Philippians 4:9- Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me, or seen in me—put it into practice. And the God of peace will be with you.

If basketball was the only reason that Kari Daugherty came to Ashland, her March 10 performance against Quincy in the Midwest Regional semifinal at Kates Gymnasium would have made that decision a success – by itself.

She scored 28 points, matched an NCAA record with 22 rebounds and had five assists and two steals. She scored 11 straight points over a three-minute stretch in the second half at a time when – with Ashland’s lead down to three – her team needed her most. As if that wasn’t enough, she tore a crucial rebound away from three Quincy defenders in the waning moments to seal a 71-69 victory.

As it turns out, basketball had little to do with why Daugherty came to AU, and that game was still one of the most special nights of her life. Late in the second half, she says, she heard God talking to her, reminding her that He was there and that everything was going to be OK. In that moment, she was able to separate herself from the pressure and anxiety of the game and just play basketball.

“It was surreal,” she said in the postgame press conference. “I’ve never had something like that happen to me before.”

Five months later, her face still lights up every time she talks about it.

“I thank Him every day for talking to me like that that day, because it has completely changed my life.”

As soon as the game was over, Daugherty broke down into tears. When the Eagles met at half court for their postgame prayer, she told her teammates and coaches what she had experienced. The outpouring of emotion on the court was visible to everyone in the gym.

“I just remember everybody crying,” Daugherty said.

In the locker room, the team had a conversation that head coach Sue Ramsey described as “somber” and “reverent,” emotions that are normally reserved for a season-ending loss, not a win that brought her team within one game of a trip to the Elite Eight.

“ We just sat there because of everything that just happened,” forward Ashley Dorner said.

Basketball was the farthest thing from any of their minds. All the team wanted to do was bask in the joy that Daugherty had experienced on the court. One person that Daugherty remembers being extremely emotional was assistant coach Shannon Sword. Seeing Sword cry for the first time, she says, made her want to share the moment with as many people as possible in hopes that it might bring them closer to Christ.

Daugherty was so emotional that the tears continued to fall as she made her way to the pressroom nearly 20 minutes after the game ended.

“When she’s up there and she’s crying like that, we’re saying, ‘Are you hurt? What happened? Did somebody say something? Did somebody in your family get sick or something?’” Al King, Ashland’s assistant athletic director for media relations, said.

A few months after the game, Daugherty received a letter from the mother of one of the Quincy players saying that she could not stop staring at Daugherty as she made her way to the pressroom.

“She said the reason she couldn’t stop staring at me was that she thought she saw like a glow on my face and it reminded her of when Moses came off the mountain and he was shining with God’s glory,” Daugherty said.

It was the defining moment of a journey that began over a year earlier when she made the decision to transfer to Ashland from the University of Dayton.

Luke 9:23- Then he said to them all: “Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me.”

Daugherty began her college career by following in the footsteps of older sister Kristin. For Kari, becoming a Flyer seemed like a natural fit. So much so, in fact, that she barely considered any of the other schools that offered her a scholarship.

“That had kind of been written in the stars,” Kari said. “As soon as Kristin signed the dotted line (to go to Dayton) I was basically signing it with her.”

Head coach Jim Jabir was more than happy to welcome another Daugherty into the Flyer family.

“Through recruiting Kristin, you recruit her whole family because they’re all amazing people,” he said.

The only question was how well Kristin would adjust to having her younger sister on the team. Though Kari admits the two led very separate lives throughout high school, they grew closer than ever during the two years they spent playing together at Dayton.

“If I would have gone someplace else I wouldn’t have gotten to form that good of a relationship with Kristin,” Kari said. “I loved being able to call my sister my best friend for those years.”

The Daugherty sisters quickly became a fixture in the Flyers’ rotation. While Kristin continued her scoring dominance – she finished her career in 2011 fifth on UD’s career scoring list – Kari filled the role of a shooter and defensive stopper coming off the bench. Kari really began to make her presence felt December of her freshman year. After scoring a career-high 19 points against Miami (OH), she scored 17 the very next game against Butler, including a game-tying shot that sent the game to double-overtime.

It was Daugherty’s defense, though, that led to more playing time late in games her sophomore season. She started a few times alongside Kristin and probably would have been placed in the starting rotation to begin her junior year. The two were even featured in a story on ESPN.com.

As well as things seemed to be going on the court for Daugherty, her life was far from perfect off it. On top of feeling homesick – UD’s campus is nearly three hours from the Daugherty farm in Fresno – and placing an extreme amount of pressure on herself to perform at the highest level, she admits that she was making decisions that did not match her morals.

“I started drinking a lot,” she said. “It wasn’t like it was all the time, but with my basketball team that’s what the girls did and I just kind of went with them.”

It was around this time that Daugherty hit what she called “rock bottom.” Though she had been involved in ‘Athletes in Action’ – a gathering of Christian athletes – and used those relationships to grow her faith, she felt like God was calling her to a better place.

“I knew I had to make a choice,” she said. “I could keep going like that or find something a lot, lot better and that’s what I did.”

Ezra 10:4- Rise up; this matter is in your hands: we will support you so take courage and do it.

