Just five games into the 2007 WNBA season, Monarchs starting power forward DeMya Walker sustained a torn patellar tendon in her right knee. The injury had many pundits saying she would never return to the court or ever be the player she once was. Walker heard the doubters and kept a list. Now seven months later and a month after being cleared to play basketball again, she is ready to prove those naysayers wrong and inspire young women, just as she did when she made it into the WNBA.

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DeMya Walker NBAE / Getty Images

When DeMya Walker was 12, her mother fell 30 feet off a scaffold while working in a steel mill. The doctors told her mother, Karolyn, she would never walk again.

After the life-threatening event, Karolyn told her daughter something she never forgot.

�My mom told me, �Don�t let them tell you, you can�t. And if I have to prove it to you, I will'," Walker said.

Today her mother walks, runs and has full mobility of her extremities. Like her, DeMya is ready to prove that she can be better than she was before her knee injury.

"I have a lot of doubters and I tend to enjoy proving doubters wrong," Walker said as the sun shone through the Monarchs practice facility windows. "It�s just something that works for me. I turn negatives into positives every day."

�Once I got cleared, Dr. Lewis told me that I needed about a month under my belt of just sheer weight training, 'The knee is completely healed, now let�s build the body some more'," Walker recalled. "Then he cleared me to start doing supervised workouts [at the beginning of January], where I just [went] all-out playing and getting comfortable on the court. He said if I felt good about that, I�m cleared to [play competitively] in February."

The road to recovery was speedy, but grueling.

There were days, Walker admits, she didn't want to get out of bed and go through another day of physical therapy. But that's when the list of doubters helped push her.

Walker speaks with teammates Kara Lawson (left) and Nicole Powell Rocky Widner / NBAE / Getty Images

"I think it�s one of the things that I can honestly say kept me going, even when I didn't really want to do it," Walker said, as beads of sweat collected on her brow while she pedaled on a stationary bike. �Sometimes I take the day off, other times I�m like, 'What do you want to do? Are you going to prove [the doubters] right or are you going to prove them wrong?' And at the end of the day, I don�t want anybody to be able to tell me, 'I told you so'."

While getting through the physical struggles that come with recovering from injury are painstaking, Walker says basketball, like rehabilitation, is more mental than anything. And now the sunny spirited forward is as confident as ever.

�I think the game of basketball itself is 90 percent mental," Walker said. "How you think about the games, how you think about yourself and how you adjust to the different things being thrown at you.

�My confidence is in myself and once I feel like I�m okay, I don�t think about it," Walker said, ensuring she doesn't worry about her surgically repaired knee. "I don't say, �Oh, I missed that shot because of my knee.' It�s never because of that. I know it�s 100 percent healed. So it�s just as good as the other one. [Actually] now it�s probably better.�

Yolanda Griffith, DeMya Walker and daughter Zachara Rocky Widner / NBAE / Getty Images

One element of the game that can't be formulated in rehab or individual workouts is the unity an athlete has being around her teammates all the time.

�I was with my teammates when they were in Sacramento, but when you�re on the road you build a different sense of camaraderie and you build a different sense of trust," Walker said. "The good thing is that I played with the majority of my team four years prior to [my injury], so I already had that. But each year adds a different element and that was something that I really missed.

�I missed being on the road where it�s just you and your teammates and there�s nobody else, so all you rely on is each other," Walker continued. "I miss that because you get the inside jokes on the road. You don�t really get the inside jokes here, because everybody�s just kind of doing their own thing. So when the team came back from the road, you�re coming into practice and everyone's laughing and you�re like, 'what's so funny?'

And they're like, 'Oh nothing, you weren�t there'."

Walker now has a chance to build that camaraderie with new teammates in Russian Superleague play as she suits up for Nadezhda Orenburg. This is not the Russian team Walker has played with in the past, CSKA. She chose this team so that she could get 30-35 minutes per game, rather than the 10-20 minutes she regularly saw with the "number one Russian team."

"I�ve been brushing up on my Russian because I haven�t been in Russia for almost a year," Walker said with her distinctive smile. "I�m used to not being in Russia for three or four months so [my Russian stays fresh]. [Due to rehab] it's been longer.

"But other than that, I�m just so excited to play. It�s the greatest feeling in the world to do what you love to do," Walker continued. "And to do it whole-heartedly, not crippled-up, just full-steam ahead."

Knowing she is a role model, like her mother is to her, Walker's ability to smile in the face of doubt is grounded in showing others a way to make dreams reality.

"I have a daughter and I want her to know that she can do anything," Walker said. �My mom never let anybody tell her that she couldn�t do something. She's cool with everybody. Anybody that brought negativity into a room she always turned it into a positive. I want to be able to say that and that�s important to me. [As professional basketball players you realize] the path that you leave for the women behind you.

"My daughter is going to be a woman one day and I want her to know [she can do anything]," Walker continued. "I have seven nieces who all look up to me and all of them are like, 'I'm going to be like my auntie' and they don�t even like basketball.

"They do [everything] to the best of their abilities, because they feel like it doesn�t matter what someone says. Even little girls who I don�t know, it�s important for them to know it doesn�t matter who tells you, you can�t. What matters is what your heart tells you and everything else just kind of falls into place."

When DeMya's mother hung in her room an inspirational poster of a basketball hoop and a black background, the adolescent was certain she knew a lot of things. Now healthy, as Walker works her way into game-shape and prepares for the upcoming Monarchs season, she reflects that only one thing she learned from that time is certain.

A goal is a dream with a deadline.

Just as the poster had said.

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