Chloe Egan walked into Nobles' Rappaport Gymnasium on March 8 with an atypical storm of emotions. Her Berkshire girls basketball team was a game away from its first NEPSAC championship in 33 years. The last time they were in this gym, two and a half months earlier, the Bears blew two games leading by double digits, and they had since clawed back to the Class B Large final as a No. 7 seed.
The last time Egan was here, she didn't know her father, Jim Egan, had a stomach sickness that was actually a rapidly-spreading cancer.
"I think walking into the gym, it was already just kind of overwhelming — just, wow. Last time I was here, he was still alive, and I hadn't even found out what was happening," Egan said. "I had a lot of family fly in and come and support me. But I knew there was someone missing — the person that I care most about coming and watching it."
Egan had spent the winter panicking and grieving for her father, who unconditionally supported her basketball journey. As the senior captain took the floor for her last prep school contest, she wanted to give him one more game to be proud of.
Two and a half months prior, as Jim began to learn about his serious diagnosis, he kept the details quiet, initially just traveling for doctor’s visits with his older brother, Bob Egan.
But his condition declined quickly. He and Bob downplayed the concerns to Chloe as doctors determined Jim had a rare stomach cancer. But she started to notice signs. Chloe's biggest fan — who played countless HORSE rounds with her, always finding his hot zone shooting corner 3s on an uphill driveway slant — wasn't showing up at games. He last looked “jaundiced” and his voice sounded off on phone calls (he had a breathing tube in).
When Jim backed out of his initial plan to see Berkshire play at the Nickerson Showcase on Dec. 19, Chloe's internal alarms went off. Berkshire, after winning its first game of the showcase, floundered. She committed a technical foul against Governor's that was "really bad" by her own admission and began to unravel.
"I felt like there were so many things I couldn't control outside of basketball, that then, when things started going wrong in the game, I was like, 'How do I have no control over anything right now?'" Chloe said. "Usually basketball is the one thing that you're like, 'OK, I can control kind of how this goes.' But nothing was working, and I think that was the hardest part. And then as soon as the tournament was moving on, it's knowing, OK, I'm going home after the last game against St George's, and now I'm gonna have to face what's going on at home."
Chloe returned to her grandmother's house where the family had gathered and noticed her dad had a drain in his side. Her aunt Mary took her hand after dinner and Chloe felt the news coming: her dad had a dangerous stomach cancer. Jim vowed he would fight the disease.
The next day, Chloe (originally from Cotuit, Mass.) made her own trip to Boston to get an injured hip checked out. Her grandmother called and said Jim was in bad shape again and that he'd be going to the hospital in Plymouth, Mass. Chloe met them there, seeing Jim struggling to keep his eyes open and frighteningly skinny. They brought him back to Boston. That night, the family was told to go home with Jim staying over in stable condition.
At around 2 a.m., the family got another call: if they wanted to say their goodbyes to Jim, they needed to rush to the hospital immediately.
"The next 24 hours, I think, were the worst 24 hours of my life — even probably worse than the day that he actually passed," Chloe said. "I literally just found out 24 hours ago that he had cancer, and now you're telling me that if I don't drive up to Boston right now and say goodbye to him, I'll never see him again."
Jim went into an emergency surgery. Doctors gave Chloe a grief packet. No one knew, once they removed Jim from intubation, if he would survive more than a few hours. Still, somehow, Jim kept up his signature sense of humor. He playfully flipped one of his brothers off, for example. He would ask Chloe about upcoming games. Kent was next on the schedule, right?
Jim's condition improved slightly, but doctors concluded his cancer was terminal. He was discharged from Boston on Dec. 31 and sent to Bob's home in the Bronx, N.Y., on hospice care.
"I think we were all surprised by the news too when they eventually told us he has to be moved into hospice. We literally can't do anything else," Chloe said. "I think we were all shocked because we were like, he fought so hard, and we thought he was getting better."
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Bob described Chloe as "stoic." Until the final buzzer, Chloe is stone-faced nearly every minute on the basketball court. In the days after her dad moved to hospice, Chloe packed away her emotions in public. She cried in silence on the hour-long ride down to Kent for Berkshire's next game after winter break.
During January, Chloe would drive to Berkshire from the Bronx on Tuesdays, missing school but arriving for practice. She would attend school Wednesday through Friday and play in Berkshire games, typically Wednesday and Saturday, driving by herself two hours from Berkshire to New York. Every drive down and back, mixed in with phone calls from her older sister Caroline, Chloe wondered if it would be the last time seeing her father.
