By JOHN BOHNENKAMP

The tone in Raegan McCowan’s voice concerned Western Illinois women’s basketball coach JD Gravina.

McCowan’s first season had her posting numbers that were among the best in NCAA Division I. She was the Ohio Valley Conference’s freshman of the year and a first-team all-conference selection.

But McCowan had entered the NCAA’s transfer portal a couple of weeks after the Leathernecks’ season had ended. Although Gravina told her she was more than welcome to return, he also knew that she had visited three bigger programs in three bigger conferences.

McCowan had made her decision when she arrived at Gravina’s home in late April, and the coach was unsure of her answer.

“She had been saying, ‘Hey, I’m just looking at what’s out there,’ and she had been to our workouts,” Gravina said. “But then you started to hear where she had visited, what she had been offered, things like that. So I was definitely fully prepared for her to tell me where she was going.

“And she sat down, and she kind of got a little bit of a somber tone, and I was like, ‘Here we go.’”

The first words didn’t help ease Gravina’s feeling.

“She gave me that, ‘I appreciate everything you’ve done,’” Gravina said. “You know, just the classic words people give you before they tell you they’re not coming.”

And then came the decision.

“I’m going to be a ‘Neck.”

Gravina said it took a half-second for him to realize that McCowan was coming back.

“I started to cry,” Gravina said, laughing. “Which is kind of embarrassing.”

McCowan smiled at the memory.

“He’s a very goofy, joking person, right?” McCowan said. “So I decided, OK, this would be the perfect time to pull this on him. I wouldn’t even say it was, for sure, a joke, but I kind of, I would say, just let it go along within the conversation, as if, like, maybe I wasn’t (coming back). And then I told him at the end, I’m staying. I’m going to be a Leatherneck. He was more than ecstatic.”

Then she laughed.

“But it messed with him so much,” McCowan said.

There were still teammates to tell and one more coach to prank.

And then McCowan set out to work toward the upcoming season with a team and a coaching staff she calls “family.”

“I’ve kind of made this,” she said, “my home away from home.”

The first season

McCowan knows where she ranked last season, and the names that surround hers on the Division I statistical lists are among the nation’s top players.

She averaged 19.4 points, third among all freshmen behind national freshman of the year JuJu Watkins of USC and Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo.

McCowan’s 45-point game in a loss to Southern Indiana on February 24 was tied with Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, the national player of the year, for the fifth-highest single-game total of the season — McCowan’s name on that list of top games is surrounded by a few other Clark forty-somethings. Only Watkins (52), Clark (49), and Iowa’s Hannah Stuelke and Buffalo’s Chellia Watson (47) have had more points in a game.

It’s impressive company for McCowan, a 5-foot-11 guard from Lebanon, Missouri.

“If high school me was looking and saw that I was compared to those names, I think she wouldn’t have believed it,” McCowan said. “But I think college me, I believe in myself a lot more than I did in high school, and have that inner confidence. So that helps a lot, but it also makes me feel extremely good about my game, because those are also people that I do look up to as well. You know, I appreciate certain parts of their game as well. So I think it’s honestly just a really cool thing.”

“She’s just a kid who just can flat out get you buckets,” said Western Illinois associate head coach Dan Chapla. “She can score around the block better than any kid I’ve ever coached. She’s just a once-in-a-generation type kid at this level. And even more than that, though, she’s a really good kid. Wants to get better, and she’s very coachable.”

“If you play one-on-one in the post with her, she is as close to unstoppable as I’ve ever seen,” Gravina said. “You know, she might miss a few (shots), but it’s just really hard to stop.”

One season taught McCowan plenty about her game, and about herself.

“She felt like she was underrecruited out of high school,” said Scott McCowan, Raegan’s father. “She said, ‘Now I know, Dad. I know I’m good.’”

The decision

Gravina knows the reality of college basketball.

A good season at a mid-major program for a player means other, bigger, programs might be interested, which is why the NCAA’s transfer portal starts filling up as soon as teams’ seasons end.

It took a few days after Western Illinois’ season ended in the OVC tournament for McCowan to enter the portal.

“I probably had a false sense of security, although in the back of my head I knew it was possible,” Gravina said. “I’m close with her, and her family, and they were very forthcoming during the whole thing about what she was thinking about, even before she went into the portal, why she felt the need to see what was out there. So by the time she came in and said she was going in the portal, I knew she was probably going, but I’d say probably a week or two before that, I kind of convinced myself she wasn’t.”

Gravina, though, told McCowan she was welcome to come back if she wanted.

“I think it showed me for sure how much he cared about me as a person,” McCowan said. “You know the old saying, ‘If you love something, you gotta let it go.’ JD and I had a good conversation, and he was like, ‘If this is something that you truly do need to explore and figure out, then absolutely go do that. But you just need to know that this door is always going to be open, and it’s not going to change how I feel about you as a player and as a person, and me wanting you to still be on this team.”

“The very first day, JD said, ‘Let her know, the door is always open for her,’” Scott McCowan said. “ I told him, ‘I know my daughter. There’s a good chance she’s coming back.’”

