Former area high school standout Kelly Ratigan is home, home to play basketball, home to represent the University of Notre Dame, home to live out an unlikely dream.
SOUTH BEND — What happens when your Notre Dame women's basketball dream becomes reality?
When one phone call turns your world upside down in the best of ways and you have no idea how to handle that emotional roller coaster but to just hold on. When everything you once wished for actually happens.
What do you do?
If you’re former South Bend Saint Joseph High School basketball standout Kelly Ratigan, you pace up and down and around your apartment in Maryland while on one life-changing call last spring. You talk and you walk and you don’t stop walking for the entirety of the conversation that stretches 15, then 20 and eventually 25 minutes.
You pace around your place so quickly that it feels like you may lose your security deposit when it’s time to move out. Sorry, but that carpet is so worn that it needs to be replaced.
You sweat through the shirt that you had on and the shirt you had on over that one. All that adrenaline had to flow somewhere. If someone had taken your picture during that conversation, it would look like you’d just showered. Or just ran a four-minute mile. You end the call feeling equally exhausted and exhilarated, but too wired to sit still, so you go.
Out the door and into a Mid-Atlantic spring night. You head to the residence of your older brother, Conor, who happens to be attending graduate school in the same city — Baltimore — where you’re a three-year member of the Loyola (Maryland) women’s basketball team. You rush to your brother’s condo, the family condo, pour out your emotions and sob uncontrollably. Unapologetically.
The two of you once made a deal that you’d leave home for school. Leave the Bend in the rearview. Then he stayed home. Now, you’re going home for your final two seasons of college basketball.
You’re happy and you’re sad and you’re stressed thinking of all the hours that it took to get to that point, and all the hours that awaits, and you just wish time could stop so you can embrace what the moment means.
Everything.
Absolutely everything.
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The moment that it became official meant you were going back to Indiana, going back home, going to become a member of the Notre Dame women’s basketball program. The program you grew up rooting for as a kid. The program whose summer camps you attended in grade school and middle school. The program you never left behind, even as you went away to school to study and play basketball.
The program that said they wanted you. You.
“It was,” Ratigan said last week sitting inside the Rolfs Hall team meeting room, “the best moment of my life.”
Last spring, after a left knee injury cost her all but three games of her third season at Loyola, Ratigan made a decision that thousands of other college athletes have made. A decision to enter the transfer portal. A decision to seek a fresh start. A decision to see what else beyond everything she had ever known about college basketball might be out there for her.
The decision to enter the portal was a search for something that Loyola simply could not offer no matter how many games she played (62), how many points she scored (420), how many forever friends she made.
“I loved the environment at Loyola,” Ratigan said. “But my growth process at Loyola was done.”
Within hours of entering the portal, Ratigan was contacted by several schools. Ivy League schools wanted her. East Coast schools wanted her. Schools that in a perfect world may have been perfect fits for the 5-foot-8 guard who can shoot it from 3, who can defend, who can compete and who plays with an infectious energy. She's one of those who gets on a court and just goes.
Ratigan gathered intel on those suitors just in case, all the while waiting for one school to make one call.
“It was either Loyola or Notre Dame,” she said. “That was it. That was the hope.”
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For two weeks, Ratigan carried that hope with her everywhere. To classes at Loyola. To workouts. To meals. To downtime out with friends and soon-to-be former teammates. For 14 agonizing days, she kept checking and rechecking her phone, kept checking and rechecking her email, kept checking and rechecking herself.
Could she do this? Should she do this? Hell, yes.
Then, that call came.
It was a Monday night. It registered on Ratigan’s phone as a call from the 574 area code. Her pulse quickened. She shouted to a roommate to turn down the music that was playing in the other room. She closed the door to her room, took a breath and answered.
There on the other end was Notre Dame head coach Niele Ivey.
Suddenly, everything about those two weeks, about any doubts that she might have had to just stay at Loyola and stick it out, all evaporated. Like that, a full body, a full mind, a full soul cleanse, all because of one conversation.
“I was under so much pressure,” Ratigan said. “It was like, I’m leaving Loyola. Nobody knows why. I don’t know where I’ll end up. I took a huge risk.”
With a massive reward.
“As soon as I got on the phone with Coach Ivey, with where she took the conversation and laid out the process and what it would look like if I came here,” Ratigan said, “I knew immediately.”
Knew she was going home. Knew she would fulfill her dream.
There are thousands of feel-good transfer portal stories in college athletics. None may feel better than Ratigan’s. This wasn’t about leaving one school for another for a big payday. This wasn’t about leaving one school for another for more playing time. This was about following the dream that she had carried for years, one that will play out this winter on the same Purcell Pavilion court where Ratigan attended those summer basketball camps.
How cool is that?
The coolest.
“Every day, I’m reminded that this was the best choice for me,” Ratigan said.
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Home is now a quick car ride that takes maybe 10 minutes instead of 10 hours. Saying good-bye to her parents, Brian and Maura, means she may see them the day after tomorrow instead of four months from now. Being at Notre Dame means immersing herself in everything that Notre Dame offers from an academic, athletic and spiritual standpoint. It also means more family moments — from mom’s ground turkey tacos to her sister Reese's soccer games for Saint Joe at Northside Athletics Complex near Saint Pat’s Park to brother Austin’s football games at Saint Joe — don't have to be missed.
She can call home; she can go home. She can call her parents; she can see her parents. She can borrow some of their clothes. On this late-summer day, Ratigan's wardrobe includes a gray Notre Dame hoodie.
“It’s my mom’s,” she said.
Home means exploring South Bend Farmer's Market, a place she never even knew existed. It means not having that feeling in her gut (if you know, you know) when it's time to say good-bye to her family and return to school. It means sharing the fan base's enthusiasm for what the women's basketball program might become this season.
Home also means playing hoops at a level that Ratigan has never played. One of the first days at Rolfs this semester, the Irish gathered to play pickup. Ratigan went to bring the ball up the court and was pick-pocketed by All-American guard Hannah Hidalgo. Next time Ratigan tried to bring up the ball, Hildalgo stole it again.
Like, this ain’t B’more anymore, kid.
“It was like ‘Aaaaaannnndddd ... I’m here,’” Ratigan said. “My welcome to Notre Dame.”
Eventually, it will all seem so second nature, so normal. She'll do stuff and see stuff and be somewhere and not get full-body chills. For now, for the second straight Friday, Ratigan works to keep it all normal. It’s hard. Last Friday, it was the first day of practice at Rolfs. This Friday, she and her teammates will join members of the Notre Dame men’s program to participate in the Irish Jam open practice at Eddy Street Commons.
Eddy Street Commons for Ratigan once meant shopping. Eating. Socializing. On Friday, it means Irish hoops.
“It’s incredible,” Ratigan said. “There are people like, ‘I can’t wait to buy your jersey.’ I can’t wait to put my jersey on.
“That’s such a cool feeling.”
For real.
Follow South Bend Tribune and NDInsider columnist Tom Noie on X (formerly Twitter): @tnoieNDI. Contact Noie at [email protected]
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Bet you won't read a better college transfer portal story than this one
Category: General Sports
