Rachel Divosevic heard the sound and hoped for the best, but feared the worst.

The sound was a "pop" in her left knee as she made a jump stop in the first half of Mercyhurst College's basketball game against New York Institute of Technology.

Divosevic was helped off the court, her promising freshman season with the Lakers put on hold.

The sound she heard was her anterior cruciate ligament tearing. She has had reconstructive surgery on the knee and is on the mend. But she won't be able to play basketball again until late spring or early summer.

"No one has said when I'll be able to start shooting around or anything," said Divosevic, a North Allegheny High School graduate.

"The recovery time is six to nine months."

What's sad is Divosevic, a 5-foot-9 swing player, was doing what Mercyhurst coach Karin Nicholls had thought she would do as a freshman.

Divosevic not only was starting, she was the Lakers' second-leading scorer.

In the four games she played, Divosevic averaged 14.3 points, and that included the seven points she scored against NYIT in just nine minutes.

"We didn't recruit Rachel to come up here and sit," Nicholls said. "We pretty much knew she was going to come in here and play.

"We knew that she would be a difference-maker."

Divosevic opened the season as a starter and led Mercyhurst in scoring with 20 points the first game. She connect on 9 of 16 field-goal attempts and had four rebounds in a 60-48 loss to LeMoyne.

Just to prove it wasn't a fluke, Divosevic scored 15 points on a 7-for-13 shooting performance and grabbed five rebounds in an 80-69 victory against Wheeling Jesuit in the second game.

"She was playing the three [small forward] and doing exactly what we thought she could do," Nicholls said.

"She can take people to the basket, and if they cut that off, she can pull up and make her shot. She's just an outstanding player."

An outstanding player who is having to learn the virtues of patience.

By her own admission, Divosevic has always been an individual who is at her best, on and off court, when she is going full speed. Getting around on crutches with an immobilizer on her left leg has cramped her style.

"It has been hard. For me, it has always been go, go, go. I've had to get used to taking things slower," she said.

She goes to rehabilitation two hours a day, three days a week. The other days, she works at getting the knee stronger on her own.

What she doesn't do is miss practices or games. She's there, cheering for her teammates, making the best of the situation.

"I have gotten a different perspective on games just sitting and watching," she said. "You do pick up things that you might not have seen."

Divosevic was a standout at North Allegheny. She averaged 16.4 points per game as a junior and 18.7 ppg as a senior, finishing her high school career with 1,064 points.

After starting at forward for two seasons, Divosevic was switched to shooting guard last winter by Tigers coach Will Saunders.

She was recruited by a number of Division I colleges. In fact, Mercyhurst was the only Division II school she visited.

In November 2005, during her senior year of high school, she signed a letter-of-intent with the Lakers during the NCAA early-signing period.

"Bucknell, Lehigh and Wagner were the schools I was looking at," she said.

"But I wasn't hung up on playing at the Division I level. I wanted to go someplace where I was going to play and then I came up here and liked the atmosphere and what coach Nicholls was doing."

Nicholls is in her third season as Mercyhurst's head coach and is building a program to compete in the tough Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. The Lakers were 6-11 overall, 2-5 in the GLIAC going into last Thursday's game.

There was a time this season when she thought she might start four freshmen.

She is hoping to still get four full seasons from Divosevic.

"We'll petition [the NCAA] to get her a medical redshirt and she can play four [more] seasons if she wants to stay that extra year," Nicholls said. "That will be up to Rachel, but she'll have the option of doing that."

A business major, Divosevic hasn't made her mind up about staying in college an extra year. But she talked like she is leaning that way.

"I've talked with coach about that," she said of the redshirt. "You don't really appreciate something until you can't do it any more."