Another foot injury for Heels

CHAPEL HILL — Foot injuries have been a painful nuisance for North Carolina’s basketball team in recent years.

In 2002-03, center Sean May, who now plays for the Charlotte Bobcats, was limited to 11 games because of a broken bone in his left foot. In 2006-07, Quentin Thomas, who graduated last summer, had a stress reaction in his left foot that caused him to miss nine games. That same season, Bobby Frasor, now a senior, missed 10 games during two stretches because of injuries to his right foot.

Now Marcus Ginyard, UNC’s top defender, will miss the rest of the season and seek a medical redshirt because his left foot — which still boasts a pin, and was inserted to heal a stress fracture in October, still hurts.

“They have not figured out what’s wrong; I don’t think there is anything that is necessarily wrong,’’ Ginyard said. “It’s just not healing as quickly as we would like it to. More surgery has not been discussed at this point. And I’m praying that it won’t ever be discussed.

“At this point, it’s just still painful. I guess you can blame it on scar tissue or damage tissue, or maybe this is just the best it’s going to get. But we’re hoping it’s going to get better, and that’s all we really know right now.”

Ginyard said he doesn’t regret having the initial surgery, “because the bone was definitely breaking, and it was weak and it definitely needed some structural help.”

He said he thought for weeks about whether to keep trying to come back, or shut himself down for the rest of the season. The tipping point: “I almost felt like if I were to continue to play on it at this point, I wouldn’t be at 100 percent. I didn’t want to be out there not at 100 percent; I would feel like I was cheating my teammates, and that would be even worse of a feeling then have to watch them on the court and not play.”

Ginyard can apply for a fifth year of eligibility under NCAA rules because he was injured, and didn’t play past the mid-way point of the season. But his absence will hurt the Tar Heels in more ways that one.

Not only will they miss his defense, but his leadership.

Although he will try to contribute what he can from the end of the bench.

“I think that this is an excellent opportunity to show what kind of character this Carolina basketball team has,’’ he said. “There is no doubt about it, that every national championship team has had to overcome some kind of obstacle – not necessarily one or two or three things, there’s going to be a lot of things that happen throughout the year ….

“And every championship team is going to find a way to get through those things and persevere, so if anything, this is the perfect situation for this team right now, to be able to look at this situation that everyone else is looking at as something so negative … [and] for people to step up and for this team to pull together, for this team to start working even harder, and it will be even better when this team gets to where it wants to be and reaches their goals, even though all of this.”