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As soon as the first two questions were answered, all the others instantly disappeared.

Once she learned she would survive and be able to walk, Alexa Russo ’23, M.S. ’25 — and everyone around her — knew she’d be running before long. And a successful return to the softball diamond was a certainty.

No matter how dire things might have looked in those frightening first few hours of summer in 2021, or how complicated things got almost exactly a year later, Russo is today where she was always destined to be.

This spring, she’s beginning a final season playing third base and hitting in the middle of the order for the UTampa softball team as a graduate student finishing up a master’s degree in instructional design to follow the bachelor’s she earned in 2023.

“I had a job to do,” Russo said. “I never thought I was not going to play.”

Well, maybe not quite never. The early-morning hours of May 23, 2021, were more than nerve-wracking for Russo, her family, teammates and friends. On her way to pick up her sister from a party in North Tampa, Russo was hit by a drunk driver who crossed two lanes of traffic, plowed through a median and then crossed two more lanes of traffic before hitting Russo head on.

The Kia she was driving wound up upside down with Russo trapped inside, bleeding internally and a piece of metal lodged near her left eye. An elderly woman who stopped comforted Russo through the window and managed to get her cell phone. The woman called Russo’s parents and told them that their daughter had been in an accident. She managed to get the phone near Alexa, who said, “Daddy, I’m going to be OK.”

She may have been the only one who was so certain at that moment. When Paul and Melissa Russo got to the scene, police and paramedics told Paul they had expected to see a fatality when they first arrived.

“God saved me,” Russo said.

“God and the Kia car company,” Paul Russo said. “That car’s safety devices did exactly what they were supposed to do.”

The first few hours after Russo was cut out of the car by rescue workers using extrication tools were tense. In the emergency room, doctors discovered she was bleeding internally from her liver and had injuries to her pelvis and eye. When she finally was stabilized, doctors told Russo and her parents that her life was no longer in danger. A subsequent exam by an orthopedic specialist brought even more reason for optimism.

“He told me I’d be able to walk,” Russo said. “Then, I asked if I’d be able to play softball again. He said, ‘Absolutely, you’ll be playing by Christmas.’”

But that only came after three surgeries resulting in two aluminum rods in her pelvis, nine days in the hospital and a grueling, long summer of rehabilitation work.

“When I first got to see her after her first surgery, she was reassuring me instead of me reassuring her,” said Christina Clauberg ’20, M.S. ’21, Russo’s former Spartans softball teammate.

Other friends and family had similar experiences.

“I spent a lot of time with her in the hospital and after she got home,” said best friend Ava Pizzuto. “I never saw her get down at all. I never saw her show even the slightest doubt that she would play again.”

Early on, Pizzuto brought puzzles to occupy Russo’s mind. But soon, it became time to rebuild a broken body.

At first, Russo was in a wheelchair and for three months couldn’t put weight on her left leg. Slowly, she began the road back with intense physical therapy.

“Once she started that, it was ‘Game on,’” said Cole Russo, a senior catcher/third baseman on the UTampa baseball team and Alexa’s cousin. “She’s won at everything she’s ever done, and I had no doubt she was going to win that time.”

Russo graduated first to a walker and eventually crutches and a cane. By that October, she was running and practicing with the softball team. In the final game of the fall season, Coach Leslie Kanter put Russo in, and her comeback momentum grew. When the spring season rolled around, Russo started 51 games at third base and hit for a .262 average with four home runs and drove in 27 runs. But fate — disaster is too strong a word with Russo involved — struck again. Russo tore an interior cruciate ligament in her knee and had to have surgery.

Another long rehab followed, but Russo never flinched.

“Alexa is one of the toughest people I’ve ever seen,” said Paul Russo, who played three seasons with the Spartans (1988-90) before playing baseball professionally. “I remember we had her at a party when she was about 3, and some kid accidentally hit her hard in the face with a Whiffle Ball bat. She never cried or even really reacted. She just shrugged it off and went on playing.”

Russo pretty much shrugged off a second straight summer of intense rehab, too. Assistant baseball Coach Sam Militello ’02 was Paul Russo’s college teammate, and the two are in the UTampa Athletics Hall of Fame. Militello is Alexa’s godfather, and their families have a tradition of vacationing together at Clearwater Beach around the Fourth of July every year. The last two summers have been a little different. When the families headed to the beach each morning, Militello sensed someone was missing.

“We’d be walking out to the beach, and I’d look over at the pool, and there was Alexa and her physical therapist working. She never stopped working. That’s just who Alexa is.”

Russo’s time at UTampa now is coming to an end, and her dad proudly will be watching and rooting for her from the parking garage overlooking the softball field while the rest of her family sits behind home plate.

“I come to the games to watch, not to talk,” Paul Russo said. “It used to be that Alexa waved up to me after the national anthem. But now, the whole team waves up to me.”

Although it once appeared as if Russo were heading to a Division I school, Kanter won her over by extolling the virtues of UTampa and offering something no other school could.

“I offered her No. 33,” Kanter said. That’s the same number Paul Russo wore when he played for the Spartans.

“That got me,” Alexa Russo said. “I guess you could say I was born to be a Spartan.”

In addition to Alexa, Paul and Cole, Pat Russo (Paul’s brother and Cole’s father) also was a baseball star for the Spartans, and several other family members have been Spartans, as well, going back to the 1960s.

“A lot of Russos have come through here,” Cole Russo said. “But I don’t think there’s any question about who is the best Russo. People always say Alexa is the best Russo. And they’re right.”