Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
By Tom Archdeacon
He was 10 years old and living in Vermont when he said his mom told him he wasn’t going to school the next day.
“I was like, ‘OK! I get to stay home!’” recalled Loudon Love, Wright State’s standout 6-foot-8 junior post player. “She woke me up the next morning, I think it was a Thursday, and told me to pack a bag with some stuff I really wanted. Some clothes, things like that. I was just a kid, so maybe a few toys I really wanted, too.
“Then she said we had to go. I had no idea what we were doing. I didn’t realize we weren’t coming back. We drove from Vermont to Illinois where my mom is from, where my grandparents lived.“
Love said his parents had gone through a long, tough divorce and his mom had just gotten full custody of him a week or so earlier. He said their life wasn’t going that well there and he wasn’t seeing his four older siblings that much.
“I was still sad because I didn’t get to say goodbye to any of my friends,” he said, although noting later, when he was in high school, he returned to Vermont during spring break and was able to reconnect with some of them.
“When we first got to Illinois, we lived in DeKalb for part of a school year and the summer and then we moved to Geneva,” he said. “My mom said it would be a fresh start for us, that we’d be around a supporting cast and it turned out that way.”
He found strong role models in his late grandparents and especially his mom, who was his hard-working, unwavering champion.
Later, just before he came to Wright State, he legally changed his last name from Volbrecht to Love, the last name of his grandparents and mom. He wanted to honor them for what they’d done in his life.
