On March 16, 2019, the East Stroudsburg University men’s basketball team lost an NCAA Division II first-round game to West Liberty, 106-99 in overtime. The silver lining for the Warriors that night at IUP was considerable, however: Freshman center Ryan Smith had played perhaps his best game of a terrific season, generating 30 points and 13 rebounds.
“As good as he is right now,” coach Jeff Wilson said in the postgame news conference, “I know he’s gonna be a lot better. And that makes me smile.”
The 6-10 Smith, seated to Wilson’s right, credited everybody but the janitors for his success, and when the moderator was about to wrap up the presser interrupted to shout out one more person — his backup, Michael Weiss. Nobody, Smith said, challenged him to the degree Weiss had, every day in practice.
“And,” a reporter offered, “you have another year together.”
“Of course,” Smith said.
It would prove to be Smith’s final game. The former Lampeter-Strasburg star died last Monday morning at age 21, after a 19-month battle with acute myeloid leukemia. Less than a week earlier — on March 16, two years to the day after that auspicious game against West Liberty — Wilson, joined by Marc Rodriguez, Smith’s friend and Warriors teammate, as well as Doug Kraft, his AAU coach, visited with him in his Willow Street home.
“Going down and knowing you’re going to see him for the last time,” Wilson said, “you’ve got so many things you want to say to him.”
He settled on two.
“No. 1, that we loved him,” Wilson said, “and No. 2, the impact he had on me.”
Nobody, Wilson said, had ever shown such spirit, such will. He was the guy who added 25 pounds of muscle heading into his first college season. The guy who dutifully showed up at the basketball office to study video the day before a game. The guy who gamely pursued a 4.0 in the classroom during his all-too-brief college career, finally achieving it this past fall, when his cancer was in remission.
And he was the guy who, when he knew his days were numbered, asked to return home from the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
Rest assured that even then, his spirit was intact.
“He was still laughing,” said Kraft, who with Wilson and Rodriguez spent two hours with Smith. “He apologized and said, ‘My mind’s still fighting, but my body’s done.’ ”
Six days later, he was gone.
“Sometimes I think when somebody passes, we embellish a little bit how good a person he was,” Wilson said. “In Ryan’s case, it’s the absolute truth.”
As Kraft put it, “He made me stronger, when he was at his weakest. And I’m not the only one.”
The night before Smith died, East Stroudsburg staged a Celebration of Love in his honor, in the Warriors’ football stadium. Rodriguez was among those who spoke. So too was Mike Millsip, who besides being a teammate of Smith’s had also been one of his roommates.
“He is the strongest person I ever met in my life,” Millsip, perched in the stands, told the crowd of 400 that had gathered on the floor of the stadium. “He gave me a lot of hope when I didn’t have hope in myself.”
When he was struggling on the floor, Millsip added, Smith buoyed him, lifted him up.
“He pushed me,” Millsip said before stopping abruptly. He handed the microphone to Rodriguez, then took a seat, his head bowed.
Rodriguez apologized for not being much of a public speaker, then launched into an eloquent, heartfelt tribute to his friend.
“He’s the best human being I’ve met,” he said, his voice cracking. “He changed my life. I’m not the same person I was, even like six months ago. I’ve completely changed, and the fact that I’m not going to be able to pay it back to him just really gets at me.”
He admitted, though, that that’s not what Smith would want anyway.
“All he would tell me now is just pay it forward,” Rodriguez said, “because he’s that kind of guy.”
By this point Millsip was at Rodriguez’s side, his arm draped over his shoulders.
“I think everyone here has a purpose,” Rodriguez said, “and Ryan’s purpose was to go through all of that, but to impact all of us. And we just have to pay it forward, because his name will live on. His spirit is in my heart. It’s in all of our hearts, hopefully. If we can just keep paying it forward, all of this meant something.”
As a player, Smith had been something of a late bloomer, sprouting from 6-3 as a sophomore at L-S to 6-10 as a senior, when he led the Pioneers to a Lancaster-Lebanon League championship, as well as berths in the District Three and PIAA quarterfinals. Some small D-1s, like Colgate and Massachusetts-Lowell, gave him a look, but he settled on East Stroudsburg.
There he became the PSAC Freshman of the Year, and his trajectory appeared to be straight up. Wilson worried at times that a bigger school might poach Smith, but then concluded otherwise, “because of the type of kid he was.” Certainly, though, it seemed like the sky was the limit.
“He was primed to become a pro,” Kraft said. “Maybe not an NBA pro, but good enough to be in an NBA camp.”
En route to playing for money somewhere, certainly.
That all changed when he was diagnosed on Aug. 13, 2019. Over the next 19 months there would be ups. There would be downs. There would be an endless outpouring of support; even Charles Barkley stopped by to visit Smith in the hospital. (And when it was clear last week that things had taken a turn for the worse the Hall of Famer mentioned him on TV. “Cancer just sucks,” said the Chuckster, blunt as ever.)
So now Ryan Smith is gone, though not really.
Kraft recalled receiving a message from Smith’s dad, Craig, at one point several months ago. Father and son had found a weathered basketball in the corner of a rehab room at Penn, emblazoned with a single word: “Ryan.” They asked around, but nobody who worked there knew the ball’s origins, much less why the name was scrawled upon it.
It had just always been there.
It is much like that with Ryan Smith. He has clearly left an imprint on a great many hearts and minds. And it doesn’t seem destined to ever fade.