Archdeacon: The resurrection of Wright State’s Rachel Loobie

FAIRBORN — She was hesitant to leave her seat on the edge of the Nutter Center court after practice the other day and return to that darkened dorm room at Central Michigan University.

For Racel Loobie, the trip is always painful.

“Uummm ... this is hard to talk about,” said the Wright State senior forward, her easy smile and effervescent nature now gone, her voice hushed.

“I remember this one night I came home from practice. I had all the blinds closed. The room was dark. I was lying on the floor crying, still in my practice stuff.

“Finally, I called my mom, and I was like ‘I just don’t think I can do this anymore. I’m not strong enough.’

“I remember my mom saying ‘What happened to my baby girl? This is not the girl I sent to Michigan.’

“And I was like, ‘I don’t know.’ It was just that everything I’d thought college athletics was going to be had turned into a bad dream.”

Loobie, a much-sought-after star at Franklin Central High School in Indianapolis, had chosen Central Michigan — which had made the NCAA Tournament in two of the three years prior, including a Sweet 16 trip in 2018 — from nearly two dozen mid-major offers.

“But the coach I was recruited by — Coach (Sue) Guevara — retired about two weeks after I committed,” she said.

Assistant coach Heather Oesterle — once a Miami RedHawks assistant — took over the program before Loobie’s 2020-21 freshman season.

The Chippewas won that year — going 18-9 — and made the NCAA Tournament where they were beaten by an Iowa team led Caitlin Clark, the Hawkeye freshman who would eventually ascend to the pinnacle of women’s hoop history.

At CMU, though, things began to crumble.

Susan Loobie, Rachel’s mom, said seven players left the team after her daughter’s freshman season.

She and her husband, Patrick, told Rachel — who, she said, loved CMU as a school, but not the constant verbal abuse that had settled over the basketball program — she should consider transferring, as well.

“But she wanted to stick it out,” Susan recalled. “She said, ‘I’m not a quitter. I made a commitment and maybe it will get better.’ “But she just wasn’t herself. She called every day. Sometimes she just needed to cry; sometimes to complain. Sometimes we just needed to give her a hype talk.

“We tried to do what we could, but you could see the toll it was taking.”

Loobie lost 40 pounds off her 6-foot-1 frame, dropping to an unhealthy 125 pounds.

She said she saw a therapist to “try and get my mind space back. I felt I’d lost myself and didn’t know how to get it back.”

After averaging 20 points and 11 rebounds a game as a high school senior, she was getting eight minutes a game as a freshman and played in just seven games as a sophomore. That season the Chippewas plummeted to a 4-25 record, after which Loobie and five more players decided to transfer.

After another six-win season and still more defections, Oesterle was fired and now works at Notre Dame.

Loobie entered the transfer portal and one of her former AAU coaches contacted Wright State about her.

The Raiders — coming off their own 4-23 campaign thanks to the decimated roster Kari Hoffman ended up with in her first season as coach — needed new players and Loobie liked that opportunity and the notion that the Raiders coaches offered a familial embrace off the court.

“She wanted to be cared about by a coaching staff,” Hoffman said. “But she also told me straight out, ‘I’m going to struggle to trust you.’ It was because of what she’d just been through. It’s been a process with her since, but we’ve built something now.”

After winning just 12 games in Hoffman’s first two seasons combined, the Raiders are now 17-14 and a No. 4 seed coming into tonight’s Horizon League Tournament quarterfinal game with Milwaukee at the Nutter Center.

Credit: Joseph R. Craven

Credit: Joseph R. Craven

And Loobie is the poster child of this resurrection story at Wright State.

After coming off the end of bench last season — she averaged just 6.9 minutes, 2.6 points and 2.7 rebounds a game — she started this season at the post position.

Although she regularly gives away height and weight to opposing post players, Loobie is fifth in the Horizon league in rebounding (6.8 per game), fourth in blocked shots and third in field goal percentage (49.5 percent.) She leads Wright State’s rotation in those three categories and is fourth in scoring (9.1) and minutes played (21.3) per game.

She’s been a regular on the Dean’s List since coming to Wright State and will graduate with a communications degree this spring.

