Ryan Gierhahn thought he was done moving.
The Brother Rice grad from the Beverly neighborhood of Chicago left the area to study and play basketball at Ave Maria in Florida his freshman year of college. He moved closer to home and attended Trinity Christian the past two years.
He will be on the move again.
The school announced in early November it would close after the 2×025-26 school year, and two Brother Rice graduates on the team — Gierhahn and senior Garrett Greene — were stunned and saddened by the news.
“I found out about it that morning through an email,” Gierhahn said of the Nov. 4 announcement. “I had a bunch of my professors reach out to me and say that class was cancelled for the day and it took me a minute to realize the magnitude of the situation.”
Now he is scrambling to find a new home after this school year.
“I have to go through the whole process again,” he said. “It was a difficult decision, but I knew I wanted to be closer to home. That was a big part of it. Now I have to look at other options and maybe I’ll have to go far again.”
Greene, an Oak Lawn native, will be able to finish his degrees in accounting and finance and will graduate. But the school closing still hit him hard. He went to Quincy and Walsh before finding a home at Trinity.
“I live down the street and it would have been nice to come back and catch up with my friends and see a game,” he said. “But now that’s taken away from me. I love all of these guys.”
David Osborn has the responsibility of coaching this team’s final season, trying to get his underclass players to new colleges and while knowing he’ll be on the move as well.
“We want to be where our feet are,” he said. “We want to be present here. We talk about CLIMB — Constantly Living Inside My Best — so for us, we are not making a lot of changes. We’re giving our best every day despite the news that we got.
“I want to finish strong here and put the guys in the best possible spot that they can be in. How we write the final chapter and how we finish strong is important. We want to send Trinity basketball out on the right note.”
This is his second season at the helm and Osborn has no regrets about coming to the Palos Heights school.
“I’m super grateful for my time here,” he said. “If I could do it again, I would, even if I knew it was closing because I love being with these guys and I love being at this place.”
The women’s team had numbers troubles and cancelled the season on Nov. 20.
The men’s team will soldier on. Through eight games, the Trolls were 4-4 overall and 2-2 in the Chicagoland Collegiate Athletic Conference.
Gierhahn said the team is trying to make this as normal of a season as possible but the end will not be easy.
“I’ll miss the bond and relationships I had with these guys,” he said. “I think that stuff will last even beyond basketball. It’s going to be tough saying goodbye to all of these guys.”