Reusse: Drake Dobbs has a chance to end his career with a championship at St. Thomas

The Eden Prairie boys basketball team for the 2019-20 season had a chance to be legendary with Minnesota’s hoops crowd. Those Eagles were 28-0 in mid-March, and that record included a 78-64 victory at Minnehaha Academy a month earlier.

That Minnehaha juggernaut included guard Jalen Suggs, the No. 5 selection in the 2021 NBA draft, and 7-footer Chet Holmgren, the No. 2 selection in the 2022 NBA draft.

The Eagles rallied from a six-point halftime deficit, with lefty John Henry bombing in threes and finishing with 29 points.

Drake Dobbs, their point guard, said postgame: “It shows how tough we are. Even when we’re down, we know that one guy can get hot, like John. We just continue to trust in each other.”

Dave Flom, then the Eden Prairie coach, said this week: “After the Minnehaha win, we moved up to No. 10 in the national high school ratings. We were getting ready to play Shakopee in the sectional final, and then COVID-19 shut down everything.”

Henry went to the University of Sioux Falls for a semester, but that wasn’t going to last. “John has an adventurous spirit,” Flom said. “He liked games, not practice.”

Will Foster, a 6-footer who guarded Holmgren and “the greatest kid ever,” per Flom, is now a lacrosse standout at Marquette. Connor Christensen is playing basketball for Dartmouth. Austin Andrews will finish among the top scorers in Minnesota Duluth history.

And then there is Dobbs, running the point for another Minnesota team trying to make a name for itself, and also with the ultimate postseason prize not available.

Dobbs and St. Thomas will take a 14-5 record into Saturday night’s Summit League home game vs. Denver. The Tommies are 4-0 in the conference, and the last of those was attention-getting: 119-104 over South Dakota.

“We shot well, but South Dakota also runs all the time,” Tommies coach John Tauer said. “And the game took 2½ hours. There were 58 fouls and 80-some free throws shot. It wasn’t that entertaining for a coach.”

The Tommies are a quarter of the way through the Summit schedule and who knows from here? What they do have is the best team in four Division I seasons. And good news came this week that the Tommies probation from NCAA postseason competition will end one school year earlier.

The bad news? That means eligibility for the 2025-26 sports season. Which means these Tommies won’t get the ultimate prize — a spot in the Big Dance — even if they were to win the conference tournament.

Dobbs was sitting in Tauer’s office this week and asked about the NCAA decision.

“I’m very happy for St. Thomas and its athletes,” Dobbs said. “I just wish it would’ve come a year earlier.”

Meaning, Dobbs and some teammates who are seniors with no remaining eligibility will end their college careers at the Summit League Tournament. In this world of eight-year college seniors, such as Uncle Parker Fox with the Gophers, Dobbs’ odyssey might not seem like much — although it does to him.

“Drake told me in the middle of his junior season, ‘I’ve committed to Liberty,’ ” Flom said. “I didn’t even know he was looking at them.”

Dobbs got a fair amount of playing time as a freshman at that midmajor school in Lynchburg, Va.

“As a sophomore, we had a game against LSU; I played terrible, and they stopped playing me,” Dobbs said. “I don’t know. I came home after the first semester and enrolled at St. Thomas.”

Troy Dobbs is Drake’s father and the senior pastor at Grace Church, the huge nondenominational church in Eden Prairie. He also comes from New Castle, Ind., home of Steve Alford, Kent Benson and what’s advertised as the largest high school gymnasium in the country.

“Steve Alford was four years older than us,” Pastor Troy said. “Some other teams with Indiana high school stars would come to New Castle, and there would be 8,000 people filling the gym before the JV game.

“So, yes, I plead guilty to turning Drake into a basketball die-hard.”

Dobbs’ start at St. Thomas was not smooth. He had to sit out the spring semester, based on not being eligible after a midseason transfer.

“Then, I flunked a class and was ineligible for fall semester in 2022-23,” Dobbs said.

His father laughed slightly at this and said: “It was a J-term philosophy class and he didn’t exactly flunk it,” Troy said. “He didn’t get there.”

By the time Dobbs was eligible, freshman Andrew Rohde was running the point in fine style. Dobbs’ playing time was limited. This time, Dobbs’ reaction was to work harder.

Rohde transferred to Virginia on a sizable NIL deal. Dobbs now had a chance to be the guard with the ball in his hands for the 2023-24 season.

“That summer, you’d watch and say, ‘He’s the best player in the gym,’ ” Tauer said.

That carried over. “Thirty-three games last year, he had 82 assists and 25 turnovers,” the coach said. “This season, in 19 games, he has 76 assists and 21 turnovers. Those are tremendous ratios.”

Dobbs offered a slight smile. Then, Tauer pointed at the slogan painted several times high on his office wall: “Value the Ball.”

It is advice that Dobbs is following in dynamic fashion, helping the Tommies to what appears to be Summit League contention, even if success in that can’t get them into the NCAA tournament.