1989 Civic Hatch – Hard Shift – Cable Stretching

Before I start pulling bolts I want to verify the problem with my 1989 Honda Civic w/ a CRX Si tranny. So I was a service manager at a Meineke a lil while back and I had a tech replace the bad tranny and install a new clutch. After it was done the car would shift in the air while running but not on the ground. Weird. His solution at the time was to tighten the fuck out of the cable and it drives fine except the pedal takes a tremendous amount of force to shift and has at this point completely stretched out the cable. Its my project car by the way my main is a really clean nice 2008 CRV w/ a manual HC K24 so after loosing my job due to this virus shit I never needed to get back to it till now. Based on how tough it is to move the fork would it be safe to assume he install the fork spring backwards or what? I’m not very experienced working on trannys and clutchs but other than that I know what I’m doing. Any ideas or tips would be greatly appreciated as I will be doing this by myself in my garage.