In the months before the Olympics, Eagle River rugby player Alev Kelter’s preparations included a spinal fusion

At the Tokyo Olympics, Eagle River’s Alev Kelter played with grit and guts for the sixth-place U.S. women’s rugby sevens team.

When she carried the ball, she plowed through traffic whenever necessary, absorbing hits and dragging with her those who aimed to stop her. When playing defense, she smashed full-speed and shoulder-first into ball-carriers, sometimes flying through the air to wrap her arms around them.

That was the grit.

The guts was that she was playing at all.

A few months before the Americans played their first game in Tokyo on July 28, Kelter had surgery to fuse two vertebrae in her neck. She rejoined the U.S. team eight weeks before the Olympics and was playing in Tokyo some five months after her spinal fusion.

“The reality is, for what she did this week, it’s a huge achievement coming off the back of that surgery,” U.S. coach Chris Brown said after the Americans wrapped up a 4-2 run in the 12-team Olympic tournament last week.

“Is she back to her optimum? No, she’s not. She’s three or four months away from that,” Brown said. “She gave us many good minutes (in Tokyo), but come November, December, she’ll be at her absolute best, and that’s a testament to her.”

Kelter, 30, has dealt with ongoing neck issues for a couple of years, including a bulging disc that didn’t respond to other treatments.

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Once surgery to connect her C-6 and C-7 vertebrae entered the conversation, she consulted multiple experts, including a doctor who offered a grim assessment.

“He told me, ‘If you were my daughter I wouldn’t want you to make another tackle, so let’s get this surgery going,’ ‘’ Kelter said in an interview before the Olympics.

“... I put my head down and trusted the process and trusted our (U.S. Rugby) staff and had an amazing doctor in Colorado do the surgery. He was well-versed in Olympians and their bodies.”

Kelter said she went through plenty of what-ifs before deciding to have surgery.

“Am I going to be healthy enough, am I going to be able to continue the way I did before?” she said. “There was a lot, a lot of thought that went into this surgery. I had a lot of amazing conversations, a lot of vulnerable conversations.”

Among them, of course: Will I be able to play at the Olympics?

“For me and maybe other people who have been injured and come back, it’s about inspiration and mindset,” Kelter said. “But you also have to listen to your body: In five months, can I just push through it?”

Timelines vary, but people are often allowed to resume light activity six to eight weeks after a spinal fusion. A full recovery and a return to vigorous activity can take several months.

“It was a tight window,” Kelter said, but she went into surgery believing she would recover in time to play with her teammates in Tokyo.

“It was definitely a mindset for me. There wasn’t a doubt I would be ready and be on that team. That’s how you have to think when you’re going through a recovery like that,” she said.

After surgery in Denver, she spent six weeks in a neck brace. After six weeks of physical therapy, she was back home in Chula Vista, California, where she trains full-time with U.S. Rugby.

Brown wanted Kelter on the Olympic team. No American has played in more international matches, and in the 2019-20 season, Kelter was the leading scorer in the World Rugby League Sevens Series, the game’s highest level of competition.

“Based on the recovery timeline we felt we would have a good eight weeks with her on the pitch following the completion of the recovery process,” Brown said. “We could build her back into the contact element and get her the volume that she needs to play this game.”

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With about a month to go, Brown became convinced Kelter was ready.

“Three or four weeks before the Olympics we saw her putting her body in good positions without hesitation,” he said. “We knew she was going to be fine, otherwise we wouldn’t have given her that option.”

Kelter said she wasn’t afraid of injury and wasn’t worried about making tackles or getting tackled.

“I know rugby’s a safe sport,” she said. “I know that based on all the years I’ve played sports.”

You can make the case that Kelter, a Chugiak High graduate, is the most versatile — if not the best — athlete to come out of Alaska. She’s a graduate of the University of Wisconsin, where she was an NCAA champion in hockey and an all-Big Ten pick in soccer before she became a two-time Olympian in rugby.

At the 2016 Rio Olympics, Kelter and her teammates finished fifth. This time, they placed sixth, and Kelter was a key component.

In a 28-14 victory over China in the Americans’ first match, she provided a punishing first-half tackle, her first real taste of contact since surgery. She went on to set up a second-half try with a long run that invited contact.

The U.S. team is scheduled to resume training in September for a pair of World Series tournaments in December. The Americans will have a new coach — Brown, who took over as head coach in 2018 and led the team to its greatest triumphs, resigned on Thursday.

Kelter doesn’t plan on going anywhere, and there’s another Olympics in three years.

“I’m not looking to retire,” she said. “Not as long as this body of mine is functioning and fully capable of helping this team out.”