McCowan made visits to Missouri State, Oklahoma State, and Wisconsin. At the same time, she was still working out with her teammates at Western Illinois.

“It was hard for her,” said Renee McCowan, Raegan’s mother. “She’s very loyal. To even think about leaving, it was hard. There was a lot of prayer. She did a lot of praying.”

McCowan decided she wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

“I will say the absolute biggest thing that brought me back is my coaches, who give me undeniable support,” she said. “I feel the most confident playing under JD Gravina, and I think that’s no secret. 

“And the other biggest thing is my teammates who are around me, ultimately. They’re the closest you get to family when you’re far away from your family. And that’s something that maybe took me a little bit to realize after visiting some other places, but it’s something that I’m for sure not taking for granted anymore.”

“There were a lot of opportunities out there,” Scott McCowan said. “But she told me, she said, ‘Two things, Dad. I feel like God wants me to stay, things aren’t done at Western. And two, my best friends and my coaches are here, and that’s who I love.’

“And I couldn’t argue with that.”

Coming back

A good joke can’t be wasted, so once Gravina realized McCowan was coming back, he knew she could probably trick Chapla, who lives just down the road from Gravina.

Chapla fell for it worse than Gravina did. He didn’t even hear what she said when she told him she was returning.

“I was thinking to myself the whole time, ‘What a great kid just coming to tell me, after she talked to JD,” Chapla said. “Ol’ Chap wasn’t even really paying attention.

“I just thought she had left, and I got up, and she just looked at me and said ‘Chap. I said, I’m coming back.’”

“I guess I gave it so good to Chap he took it as, ‘She’s gone,’ like, ‘I’m super happy for you, kid,” McCowan said, laughing. “Oh, it was hilarious.”

Her teammates were the next to know.

“Oh, it was huge for us,” said guard Addi Brownfield. “I remember when she told me, I, like, literally started crying. I was so happy she was coming back.”

There is an evolution to a player’s game. A good freshman season means more focus from opposing defenses, and McCowan saw that late last season.

“By the time people really realized who she was last year, it was almost too late for them,” Gravina said. ”And I think on the flip side, we didn’t realize exactly what kind of player she was. I knew Raegan was going to be a really good player as a freshman, but I didn’t realize we’d be running most of our stuff through her as a freshman. So now I’m excited. We’ve had a lot more time to kind of prepare for that, and both prepare her and prepare the rest of the team for how we want to attack different things when we are running some stuff through her.”

“I know I’m obviously going to get a lot more attention than I did last year,” McCowan said. “But I think going into conference play, I don’t think it was a secret every team started doubling. I think this year, what’s going to be different is that I have a lot more options out of those double teams.”

The Leathernecks bring back five of their top six scorers from last season, and added post player Mia Nicastro, a transfer from Saint Louis.

“If they want to double-team her, please do it,” Brownfield said. “Because we have a lot of different ways to score, and she knows how to handle double-teams.”

The addition of Nicastro should allow McCowan to see time at a more comfortable spot on the wing. McCowan made just eight of 23 3-point attempts last season, and outside shooting was a spring and summer focus.

“I approached my offseason just like any other offseason,” McCowan said. “I looked at my stats last season, and looked at and saw that I needed to work on my 3-point percentage. Working on my 3-pointers, working on my guarding skills because, you know, we have a lot more size this year, and I might have to play the ‘3’, which I’m completely comfortable with.”

“She can get a lot better,” Gravina said. “She’s continuing to get better. I think a big thing is her starting to use her entire repertoire of moves in games, because, she honestly probably used like, 25% of what she’s really capable of as far as moves in games, because she just went to what she was most comfortable with, especially as a freshman. But man, when she starts putting the ball on the floor a little bit more around the basket, with her step-through and counter moves…”

Her parents say McCowan’s process of improvement never stops.

“She’s very hard on herself,” Renee McCowan said. “She wants perfection.”

“I have to make her back off sometimes,” Scott McCowan said. “She always wants to work.”

There is motivation behind the work that goes beyond the individual goals.

“When I made that decision to come back here, it was a lot easier in a team aspect,” McCowan said. “Of, like, hey, what do we need to do to get to where we want to go? When I decided to come back, it made it a lot easier in that sense, because I wanted to do something special with my teammates.”

“She’s an amazing player, and she’s only going to get better,” Brownfield said. “You know, she still has so much to show people, and I’m excited that she’s taking me along for the ride for it.”

McCowan is back working where she feels the most comfortable. Macomb, she said, is home.

“It reminds me a lot of my hometown, just a small-town community,” she said. “Like JD said, just having those little kids look up to you, kind of look at you like you’re a celebrity, it’s a great feeling that I hope everyone would get to experience. But not many do get to experience that, and it’s something that I’m forever grateful for.”

“She’s someone you feel like came back for the right reasons,” Gravina said.

“To have her back is, oh, that’s the best gift we could get,” Chapla said.

Top photo: Western Illinois guard Raegan McCowan hopes to build on her first season, when she ranked among the top freshmen players in the nation. (Photo courtesy of WIU Athletic Communications)