"She wasn't looking like herself," says Golden Valley co-head coach Chris Evans. "She didn't have spring in her step. How she carried her body, her posture, nothing looked like Lauren."

Hunched over on the fence surrounding the Golden Valley track, Lauren told her coaches why.

She had suffered a concussion on a snowboarding trip the past weekend, an accident that was much more severe than she initially believed.

As the dizziness and nausea set in, so did the reality of the situation: Hackney wasn't going to be running any time soon.

At that point, it was hard to envision her competing for a CIF-Southern Section championship in her primary event, the 400-meter race.

But today at Cerritos College, that's exactly what the junior sprinter is going to do.

"I'm just really excited," she says. "I want to have a fun time, but I haven't really looked at anyone else's times because I don't want to psych myself out."

If she did look, she'd see that her time of 58.17 seconds was the fourth-fastest overall in Division III, and that she's a threat to win the sectional title given her personal best of 57.71 at the Foothill League finals just two weeks ago.

In late January, times like that seemed far off.

Hackney was up at Big Bear Mountain with friends when she fell while snowboarding. None of them remember the accident well, least of all Hackney.

"I really don't know that much," she admits. "I got down the mountain and it's kind of blurry."

She doesn't even remember much of her first practice back.

Evans certainly remembers it. Hackney's health and well-being came first, but Evans also remembers the blow the concussion dealt to her development.

Hackney had run track for three years when she was younger, but her main focus had been on soccer. She decided to give track another shot as a sophomore, and by the end of the season, her time in the 400 was consistently in the 58-second range.

She liked track so much that she quit soccer and prepared to run full-time.

"This was set up to be her big breakout year," Evans says. "She was going to train with us all year. She was really going to be ready to go. Then she got the concussion, which threw our plan out the window."

Hackney went to see a doctor, and he told her that she couldn't run again until she showed no symptoms of the concussion whatsoever. She says she dealt with bad headaches and missed some days of school, during which she'd lay in bed all day.

But Hackney still wanted to be involved with the track team.

"All she talked about was how she just wanted to be able to run again," says Nicole Watson, a friend and teammate of Hackney's. "She just wanted to kick herself."

Hackney began keeping times at practices and meets and doing other things with the team to keep herself busy.

In all, she missed almost two months of the season and didn't return until late March, right before Golden Valley was scheduled to open the league schedule against Valencia.

By then, she was fed up with sitting out.

"There's the story of the concussion," Evans says, "and there's the story of what she did once she came back."

The coaches were extremely cautious with Hackney at first, allowing her to run just a single lap at practice the first couple of occasions.

Despite not being fully recovered, she didn't shy away from running hard and competing against some of the other top sprinters in the league, starting with Valencia's Jasmine Hall.

That's part of her passionate personality, something Watson says the team missed in her absence.

"To see her come back, for me, it's really great because I'm her really good friend," Watson says. "The whole team was like, ‘Hey Lauren, it's so great to see you. Glad you're back!'"

The same could not be said of other Foothill League competitors.

By the time the fourth week of the league season rolled around, Hackney had totally recovered. She proved it by winning the 400 with a time of 58.5 against West Ranch.

"Last year I ended on a 58 and I really wanted to get back to that," she says. "That was the first time I did it."

Hackney followed up the next week by winning the 400 against Hart, and she set her personal record at the Foothill League finals while finishing third behind Saugus' Jenna Vincej and Amber Wright.

Both of them are competing at today's CIF-SS championships, along with Hackney.

And she doesn't want to stop at Cerritos College.

"Since my track season was shortened in the beginning, it kind of makes up for it with the end being longer," she says.

How long it will last remains to be seen.

After what Hackney's been through, it wouldn't be wise to doubt her.

"The thing about athletes is they're really not defined when things are going well," Evans says. "They're defined when the plan, how you thought it was going to go, is thrown into a complete detour.

"Great athletes, they define the moment. They don't let the moment define them."