Tom Archdeacon: Former Wright State swimmer receives long-awaited gift

Under the Christmas tree next to her were blue-wrapped presents her kids had brought home from school.

Yet on this afternoon a few days ago, the best trophy, the best gift in the house could be found on Krissy Randall’s left hand, which she now held out in front of her so she could admire that ring all the more:

Not the big wedding diamond she wore on her ring finger, but rather the adornment on her middle finger that had a green stone and WSU on the crest and an engraved swimmer and “Krissy” on one side.

That ring was back on her hand for the first time in nearly 24 years.

She and her Wright State swimming teammates had received that hardware after winning the 1992 championship of the North Star Conference, a women’s league that ended after that season.

A freshman backstroker on that title team, Krissy had three top four finishes in the league’s championship meet and was a member of two winning relay teams.

The following winter the school awarded the rings and three months after that, during a spring break trip to Florida, Krissy lost hers during a nighttime walk along Clearwater Beach.

A fateful walk

Krissy Fott came to WSU out of Vandalia Butler High School, which didn’t have a swim team back then but did have her and a couple of other girls who represented the school.

She had qualified for the state meet three years in a row and was a known commodity to WSU swim coach Matt Liddy, who had first taught her as a 7-year-old at the old Sherwood Forest pool in Dayton.

She blossomed quickly at the college level and the kinship with her teammates carried over into their spring break plans in 1993.

“A lot of the guys and girls on the team all went,” she recalled. “We had a little caravan of cars. We lost a couple of them on the way down, but we all met up again at this condo we had in Florida.

“And one nice night we all went out on the beach for a walk. When I came back, I looked down at my hand and it was like ‘My riiiiiing!’ ”

She said they all went back out with flashlights and searched: “We pushed sand around, but it was a lost cause.”

Her WSU roommate, Karen Bresser from Notre Dame Academy in Northern Kentucky, was along on the trip, but today — as Karen Jones — doesn’t remember all the details.

“I’m pretty sure I was with her that night, but then again it was spring break and those memories are a little fuzzy,” she laughed. “And now having three kids and dealing with them has sucked my memory out all the more.

“But I do remember her losing her ring — it was like looking for a needle in a haystack — and how upset she was about it.”

Krissy agreed: “I was crushed. I wanted to go home.”

In the years that followed, she finished up a solid career at WSU, became a special education teacher at Graham High and married Rich, who had been a standout wrestler at Graham and now teaches economics and government there and is an assistant wrestling coach at Miami East.

Krissy is 43 and her days are filled with teaching and raising three sons — 16-year-old Alex, 11-year-old Hunter and 8-year-old Hudson — but she admits she never quite forgot about that long lost ring:

“I kind of looked at it as my college ring, so now every year when class rings come up at school. I’m like ‘eeehhhh.’ ”

A stroke of luck

Three years ago Sheila Logan’s 15-year-old stepdaughter, Toni, returned to their Hampton, Virginia home from a visit with her grandfather who lives in Clearwater.

She brought back a ring with a hunter green stone and “WSU” on the crest.

Her grandfather had found it walking on the beach some two decades earlier and had put it in a trinket dish where it mostly was forgotten. Finally, he had given it to Toni.

“When she got back, she said, ‘Look what my granddad gave me,’ ” Sheila remembered.” I looked at it and thought, ‘Oh that’s a big deal. Someone would love to have that back.’

“I knew it was something that meant a lot to somebody and it didn’t really mean anything to us.”

Sheila — who works in the advertising department of the Daily Press newspaper in Newport News, Va. — began searching the Internet with the few clues she had.

Initially she thought WSU stood for Washington State University, but that path led nowhere.

“I went back and looked closer at the ring, saw North Star Conference and that brought me to Ohio and finally to Wright State,” she said.

While she did discover a Krissy Fott on the team, she said she could not find her on Facebook.

