Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
By Tom Archdeacon
Miami had just stunned Wright State, 65-62, thanks to a deep three at the buzzer by the RedHawks’ Isaiah Coleman-Lands.
As the Raiders trudged off the Nutter Center court Wednesday night, Skyelar Potter was in tears.
The freshman guard had suddenly been hit by a real sense of loss, but not because of Miami’s shot as time expired.
“She was supposed to be here tonight,” he quietly explained afterward. “It just hit me. She’s never going to be here …again.”
Last Saturday night 38-year-old Donna Kaye Potter – “She was another mom to me, I really don’t call her my step mom,” he said — died unexpectedly of a heart attack.
“She has been with me since I was a kid,” he said. “After my parents divorced, I was around her more than my actual mom.
“She just did everything for me and my younger sister and my dad. She made sure I stayed straight. She paid the bills, worked a job, kept up the house, guided me. She helped me with all my college papers, the stuff for financial aid, everything.
“She called me Babe and Boo Boo, all the loving stuff a normal mom says.
“She was a very good woman – for real.”
It was some 20 minutes after the game now – a game in which he had scored a career-best 17 points on everything from his own three pointers to a falling, acrobatic flip-before-he-hit-the-floor drive – and as he reflected on the loss of his stepmother, his eyes began to glisten again.Raiders assistant coach Clint Sargent had driven him back home to Bowling Green, Kentucky on Sunday morning so he could be with his family. He had returned to the WSU campus Tuesday afternoon so he could play in Wednesday’s game.
“It was all weighing on me a lot,” he said. “I was thinking about Donna all day, every day since it happened. So I dedicated the game her. I played for her.”
And now in a few minutes his high school coach would drive him back home again so he could attend the funeral services and, he said, be there for his dad and especially his younger sister, Chloe:
“I don’t think my sister really believes it yet. She’s 13, an eighth grader, and she still laughs and talks about other things.
“She doesn’t understand this is how it will be for the rest of her life. That’s her birth mom and she’s not coming back. She’s not going to have her anymore. She’s going to have to grow up faster now.”
Skyelar, who’s just 18 himself, planned to be there for his dad and sister at Thursday’s wake, just as the rest of the Wright State team would bus down and be there for him.
The funeral is Friday.
“I dealt with death before,” he said. “My granny died. But I was real young and yeah, I cried, but I didn’t really understand. Now being a little older and having someone who’s like a mom to me die, it’s crazy to think about, really.”
‘Happened without warning’
Brad Potter, Skyelar’s dad, and Donna were supposed to go to Wright State’s game at Indiana State Saturday afternoon, as well, but Skyelar said they called the trip off because of bad weather.
“It’s good they didn’t come because this would have happened while they were still driving home,” he said.
“I mean it just happened without warning. Yeah, they had heart problems in their genes, but she never had a problem ever in her life.
“She’d had a normal day. She wasn’t sick. She went to work. Then she went to the bathroom and fell over with a massive heart attack.”
She died at 9:26 p.m. Saturday.
