Chiamaka “Gabby” Ozoude, then a 16-year-old sophomore volleyball player at Bellbrook High, was riding in the backseat of a car driven by Chea Taylor, a Golden Eagles basketball player. Chea’s younger sister was along for the ride, as well.
On Waynesville Road the car collided with another vehicle and Gabby got the brunt of the impact.
“We were T-boned right where I was,” she said.
Soon after, Dr. Kingsley Ozoude, a radiologist at Kettering Medical Center, was on his way home from his hospital shift when his cell phone rang.
“It was Kettering, so I figured they were asking me about something at the hospital,” he said. “But then they said, ‘Your daughter’s in the ER … she’s been in a car accident.’”
He rushed back and said by the time he got there, Gabby already was X-rayed and awaiting surgery.
“Her pelvis was broken pretty much every place,” her dad said quietly. “She would be in surgery four or five hours — it was a matter of putting everything back together with plates and screws — but she was very lucky.”
Gabby agreed: “I broke five pelvic bones, tore the PCL in my knee, too. Everything on the right side of my body got banged up. You could tell I was in a wreck, but it could have been a lot worse.
“I could have been paralyzed.”
The second close call came on the first day of Bellbrook’s basketball tryouts this season.
For six years — since Gabby was a sixth-grader — Golden Eagles coach Jason Tincher had tried to get her to go out for basketball. She was physically gifted but knew nothing of the sport.
Her parents are from Nigeria and, as is the case with many immigrant success stories, they embrace education before athletics. And besides, her dad’s sports had been soccer and track and field, not hoops.
Gabby finally did come out for the team in ninth grade but soon was injured and spent most of the season as a manager.
Then in August of her sophomore year came the crash and a long recovery road as she went from bedridden to a wheelchair, then a walker, crutches and finally a cane.
This year — Gabby’s senior season — Tincher figured he had one last shot of getting her in a Golden Eagles uniform. She’s 6-foot-2 now, powerfully built, has great leaping ability and is light on her feet.
“But she didn’t come to tryouts the first day,” he said.
Gabby said her mom, especially, feared she might injure herself again and, to be truthful, she worried, too.
“I didn’t think I was going to play,” she said. “I was ready to turn in my uniform.”
That’s when Tincher tried a last-ditch Hail Mary and contacted University of Dayton women’s basketball coach Jim Jabir.
“I coached Jim’s daughter Lauren when she went to Bellbrook and I had his two sons, Jackson and Shane, in class here, too,” Tincher said. “Over the years Jim’s helped me a lot of times get our kids to different schools. He’d say, ‘She can’t play for me, but I’ll see if someone else is interested.’
“This time I said, ‘Will you do me a favor? I have this girl, her family may be a little hesitant and she is pretty raw, but I think she has the ability. And she’s a super kid.’
“So he wrote them a nice letter and the next day they said ‘OK’ and let her play.”
So what did Jabir write?
“He let them know that she has a God-given ability,” Tincher said. “He said it would be a shame if she didn’t use it.”
Learned from Jordan
There is also a story within a story here.
In the midst of Bellbrook’s 17-0 start this season, people are getting to watch the birth of a basketball player.
Tincher said when Gabby came out for the team — the only senior on the squad — she “was a little hesitant. She didn’t know the kids, didn’t know if she’d fit in.”
And that’s when he said something “pretty cool” happened.
Claire Fryman, an end-of-the-bench junior, reached out to Gabby.
“When she came to the team, Tincher said she had no friends and was kinda nervous because she didn’t know any of us,” Claire said. “I had known her before and I made it my goal to be friends with her and make her feel welcome.”
She did more than that, Tincher said:
“Although she doesn’t get to play that much, Claire’s very knowledgeable about the game and whenever she got the chance, she was telling Gabby, ‘Do this. Do that.’ ”
Other times Claire explained basketball terms to Gabby and sometimes the two just joke around.
“She’s got great jokes,” Claire grinned.
Tincher said it’s been great to watch the interaction: “Claire doesn’t get any glory, but she wants Gabby to be great.”
And Gabby will take any help she can get.
