“It’s a chance to do something in the future that serves a purpose, something more than me,” Glaab said at her signing day. “I want to do engineering. It’s a great school for after college and in college and I get to play basketball. It will be a challenge, but I get to grow as a person.”
She visited the Army and Navy academies as well as the Air Force Academy and that cinched a long-time dream of attending an academy for college.
“After the visits, I saw they had some of the same characteristics,” but she finally settled on trying for the Air Force Academy, she said.
Most high school athletes seeking to continue playing in college are faced with getting coaches interested in them and then proving their value as an athlete and a student.
There is another step, however, to get accepted by a service academy—getting a nomination from a legislator and then filling out a lot of paperwork and getting teachers and counselors to write letters supporting that nomination.
“It is a really, really long process and a lot of people helped with the recommendations,” she said. “Teachers were always willing to help with the process of the academy. They did the little stuff, staying after school to write letters and help with class work, tutoring.”
Her mother, Angie, echoed that saying, “Talawanda is fantastic, helping with the documentation for the academy. Thanks to the teachers and staff who have supported her.”
Girls’ basketball coach Kim Richter congratulated Glaab and her family on the success she has achieved, saying it came as the result of hard work and determination to succeed.
Richter said it has been a privilege to coach Glaab, who played varsity basketball as a freshman, in her own first year as Talawanda coach.
“It has been a true privilege to work with her but it is also sad because this is the beginning of the end. She is the only (remaining) player I started with and she will be graduating. Darby was one of the first to buy in. She is a wonderful students and a great teammate,” Richter said. “I joke that Darby is my favorite player and I had two daughters on the team.”
Glaab has also played varsity soccer at Talawanda for four years and has enjoyed her times with teammates in both sports over her high school career.
The success of the basketball team over the past several years has drawn a lot of community and school support for the team and the players have bonded together, raising their level of play together, she said. Some of those teammates have graduated and moved on, but she feels confident this year’s team can continue that success by working together.
“We push each other. We need to raise our level of play. It will be very different,” she said.
Glaab played in 20 games in the regular season last year and all three postseason tournament games. Her 52.2 percent shooting percentage in the regular season was good for fourth in the Southwest Ohio Conference and she average 7 points per game and 5.4 rebounds per game. She played in all three tournament games, scoring total of 16 points.
The final game—a 41-38 loss to Mount Notre Dame—was her best game, she believes.
“Although we lost, it was one of the best games I’ve played,” she said. “As a team, we were coming together as a whole and picked ourselves up.”
That loss, by three points to end the season, was a marker for the team’s improvement because they had lost to MND 61-44 on Dec. 28.
As she prepares for her final season of high school basketball and looks forward to playing in college, Glaab expects to be challenged to be even better both on and off the court but takes past lessons learned with her.
“MY AAU coaches and my high school coaches pushed me. Sometimes they saw things I did not know,” she said.
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