Jim stayed on the lowest floor of Bob's three-story home, with south-facing windows looking out onto a chicken coop. When he was feeling up for it, he and Chloe would walk outside or watch the chickens together. Chloe could chat for hours during long AAU car trips with her dad. But how could she know what to talk about with limited conversations left? Jim tried to keep things light, joking as usual and still passionately following the season.
"He made sure to constantly reinforce how much he loved her," Bob said. "So I think part of his conversation was basketball (and also), 'I love you so much. I hope you have a good night.' He was really trying to infuse the conversation with how he feels about Chloe, without having the conversation be about how he feels about Chloe."
In the event of Jim's passing, it was decided Chloe would then live with her Uncle Bob and Aunt Giti, who have five daughters of similar ages and older.
"He loved my dad so much, I love my dad so much, and I think he's been the perfect person," Chloe said.
Jim's friends, family and former Colgate football teammates made visits to see him. Another important guest who made the long drive down: Berkshire coach Junior De La Hoz. He and a parent of a former Berkshire player spent half a day laughing with Jim and sharing basketball stories.
"Junior drove here and sat with Jim and I for a whole morning," Bob said. "And I was scratching my head, going, do I have a high school coach that would have driven two and a half hours and spent time with my parents? That's a straight-up no."
Chloe used to be worried when she found out her dad and De La Hoz frequently texted. Was he complaining about playing time? She later realized that the two had become genuine friends.
"(Jim) was funny — really funny," De La Hoz said. "He would come up with all these jokes all the time. But he was caring too. He really cared about his kid and cared about our team."
Back at practice, Chloe sometimes just didn't have energy left to lead the Bears. Marcela Sanz, one of Chloe's closest friends on the team, would raise her own voice to cover for her. Chloe talked with school counselors and advisors about her dad but spared the details from most of the team. More than anything, she wanted to preserve basketball as a space where her life could feel normal.
"What I needed from them was just, like, Sammie (King) laughing in the locker room and (people) making stupid jokes where it's like – how can I not laugh in this moment? I haven't laughed probably in a week, but now I'm here," Chloe said. "Everyone on the team, they just are really good people, and I wouldn't have gotten through any of this without them."
Friday, Jan. 23, felt particularly hard for Chloe.
A teacher was asking her about homework assignments and Chloe updated them on her dad's condition in hospice. For whatever reason, it set off a renewed flood of emotion. She couldn't stop crying that day, and she couldn't even practice, instead sitting on the sidelines and working the clock.
Chloe drove back down to the Bronx that night. Her dad asked how practice went; Chloe lied and said it was fine. Before she went to bed, her dad asked for a fist bump, which had long been their own gesture of connection.
"Usually, every time I'd go up to bed I would just say, 'Goodnight, love you,' like, three times as I was walking away. But this night he was very inclined for me to go up and give him a fist bump," Chloe said. "And I felt like something's going on, because he didn't look good that night.
"And I think part of me wanted to stay down there the entire night, and then there was another part of me that was just scared of what I was seeing. I think I was like, OK, I'll go to bed, and if I go to bed early, then I can wake up early and I can spend time with you before my game tomorrow."
Bob went downstairs in the early morning and found that Jim had died. Chloe heard the ambulance but didn't see a stretcher and felt paralyzed by fear. After a while, she heard Bob open the door to her room. Chloe asked him what happened, Bob told her, and he pulled her into a hug. Eventually Chloe went down to sit with her dad and say goodbye before his body was taken away.
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Chloe had two weeks before her dad's funeral, and in that time, it was decided she would play basketball for Berkshire but not come back to school yet. She returned to action Jan. 28, a 58-49 loss to Class B Large frontrunner Suffield. It was the first game Chloe realized she could not see, call or text her dad to talk about it.
As a point guard, returning top scorer, and Hamilton commit, Chloe wants the ball in her hands in big moments. Against Suffield, she retreated to the corners and hoped teammates would pass somewhere else. She was subbed out midway through the third quarter, and even when Berkshire drew up a play for the final possession of the quarter, Chloe declined to return.
"There was no capacity in my mind to make a good decision," she said.