With Toni now enthused about solving the mystery, Sheila went through the roster and soon came across Karen Bresser, whom she found as Karen Bresser Jones on Facebook.

As luck would have it, Karen and Krissy had kept up their friendship since college. In fact Karen, now a clinical researcher living in Fort Thomas, Ky., was in Krissy’s wedding and in recent years they have gotten together when Krissy brings her two younger sons down to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center for various appointments.

Sheila sent a Facebook message to Karen on Jan. 6, 2013, but the query was not answered and finally it was forgotten.

Karen said the message went unnoticed for nearly four years:

“She had sent me a message on Messenger on Facebook and apparently I didn’t have my messages set up or whatever. It was an old phone anyway.

“Then just a couple of weeks ago I updated my phone and suddenly I had all these old messages that came through. I read the one from Sheila and answered her back.”

Sheila was caught off guard by the response:

“I was driving back from Richmond with another person in the car and all of a sudden I get this crazy message from a lady saying: ‘Krissy was my roommate.’ It had been so long ago that I had forgotten and I said, ‘Oh no. Someone has hacked into my Facebook account.’

“But the person with me opened it and looked closer and said, ‘Well, you first wrote her on Jan. 6, 2013 at 2 in the morning.’”

Sheila started to laugh about working into the wee hours: “Oh I was on a mission back then to find the owner. And now, when I finally did, I knew Karen would be the connection.

“She asked me if I still had the ring and I said, ‘I think I do.’

“I wasn’t sure and after I hung up. I called my other daughter and had her look on a key chain hanging on a peg at home. At first she couldn’t find it and I worried it was lost. But then she goes, ‘Wait, here it is.’ ”

‘It’s a miracle’

Karen called Krissy with the news:

“I was so excited and I said ‘You’re never going to believe this!’ And I think she started getting nervous at first.

“I said, ‘Some lady just called me and they have your Wright State ring you lost on the beach!’ ”

If you know your Scripture, you know of Acts 20:35: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.”

But after the path this ring traveled — “It’s really an amazing ride,” Krissy said — you realize both the giver and the receiver feel pretty blessed.

“It’s a miracle,” Krissy said.

Sheila packed up the ring a few weeks ago and sent it to Ohio.

“I absolutely feel good about it,” she said. “And I feel good about the lesson my stepdaughter got. She’s graduated now and is in school in Florida. When I called her to let her know we had accomplished our mission, she was ecstatic.

“I feel good that Karen got to be a part of it too because she was with Krissy when she lost it. And, of course, I especially feel good for Krissy. She finally got her ring back.

“It’s been a feel good all the way around for everybody.”

Karen saw another positive in the ring saga, too:

“You know after the election so many people were like ‘Facebook is horrible. It’s awful. Everyone is so mean.’

“But now I’m like, ‘You know what? There are still people in this world who go out of their way to do good things. If it wasn’t for Facebook, Sheila would have had no way of contacting me. So you can get good things out of it.”

Once Krissy got her ring, some memories came flooding back:

She thought of Liddy — “He was like a big brother to me,” she said — who died almost seven years ago from a heart attack. He was just 50.

She thought about all her swimming ventures and how she doesn’t really swim anymore.

They have a big pond behind their house now, 25 feet deep in the center, but she said she can’t see in it, so she doesn’t swim laps. She leaves the water for the blue gills catfish, grass carp and other fish who live there.

The returned ring also has fostered some new thoughts: “It’s really nice to know people will go out of their way to do something for someone they don’t even know.”

At school the past couple of weeks, she said other teachers have asked: “So where’s the ring?”

She started to laugh: “I say it’s in my jewelry box, nice and safe. I’m not gonna lose it again.”

But then there are the times like the other afternoon when she put the ring on, took out her old green scrapbook from her Wright State days and let the thoughts come in:

“I’m proud of what this ring represents.”

You sensed she wasn’t just referring to what she did in the water.

She was talking about what others did once her ring landed in the sand.