Auburn Riverside’s Patricia Phithamma can regularly be found leading a lip-sync battle between teammates or joking with them in a huddle after practice.

After a season away from the Ravens’ soccer team, the senior relishes such opportunities.

In May 2015, Phithamma was playing defense for her club team, converging on the ball with an opponent.

“I stepped in with my left leg and my right foot was planted, and she just kind of hip-checked me,” she said. “My knee went in, my body went the other way and my knee just popped.”

Phithamma was able to walk off the field, and a trainer at the match did not think it was a serious injury. But when the pain did not subside after two weeks of icing the knee, Phithamma’s parents decided to take her in for a magnetic resonance imaging examination. That test revealed that she had torn the anterior cruciate ligament in her knee. Doctors used a patella tendon graft, Phithamma said, to reconstruct the knee.

Then came the recovery process.

“Just trying to straighten my leg for the first three months was unbelievably hard,” Phithamma said. “I eventually started running, too, which was a process because I had a limp for the longest time. It was really slow. It was like a marathon.”

She said her doctor recommended that she perform single-leg squats about 100 times per day, which enabled Phithamma to watch two seasons of one of her favorite TV shows, “Grey’s Anatomy,” in a short time frame.

The process of watching the Ravens last fall was much longer.

“There were so many moments where I just wanted to be playing and helping. There were so many things I saw from the sideline that I was like, ‘I could’ve done that; I could’ve gotten a goal.’ “

Phithamma, a Hawaii native who moved to Auburn when she was 6, joked that there was one benefit to watching her teammates play, though.

“There were some moments where they were out in the freezing cold rain and I was on the bench in my big jacket,” she said with a laugh.

This year, Phithamma will be counted on to help replace Izzy Creighton, who graduated after being selected as the South Puget Sound League 3A Offensive MVP in 2015. Creighton scored eight goals and had five assists last season. Phithamma said her “Barcelona-playing style,” which consists of passing and moving the ball, is different from Creighton’s.

“She’s a lot more direct,” Phithamma said. “She’ll run after anything.”

But Auburn Riverside coach Paul Lewis said his team will benefit from Phithamma’s return to the field.

“Patricia is power,” he said. “One thing we missed last year was her ability to strike a ball hard from the midfield, from the forwards.”

And her leadership.

“Pat’s kind of the life of the party,” Lewis said. “She sets kind of a light tone. At the same time, once the drill gets going or the game starts, it’s going to be intense.”

He saw some of those elements when the Ravens visited Lake Roosevelt in the Grand Coulee Dam area for their summer retreat. There was a hike, a variety of team challenges, and yes, a lip-sync battle.

“Soccer’s a really social game,” Lewis said. “It’s different from a lot of other sports because there’s not a lot of scoring. It takes a lot of cohesion to make goals happen. The more that we can foster that atmosphere, the better.”

While Phithamma hopes to play collegiately – she is looking for a college that offers an engineering program in a warmer climate, such as California – she said her focus is on the season at hand. After all, no athlete knows when that opportunity might end.

“You have to play to have fun because you might get injured,” Phithamma said. “I’m more appreciative of the game now.”