In New York, Chloe was learning how to live with her cousins, aunt and uncle — and trying to stay active amid an onslaught of Northeast snowstorms. She started going to hot yoga with her older cousin Molly when Jim was first in hospice. After Jim died, Chloe kept it up, valuing the hour to reset herself physically without a competitive goal.
"There's a person next to me that's been in child's pose for half the class, there's also a 70-year-old woman that's in a headstand, and I can't even touch my toes," Chloe deadpanned. "There's no pressure on doing well or anything."
Chloe eventually convinced Bob and the rest of the family to come with her. The day after Berkshire lost to Greens Farms by 27 points, Chloe, Bob and her cousin Esme tried out an empowerment workout class — no mats and no towels, just kickboxing, dancing and yelling out self-affirmations. Chloe and Esme cracked up watching Bob, the only man in the class, sweat and scream positive slogans.
"We all kind of walked out of that class like, 'I have no clue what happened,' but I feel like we needed that in the moment," Chloe said.
Empowerment yoga nudged along a change. Chloe felt grateful seeing De La Hoz and the Berkshire coaching staff drive all the way to Buffalo, showing up in black Bears basketball quarter zips, for Jim's funeral services on Feb. 7. Her teammates sent sweets, stuffed animals, and coloring books that Chloe spent hours working on while away in New York. The first day Chloe came back, instead of eating in the dining hall where she would be overwhelmed by all the people, the Bears went to the gym and ate their dinner together.
On Feb. 11, against Choate, Chloe played her first game since her dad's funeral. The Bears' pregame energy was off and they started poorly. Another loss would have severe consequences in the B Large playoff race. Towards the end of the game, Chloe decided she had enough.
"Life could not get any more horrible right now, but I'm not losing this game," she said. "I think at that point I was like, I want to finish the season. I want to finish strong. I want to win the whole thing. And I want to do it for him."
Chloe scored 10 straight points in the final minute as Berkshire pulled off a 49-44 comeback win. Everyone went out to Shake Shack afterward and the fast-food chain was filled with "hugs and happiness."
"I was there with two of Jim's friends that I consider my friends now, so we were all fired up," Bob said. "Again, this basketball thing — it's been a super helpful, welcoming transition, because that's how Chloe went back to school."
Chloe dedicated the rest of Berkshire's season to her father. The motivation never felt like pressure, because during Chloe's upbringing, she never felt pressure to perform from Jim. He texted her before most games some version of "good luck, play hard, have fun." She fondly remembers his clap that somehow out-echoed every other parent's applause during her childhood.
Before the playoffs, De La Hoz had every player write their 'why' on a piece of tape and stick it in their shoe. Chloe wrote down her dad.
"It felt weird that I was stepping on him all game, but that was beside the point," she quipped. "I know he's watching from somewhere, and one of his favorite things in the world was to watch me play basketball. So this is my time to give back to him."
When the postseason arrived, Chloe felt more herself, but not 100 percent yet. If she didn't have the energy to lead a huddle, Chloe would pass a glance to Sanz before entering the circle and Sanz would know to take over. Berkshire went on the road to rematch second-seeded Suffield and pulled off the quarterfinal upset, 45-40. Then they traveled again and blew out Brooks, 58-32, in the semifinal.
Returning to Nobles for the championship game brought painful memories back. But Chloe had a team in her corner. In the stands was her older sister, Abby, who increased her in-game attendance accompanied by friends and homemade signs, as well as her trusted Berkshire advisor, Elizabeth Perkins.
And on the sidelines, she had the Bears, who had given her a safe space away from her tragedy.
"This wasn't people that were supporting me that didn't really know who he was. It was people that were supporting me that knew how amazing he was," she said.
Berkshire trailed almost the entire game against fourth-seeded Lawrence Academy before a Sammie King corner 3-pointer sent it to overtime tied at 48. The Bears scored the first seven points of the extra frame and sealed the storybook championship, 61-57.
Immediately, Chloe and the Berkshire seniors were whisked away to Logan Airport to join the rest of the school's graduating class in a spring trip to the Bahamas. Bob called her quickly and later described her as "literally on an excitement high." The following Monday, when De La Hoz returned to school, he and the Berkshire staff remarked at how Chloe looked jumping around in celebration.
At times during her flight, Chloe couldn't even focus on her phone. She just sat there, overwhelmed again, and this time happy.
"I dedicated my season to my dad, and then I finally completed the one thing that we kind of had always talked about," she said. "So it was definitely just pure joy."
