Driscoll's champions beginning process of moving on
Taylor Reaber's first reaction was anger.
Who could blame her? Barely a month removed from a state girls basketball championship, and it might as well have been another lifetime.
Reaber found out with the rest of the Driscoll student body on April 2 that the school was closing at the end of the year. Her senior year, the future of her and sisters Kasey and Brittney, a cloud of uncertainty.
Forget basketball.
"I said, 'I can't do this, I don't want to put on another school's jersey,'" Taylor said. "But then I realized that I love playing basketball. I don't want to give it up."
Like it or not, Reaber and other displaced kids like her must pick up the pieces and move on. Any hope of Driscoll remaining open was slammed shut last week when the Christian Brothers of the Midwest and Joliet Diocese reaffirmed the decision to close the school.
"It's like going to a funeral," dad Frank Reaber said, "over and over again."
For the Reaber girls, the future is at Immaculate Conception. Frank Reaber, also an assistant basketball coach and head softball coach at Driscoll, was adamant about keeping his daughters in a parochial school. Nazareth and Montini were discussed, but Reaber was impressed that IC coach Dan Murray's first concern was how the girls were holding up - not about basketball.
It's a significant year for both girls. For Taylor, the senior year at a new school. Kasey will be a junior, an all-important year for the college recruitment of a point guard who has drawn some Division I interest.
Conference rivals are now teammates.
"They're going to get an equal shot," Frank Reaber said, "just like everybody else. I just hope the transition is easy."
The move for Courtney Lindfors would appear to be more seamless. Lindfors went to public schools in Elk Grove through the eighth grade. Now she's going back to Elk Grove High School for her senior year. Lindfors played in junior high against 6-foot senior Ashley Capotosto, who nearly led Elk Grove to an upset of Geneva in sectionals last season.
"Luckily Courtney is stepping into a program with good people around her," said Courtney's dad, Ron Lindfors. "She just wants to go in and be a piece of the puzzle."
It will be a surreal season ahead for Steve McCuiston. Driscoll's coach for six years, he mentored many of the girls going back to grade school. Now he could be coaching against some of them.
The wounds of a blissful championship ride turned upside down won't soon go away. McCuiston has thoughts of assisting another program this year but will not put in for a head coaching job. Not now, at least.
"I just can't imagine jumping back into it, emotionally," he said. "I need to have the itch back. Right now it just wouldn't sit right."
The idea of McCuiston making a quick turnaround and planting new roots at a school with an opening, like St. Francis, just was not going to happen. Neither was the fleeting notion that every Driscoll basketball player would switch schools as a group. With different hometowns, geography gets in the way.
Like it or not, the Driscoll girls basketball family is broken up.
"I don't think it's hit home yet, that we're never going to play basketball together anymore," Taylor Reaber said. "We don't have a chance to do it again. All we can do is make the best of a bad situation."
At least the girls will get the opportunity to play next year.
Keeping this all in perspective, the girls' uncertainty pales in comparison to Driscoll teachers looking for jobs now.
"If this is the worst thing that happens to them," Ron Lindfors said, "then it is not so bad. There are a lot of things that could happen worse for these kids than their school closing. Now the focus should be trying to blend in at a new school."
jwelge@dailyherald.com