Senior recovers to help Knights to crown
By Bob Nuse, Sports Editor
RED BANK — Cameron Musco has managed to wash away a year’s worth of frustration in two weeks.
The West Windsor-Plainsboro North senior went through a tough year of rehabilitation after a knee injury suffered during the baseball season of his sophomore year. The injury forced him to miss all of his junior soccer season.
”Last year, having to sit and watch, that was the most frustrating thing in the world,” said Musco, part of a WW-P North defense that posted its third straight shutout as the Knights beat Red Bank, 3-0, Friday to capture the Central Jersey Group III title.
”Sitting on the sidelines and not being able to help your team is tough. This year, all I wanted to do was whatever I could to help the team win.”
Musco vividly remembers the day he was injured. It’s not the kind of thing you easily forget when it costs you a year of sports.
”That was not a very good day in my life,” Musco said. “I missed all the rest of the baseball season, the soccer season and basketball. At times I felt down. And the physical therapy was long and hard. I had a lot of teammates that have helped me out during the whole thing.”
Making it back in time to contribute to the Knights this year has helped ease a lot of that frustration.
”To make it back to a normal team is one thing,” Musco said. “To make it back to a team like ours is great. We’ve all been saying the same thing, that heart speaks for everything. This is what happens.
”Our back four has been so solid. And then we have Eric Scala, who has been great in goal. He came up big today. And I give a lot of credit to our outside midfield for making their way back as well.”
Musco has shown a lot of heart in fighting his way back from a knee injury that could have ended the career of a lot of players. But, as important as sports are to him, there was little chance he wouldn’t make it back.
”Sports are his life,” WW-P North coach Trevor Warner said. “He’s such a competitor and he’s so involved in things. What he brings to the table, from a competitive standpoint, is difficult to match. When he’s one-on-one with a kid, and he’s not the biggest kid on the field, but goes hard on tackles. He wins aerial balls. He closes people down, consistently.”
Warner knows how hard Musco worked to get back on the field. And he also knows how frustrated he was earlier in the season when he was first coming back. But the hard work paid off and the past two weeks have eased a lot of the pain.
”He’s a baseball player, too, and he missed the baseball season and it just gutted him,” Warner said. “It was like, put him on a table and cut his insides out. It was terrible for him. And at the beginning of the year this year he wasn’t really in game shape, his knee was still bothering him a little bit, and we had a long talk one day after practice. He made it very clear that this was the most important thing in his life right now. And shortly after that he got an opportunity and he hasn’t looked back.”
And neither have the Knights.