She has one more year of eligibility left and hasn’t decided if she’ll stay at WSU or move to a school that offers her a master’s degree (WSU does not) in her field.

This biggest change Susan and Patrick have seen in their daughter is the return of her smile and an off-the-court embrace of everyone around her.

The other day after practice she cavorted on the court with Hoffman’s 4-year-old son. And she’s befriended a young man with special needs who is one of the Raiders’ most ardent fans and they often talk after games.

After a recent game she made her way to a pair of elderly ladies sitting courtside and held their hands and laughed with them.

Following a quick trip to the locker room for Hoffman’s postgame comments, she returned to the court and signed autographs for middle school girls who flocked around her.

“She has a great heart,” Hoffman said. “She really cares about people .

“After one of her games I pulled her aside and said ‘You really have a special gift of making people feel important. You invest, you care, you’re intentional, and that goes a long way. That will take you far in life.’

“And she said, ‘That’s the best compliment I’ve ever received.’”

‘She can hoop a little bit’

Loobie is a mix of her parents: her dad’s push to better himself and her mom’s passion to help others.

Patrick Loobie was raised in Trinidad, but at his mother’s urging — Rachel said — he came to America to further his education and find work.

He ended up in Miami, where he went to trade school, got a job and joined a reggae band.,

Susan Loobie was raised in Windfall, Indiana, and educated at Ball State.

As part of the One Mission Society — an Evangelical Christian ministry group that was founded in 1901 and last year was working in 78 countries — she has traveled the world, mostly recently to Kenya, and lived in Mexico and Spain.

It was during her mission work in Spain many years ago that she broke her back and was returned to the states — to a hospital in Miami — for surgery and months of rehab.

It was there that she met Patrick, the drummer in a church band. He signed up with other members of the congregation to bring her food as she recovered.

Eventually, they fell in love, married and had two children, Rachel and younger brother Caleb. When the kids were small, the family moved to Indiana, where Susan is now the communications director of One Mission.

Patrick introduced Rachel to basketball when she was four and, as a young girl, she was playing against boys.

“Initially with the boys it was ‘Ha!... Ha!... Ha! Look at the little girl who’s come to play ‘cause her Daddy brought her in here.’

“But then I became closer to the boys and they were like, ‘OK ‚she can hoop a little bit.’”

At Franklin Central — even though she fractured her sacrum in a spill her sophomore year and underwent a microdiscectomy — she scored 1,396 career points, grabbed a school-record 773 rebounds and won All State honors four years in in a row,.

She chose Central Michigan because of its basketball success.

“They’d just come off the Sweet 16 and I was like ‘Oh the lights! The cameras!’ I wanted to be on a team that does all this and that. I thought that’d be cool and fun.” But in the end that wasn’t the case.

She said the real fun didn’t come until this season at Wright State.

‘I want to prove myself’

It took her a while to buy into the fact WSU wanted her to play the post, where she would be undersized almost every game.

“But after having three years without the results I wanted, I just changed my mindset this year,” she said. “I decided I’m not going to be upset. I’m not going to pout. I’m not going to do anything but work.

“Now I take every game as a challenge. It’s exciting and I want to prove myself.”

And tonight, Milwaukee — which split its two games with WSU this season — will present a huge rebounding challenge. In both games the Panthers overwhelmed WSU on the boards: 48-29 in the game WSU won and 49-32 in the other.

Loobie stayed after practice Tuesday to work with assistant coach Megan Leuzinger on some of the challenges the Panthers will present.

As the two left the court, Loobie was smiling.

Sights like that are something Susan Loobie didn’t see from her daughter in her early college years.

She said she knew something was different the first time she and her husband came to a WSU game last year.

Afterward, as they were leaving with Rachel through the back loading dock area of the Nutter Center, she said something unexpected happened:

“All of a sudden, she’s calling out, ‘Hey Jose! ….Hey Maria!....Hey John!’

“It was like the custodian, the ticket taker, the security guard — all the people who work in the background. She knew them all by name and they all knew her.

“And they were like, ‘Hey Rach, come over and give us a hug!’

Right then, Susan looked at her husband and they both knew.

They had their daughter back.

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