Quinnipiac senior forward Grace LaBarge felt the end in silence. The Bobcats had just lost to Seton Hall 57-40, and were sitting in the visiting locker room of Walsh Gymnasium. LaBarge had just taken off her shoes, which were a hybrid of pink, purple and blue.
It was only players in the locker room at this point, no one was speaking, though. Some had their heads down, others were crying. It wasn’t until a minute or two in that sophomore forward Anna Foley said something, then LaBarge spoke.
She thanked them for her senior year and how proud she was of all of them. With her shoes off, and her uniform eventually coming off, LaBarge had a realization.
“Wow, I’m not going to put these back on,” LaBarge said. “I’m never going to be suited up for a game again.”
Former Bobcat guard Jillian Casey has been on that road before. Her basketball career ended in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the year before at the MAAC Tournament. Casey is now a physical therapy student at the University of Rhode Island pursuing her doctorate.
She texted LaBarge right after the game ended, “How are you feeling?”
“[LaBarge] said, ‘definitely weird, and I’m not really sure what to think of it,’” Casey said.
The morning after, LaBarge was in a haze. It was 10 times worse after sleeping. She texted a group chat she has with sophomore guards Maria Kealy, Ava Sollenne, Paige Girardi and Foley.
“It feels like we’re still in a nightmare,” LaBarge said. “This is reality.”
This was the second sit-down blow of the end for LaBarge. Quinnipiac was clobbered 76-53 in the MAAC Championship game by Fairfield, so that and the permanent end created a “double whammy,” for LaBarge.
A month later with fresher eyes and now a “NARP”, (a non-athletic regular person), LaBarge sees the end of her basketball, hell, her college life as simply the end of chapters. College is a four-year chapter, sure, but basketball has been a 17-year chapter for LaBarge. It’s been a chapter filled with joy, camaraderie, injury, anxiety and, above all, love.
Where it all started
LaBarge first started playing like most kids with her siblings at around five years old. She’s the baby of the family. She has three older siblings, a brother, Michael, and two sisters, Emily and Hannah.
That’s how her love of the game developed.
“I would go to all of their games, and I loved watching them play,” LaBarge said.
From there, her next memory concerns something LaBarge has become all too accustomed with: three pointers on the wing. LaBarge attempted the fourth most three pointers on Quinnipiac this past season.
She was in fourth grade, playing up against fifth graders and she put up a prayer.
“I shot the shot, and I immediately started running back on defense,” LaBarge said.
It went in. From there, a love of the three-ball started with LaBarge. Of her 601 career points with Quinnipiac, 213 are triples.
Pretty early on — in late elementary school/early middle school — LaBarge knew that she wanted to play collegiate basketball. She played up for most of her life, in preparation for playing for William Fremd High School.
When she got there, LaBarge instantly made an impact. She was on the varsity team as a freshman, although the varsity team was like LaBarge at the high school level, inexperienced.
“We were really young,” then-assistant coach and interim head coach of Fremd James Han said. “We actually didn’t have a great season, per se, because we were so young.”
Dave Yates was the head coach of Fremd when LaBarge went there. He had to step down in 2024 because of a brain cancer diagnosis. He was the Fremd girls basketball head coach for 18 years and died on June 11, 2024.
He was instrumental in LaBarge’s growth. LaBarge struggled with self-confidence her sophomore year. She would get on the court and think that she couldn’t do it and she would mess up. She was locked in her head.
“There was a time where I was like, I can’t do it anymore. I don’t want to play basketball anymore. I’m ready to give up,” LaBarge said.
It was Yates who convinced her not to. Through being there for LaBarge, he put her on the path she’s on now.
“If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have ever made it to Quinnipiac,” LaBarge said.
In LaBarge’s junior year, Fremd went on to win the state championship, its first in program history. It beat Lincoln-Way West 58-47 to take home the trophy.
But trophies weren’t of the team’s concern.
“None of us wanted to be done,” Emily Klaczek, the then-point guard on Fremd said.
“One of our mantras Grace’s junior year was ‘keep winning so we could spend more time together as a group,’” Han said.
It was Dave Yates first ever state championship. Yates’ family held a celebration of life in the Fremd library, where the whole state championship team came to show their support. Both LaBarge and Klaczek flew back for the occasion.
“I’m so glad I made the trip home for it,” LaBarge said. “It really encapsulated the type of person he was, that he was having so many people come around for him.”
The Quinnipiac experience
LaBarge committed to Quinnipiac over the pandemic. One of her AAU coaches put her on a phone call with Quinnipiac, which was news to LaBarge, both the phone call and the school she would shortly be talking to.
“I have never even heard of Quinnipiac,” LaBarge said. “What is that?”
LaBarge knew right when speaking to Quinnipiac head coach Tricia Fabbri that it would work out. She talked with former players Rose Caverly and Cat Almeida, took a visit and committed shortly after that.