When she came out for the team her freshman year, the game was so foreign to her that she said she went home and “YouTubed the terms of the court. I made a notebook of all the different positions and sketched out the entire court. I watched Michael Jordan’s top clips and anything else I could. I figured I had to do some research.”
Some things, though, didn’t come from books.
She has some special physical tools, as Claire — who is seven inches shorter and often goes against her in practice — quickly found out.
“The first practice she got the ball,” Claire laughed. “I’m used to guarding a girl who’s just right there in front of me, but I turned and her stomach was in my face. She was already going (way) up.
“I just said, ‘This is crazy.’ ”
A work in progress
Tincher said Gabby initially worried about drawing attention: “She just wants to blend in.”
But that’s pretty hard to do when you’ve had a week like she’s already had.
Monday night Bellbrook overwhelmed Wilmington, 62-39, thanks in a big way to Gabby, who had a career-high 27 points on 13-for-17 shooting from the floor.
The next day at practice, a player went up for a layup only to have Gabby leap from behind and pin the ball on the glass.
“We’re not used to THAT happening here,” Tincher laughed.
Then Wednesday night as Bellbrook was roaring past Middletown Madison, 55-18, Gabby used a tomahawk chop of a block that not only sent the rival’s shot rocketing off the floor, but it left the Madison player with her headband down around her chin.
Although Gabby would finish with 13 points, that game also illustrated that she is still a work in progress. While she had shot 76 percent from the floor Monday night, she made just five of 15 shots from close range Wednesday.
At times she shot on her descent rather than at the apex of her jump. She’s also learning how to get open in the post and position herself for rebounds.
Still, she’s making great strides, and that’s thanks to the Bellbrook coaching staff.
Along with the ever-patient Tincher, she’s able to draw on the Golden Eagles two assistants, both standout college players themselves. Lynzee Johnson played 135 games for Marist College and Courtney Boyd logged 130 with Wright State.
“Jabir summed it up perfectly,” Tincher said. “She’s almost like a baby, an infant. And in a lot of ways that’s good. She’s not burned out from playing basketball year round. She hasn’t developed many bad habits and she’s very coachable. Right now, you can see the improvement almost daily.”
Johnson compared her to “a sixth-grader. She’s starting from scratch and right now she’s like a sponge.”
But she’s also got all those other things that make her special, Johnson added:
“She’s got that frame, she’s 6-2 and she has that wingspan. She’s really agile and can hang in the air.
“She’s come 180 degrees this year and now there are times in a practice or a game where I look at Tincher and we just laugh. It’s like, ‘Oh my gosh! Did you see that?’ It’s like being a proud parent.”
Gabby is averaging 10.6 points per game and besides the 27 against Wilmington, she had 20 against Valley View and 17 against Chaminade Julienne.
Tincher is trying to drum up college interest, but said since Gabby has been playing varsity for just over two months, she’s not well known. And he said many programs already have committed their scholarships for 2016.
He’s enlisted the help of his friend, veteran Lakota West coach Andy Fishman, whose team won the Ohio Division I crown last March:
“He’s talking to college coaches all the time, so I sent him all her stuff and he’s getting the word out.”
Tincher said he also called all the Ivy League schools, as well as local college programs.
Tuesday, one of the Dayton assistants phoned him. Wednesday, a Dartmouth coach called, and at the Madison game assistants from Xavier and Wright State came to watch Gabby.
“The Xavier coach told me, ‘Now that’s a Big East-caliber player,’ ” Tincher said.
He doesn’t deny she would be a project and need some time to adapt to the college game, but she does have that size and those innate physical tools.
“She’s gonna end up somewhere,” Tincher said. “Someone is gonna get a great kid.”
Claire Fryman agreed: “She’ll go to college and do really well. And we always joke that when she does, I hope she brings me along. I could be her agent.”
The prospect of playing college ball made Gabby smile:
“That would be pretty sweet.”
If you consider those close calls, her bond with Fryman or the ever-more-prevalent “Oh my gosh!” moments, you realize, Gabby Ozoude’s story already is pretty sweet.
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