USC RB Markese Stepp: 'I've got to reprove myself to everybody again'

Sports injuries by nature are unfortunate and inconvenient. There is no other kind.

But what happened to USC running back Markese Stepp last October was just plain cruel.

Stepp's role in the Trojans' offense had become a weekly fulcrum for debate, as the staff tried to manage finding increased touches for the impressive up-and-comer -- who was stampeding his way through defenses whenever called upon -- while also continuing to reward redshirt junior Vavae Malepeai for his steady reliability and giving fellow veteran Stephen Carr enough opportunities to see if he could connect on his home run potential.

Consequently, Stepp's role never seemed large enough for some, but his moment had arrived by the middle of USC's Oct. 19 clash with Arizona.

It wasn't the way anybody wanted to see it happen, with Malepeai undergoing knee surgery earlier that week and then Carr sustaining a hamstring strain in the first half of that game, but the USC staff had no choice at that point but to feed Stepp the rest of the way and in the weeks to come. Or so it seemed.

Instead, the promising young back soon went down with his own injury early in the third quarter -- tearing ligaments in his left ankle that would require surgery and a far longer rehab than anyone expected. Asked all these months later the best way to describe how it happened, Stepp quickly texts over the slow-motion video of the play and says, "However you want to describe that."

Severely painful would be the simple way to put it. To get more specific, Stepp's balance had been thrown off along the sideline by a diving defender, and as he tried to recover that left foot just stuck in the ground, twisting first to the right and then forward over top of itself.

As bad as it looks on film, though, he didn't know at the time that he'd still be working through the final stages of his recovery eight months later.

"The ankle is coming back pretty well. I'm in the last 10 percent, and it's really feeling like the hardest part," Stepp said Wednesday night. "You feel like you're right there, but it's not just retraining that ankle but retraining your whole body to get back into those football movements, football cuts and stuff. So this by far has been the hardest part of the rehab, getting that little strength back, that last little push. It's been hard, I'm not going to lie."

Not to mention the mental toll, which Stepp spoke candidly about while going in-depth with TrojanSports.com about the ups and downs of last fall and how he's approaching this 2020 season.