of those seasons ended with Brair Cliff appearing in the Final Four, no small feat.
Cihak says a prayer to her father at the conclusion of the National Anthem each game. It comes seconds before the opening tip. The communication gives her strength and steadies any pre-game jitters. It reinforces the fact she's lucky to be playing and should take nothing for granted, a mantra that's guided her for nearly a decade.
"I work hard at everything," Cihak says from a table at Bishop Mueller Library on the Briar Cliff University campus, a place of quiet where the psychology major studies. "It's cliché, but I really don't take things for granted."
Says Power, "She's an example of how hard you have to work. She's our unsung hero."