She moved in over the summer for the two summer practice sessions with four other freshmen — senior guard Jackie Grisdale, Rose Caso, Reiven Douglas and Korin Mereste.
Talk to anyone about LaBarge, and they’ll mention how funny she is.
“She was certainly a goofball,” Han said. “She’s always been silly.”
She instantly left that impact upon her fellow freshman, regardless of what they were doing.
“We would sit in the common area and play board games,” Douglas said. “She would be one of the ones making jokes about the games.”
Her humor left a lasting impression on Casey too. The team was shooting around, some were shooting others were rebounding. LaBarge walked up to Casey and left her with seven words.
“Born to yap. Forced to play basketball.”
Her and Casey became close, over humor, yes, but also over common struggles. Throughout LaBarge’s four years as a Bobcat, she dealt with uncertainty about her playing time, having to miss family events, multiple sprained ankles — including one that sidelined her for a little over two weeks this season.
Casey has been through all of that. She had a concussion her junior year and then broke her pinky her senior year. But she had Grace to lean on throughout it all.
“I can honestly say that I’m not sure that I would have gone through my last two years without being friends with her,” Casey said.
For LaBarge, former director of basketball operations Jasmyne Fogle and senior associate athletic trainer Becky Mella are who helped her get through the four years in Hamden. In the first summer session, Mella gave all of the new freshman hugs.
“Even from day one, I already knew that I was going to be very close to her,” LaBarge said. “As the years went on, I would find myself turning to Becky if I needed help.”
There’s disagreement among those closest to Grace about what their favorite Quinnipiac basketball memory was of her. Her parents, Ann and Jim, recall the 20-point performance against Princeton on Dec. 6, 2023. LaBarge went 6-6 from the field, and 3-3 from beyond the arc.
Brody Limric, a former Quinnipiac player and Grace’s boyfriend, however, likes to think about her layup against Fairfield from this past season.
“That’s gotta be my favorite,” Limric said.
LaBarge got the ball on the right wing, she drove to her left side, got banged in the paint and while falling to her left toward the M&T Bank Arena stands, lofts a left-handed shot off the glass into the bucket. It sealed a regular-season finale win over Fairfield.
At that moment, it felt like Quinnipiac could win the MAAC, and Grace’s last memory would be hoisting a trophy. But only if we could live in “what ifs,” life would be so much different.
The future
No one truly knows what the future holds for them. For LaBarge, though, the next steps may lay in a cat she adopted over the summer. Meet Oliver, he’s a little over a year old with light brown fur and black stripes all over his body. He’s also missing his left eye. He loves to go on walks outside, he begs LaBarge every day to make it happen. LaBarge loves doing it.
However, some of the students on Quinnipiac’s York Hill campus think otherwise.
“I’ve been walking outside with him and people will yell out their windows at me, and they’ll say ‘that’s not a fucking dog,’” LaBarge said. “I vividly remember some guy yelling that, and I wish I knew where he lived, because I’d be like ‘are you serious?’”
LaBarge worked at the Mount Carmel Veterinary Hospital on Whitney Avenue. She only worked a little during the school year, due to basketball and classes, but a lot more in the summer.
LaBarge came in one day, and saw Oliver on the recovery table, post surgery from removing his left eye. He was mangled — the vets believe he was hit by a car — which caused his left eye to bulge out of his skull.
He needed help with recovering, and it was in part LaBarge’s job to do that. It was a challenge for Oliver to recover.
“It got to the point that I was like, I feel so bad leaving him here overnight in a cold crate, so I asked the vet if I could take him home just nights with me,” LaBarge said.
The answer was yes, and LaBarge grew attached with each night.
“He wanted to be with me the whole, entire time,” LaBarge said with a wide smile. “He was also just so cute and had one eye, how could you resist him?”
Oliver eventually went up for adoption, and it was LaBarge who adopted him.
“She loves that animal,” Limric said. “She does a lot for it.”
Oliver is a representation of LaBarge’s love of animals, which inspired her to become a veterinarian. She’s always had that love, dating back to the ditch at the end of her driveway in Inverness.
“That [love] probably started sooner than basketball for me,” LaBarge said. “This is so gross, I have so many memories playing in our little ditch at the end of our driveway, because there would be so many frogs there.”
“I loved hanging out with the frogs, I would spend hours outside with them.”
She’s waiting to hear back from two veterinarian schools, the University of Illinois and Midwestern University in Glendale, Arizona. She had a job interview on May 2 to work at a vet back home. The summer plan is to go back home and work there, then spend the year with Limric — who is currently in the transfer portal — wherever he ends up, if LaBarge doesn’t get into vet school.
LaBarge isn’t going to walk the stage at graduation. Her collegiate end won’t be in a cap and gown. It will be among family and friends back in Illinois. That won’t be in silence either, but once in solitude, LaBarge is filled with nothing but gratitude about her journey.
“If I was there, I would just be grateful for all of the good experiences that I had, and the bad,” LaBarge said.
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