Now, Wright State has Alexis and Bo.
This past spring, Alexis Hutchison and Bo Myers transferred to Wright State — and the respective Raiders’ women’s and men’s basketball programs — after getting their undergrad degrees at Malone University. Both of their hoops careers at the NCAA Division II school in Canton were impressive and, when taken together, made them something of a celebrated couple on campus.
“Yeah, sometimes people would call us The Power Couple,” Hutchison laughed.
The pair met soon after coming to campus four years ago — she from Centerville High School, where she was captain of the girls’ basketball and soccer teams and he from tiny Rockbridge, the Hocking County crossroads, and Logan High School, the nearby D-1 school where he became the all-time career scorer.
At Malone, they really were a power couple on the basketball court, scoring a combined 3,126 points.
She played in 108 games, started the last 103 in a row and finished with 1,387 points.
Myers, who said he’s named after Bo Jackson, played in 111 games, started 85 and scored 1,739 points.
Although both of their sophomore seasons were nicked by COVID precautions that shortened the Pioneers’ seasons by a handful of games, the intrusion did give them this NCAA-mandated extra, post grad year that has allowed them to come to WSU.
Hutchison decided on WSU first and when she came on her official visit, she brought along Bo as her plus-one. He’d never been on the WSU campus before and hadn’t yet been recruited by the Raiders’ coaches.
Both had been mostly bypassed by Division I schools coming out of high school — Myers did get a lone offer from the Air Force Academy — and wanted a chance to show they can play at the D-I level.
Hutchison had been derailed early at Centerville when she tore her ACL in a game as a sophomore. While she came back to be a leader on both the basketball and soccer teams, she said she only got considerations from D-II and III schools and NAIA programs — and not all of them.
When WSU coach Kari Hoffman was a Cedarville, she didn’t recruit Alexis.
“We just had this conversation recently and she told me ‘I didn’t think you were that good,’” Hutchison said with a laugh. “All I could say was ‘Well, I’m here now.’”
On the men’s side, WSU associate head coach Clint Sargent admitted the Raiders bypassed Myers: “I don’t know if this is a good thing to say or not, but I don’t remember him, except for his name. I know we didn’t look at him back then.”
It was the same for a lot of other schools in the state and, to that, Myers only says:
“I’m not in other people’s heads, so I don’t really know what they’re thinking.
“But I can say I’m happy to be here now.”
Gym meeting
The way Hutchison remembers it, on one of her first days as a freshman, she was about to walk into Osborne Hall, the basketball gym at Malone, when she saw the 6-foot-6 Myers out on the court taking shots:
“All of a sudden I was like ‘I’m not going in there!’ I was too nervous and I walked back out.”
Myers said he already had noticed her at freshman orientation and after her gym about-face, he sent her a message on Snapchat.
“He said something like, ‘I think you’re really pretty. Want to go on a date?’” she laughed.
“I just said, ‘You want to hang out?” is the way he recalled it in the separate interviews I had with the pair outside WSU’s Pavilion practice gym Wednesday afternoon. “I just wanted it to be relaxed.”
Hutchison said he took her to the local Smoothie King and got her a smoothie.
With a little prompting, she laughed and played along: “Oh yeah, he was smooth. ... He did open the door for me like a gentleman and everything.”
As she got to know him, he said she liked him: “He was genuine ... and he also believed in God, which is important to me.
“Malone is a Christian college, but my faith wasn’t that strong when I first met him. He introduced me to the Lord. When I met Bo, he’d already read the Bible twice.”
At Malone, Myers started to work his way through the Pioneers’ record book and ended his career 12th on the all-time scoring list. As a senior, he averaged 18.5 points per game and had a career-high 40 against Lenoir Rhyne.
Hutchison averaged 18.1 points per game as a senior.
She opened the year with 33 against the University of Indianapolis and closed out her career with a herculean effort — 32 points , nine rebounds, five assists and three steals — in a 72-65, first-round NCAA Tournament loss to top-seeded Ashland, which would finish the year 37-0 and win the Division II national title.
Close to home
When Hutchison decided to transfer, she visited Miami University, Northern Kentucky and IUPUI.
She wanted to play someplace a little closer to Centerville so her family and friends could come see her final season of college basketball.
She said she also wanted to play for Hoffman, whom she knew from the coach’s successful tenure at Cedarville.
In turn, the coach can use her here.
The Raiders have gone 12-43 in Hoffman’s first two seasons as coach, so this year’s roster includes five new college transfers and freshman Rylee Sagester, the 5-foot-7 guard from Tri-Village, who, with 401 treys, became the most prolific three-point shooter in girls’ hoops history in Ohio. She was the Division IV Player of the Year and runner up for Ohio’s Miss Basketball.
As for Myers, he joins a veteran team led by returnees Trey Calvin and Brandon Noel and highlighted by the U-turn of Tanner Holden, who scored 1,481 points in three seasons at Wright State and then left to play a season at Ohio State, where he finished the year with 97 points in 27 games. After the season, he decided to transfer back to the Raiders.
Although several schools reached out to Myers when he entered the transfer portal, he said he didn’t call them back once Alexis committed to WSU and he’d seen the facilities and realized the team the Raiders’ men had.
He already knew Noel (Chillicothe) whom he’d played against in high school.
“Everybody dreams of going to the NCAA Tournament in their career and I feel Wright State is a good place for that to happen,” he said. “And it’s really worked out because (Alexis) and I wanted to stay close together.”
Yet, while they may be side by side, they don’t have the same sightlines when it comes to looking back on their basketball together. At least not when it comes to playing H-O-R-S-E.
In those separate interviews, they remembered the shooting competitions differently.
“I don’t know if I should say this, it might get me in trouble, but I think I take the games when we play,” Bo said with a grin.
Alexis had no hesitation in her answer: “I win.”
You don’t become a power couple if one concedes second-fiddle status.
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