Jan. 29, 2011 was one of the most emotional days in Sue Ramsey’s coaching career. The Eagles had just lost in overtime to Findlay. To make matters worse, point guard and scoring leader Jena Stutzman suffered a season-ending knee injury. As Ramsey sat at home, depressed, she received a phone call from Mark Snowbarger, who coached Stutzman and Daugherty in AAU.

“I am so sorry,” he said. “I just heard about Jena.”

“Yeah,” Ramsey said, sighing.

“But,” Snowbarger said, “Would you be interested in Kari Daugherty transferring to Ashland?”

Ramsey could hardly believe her ears.

“You talk about your lows and then your potential highs,” she said.

Daugherty would still have to finish her season before anything could be made official, but she had already made up her mind.

“Crazy enough, as soon as I found out that there was a scholarship open (at Ashland), I knew that I was going to go there,” she said.

To understand why Ashland was the perfect fit for Daugherty, one must trace the path that Ramsey’s career has taken. Like Daugherty, Ramsey left Dayton in search of balance in her life. Though she had success as the Flyers’ head coach in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Ramsey was there at a time when Division I women’s basketball was starting to become less about people and more about wins and losses.

After resigning and taking a year off from coaching, she landed at Ashland in 1995 and created a program focused on shaping well-rounded human beings on and off the court. In 2011, she was honored with the Kay Yow Heart of a Coach award, which goes to a coach “who has exemplified biblical principles over the course of his or her career.”

“I wanted to be in a place where I could grow spiritually, and just coming here and meeting (Ramsey), first off, and the players that she recruits – great kids – I wanted to be around that,” Daugherty said.

Daugherty’s first step when she started thinking about wanting to transfer was to send a Facebook message to Stutzman, who had gone through a similar situation when she transferred from Kent State to Ashland. Stutzman talked her through the process that wound up bringing the old teammates back together.

The most difficult part was severing ties with Dayton. Daugherty was worried that she might damage relationships that began when Jabir first stepped on the Daugherty farm while recruiting Kristin.

“(Jabir) gives his whole life to his team and really emphasizes team as being a family,” Kari said. “He really cared about all of us and he had a great relationship with my family and I didn’t want to let him down.”

The night before Daugherty went to talk to Jabir she was reading her Bible and came across Ezra 10:4 (above). The verse gave her the strength to follow through with what she knew she had to do.

“I let her off the hook right away,” Jabir said.

Ramsey’s past experience with Dayton helped ease the process as well. She and Jabir have a relationship that goes back to when Ramsey was at UD and he was still the head coach at Marquette.

Jabir called his old friend to finalize the transfer.

“Coach Ramsey thought it was Christmas,” he said.

“Yeah, I did,” Ramsey said, laughing.

First John 3:1- How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.

Even before she played with the Eagles in summer league, word spread through the team that they would be getting a talented new player. Excitement began to build.

“We felt like she could be that link to help to go as far as we did,” Dorner said.

Daugherty became more than just a missing link. Her work ethic and competitive fire, combined with her talent, would eventually lead to her becoming the leader of her new team.

“It felt good to have,” Dorner said. “She’s a natural leader.”

Daugherty played guard at Dayton and expected to step into that role for the Eagles, but that all changed when All-American forward Daiva Gerbec injured her Achilles tendon in preseason practice. Daugherty immediately made the switch to forward.

“I hated that Daiva had to miss last year with that injury, it was absolutely awful – but I feel like being able to play in the post, I was able to use my game so much more,” Daugherty said.

One of the facets of her game that was really able to stand out was her rebounding. Daugherty led Division II with 14.1 rebounds per game last year, made even more impressive by the fact that she is listed at six-foot, one-inch tall (though she may be shorter than that.) She had 20 or more rebounds in six games.

“All the girls, they were like, ‘Kari, I didn’t even try to go rebound for half the time because I just figured you were gonna go do it,’” she said. “I was like, ‘You guys, no, don’t do that.’”

She also led the team in minutes (34.2 min/g), points (21.3 ppg), steals (54) and blocks (35) and was second in assists (4.1 apg). She recorded AU’s first-ever triple double in a Jan. 5 game against Findlay with 12 points, 15 rebounds and 11 assists, set the school record for rebounds in a game with 24 at Lake Erie (Feb. 25) and propelled the Eagles into the national championship game with 31 points, 22 rebounds and six assists in the national semifinal game against Bentley. In the NCAA tournament, she set records for rebounds (95), field goals (56) and was one shy of the record for points (148).

Colossians 3:23- ‘Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as if working for the Lord and not for men.’

Although the Eagles lost 88-82 in overtime in the national championship, Daugherty was honored as the State Farm/WBCA Division II National Player of the Year. She and Ramsey – who was named the Russell Athletic/WBCA Division II National Coach of the Year – traveled to Denver to receive their awards at the Division I Women’s Final Four.

“There’s a lot of talented people in the world who achieve things – and sometimes they don’t – but when you have someone who’s just a really good person, you know, and is very deserving, it’s just nice to see them rewarded for who they are and how hard they work,” Jabir said.

In June, Daugherty received an even greater honor when she was named the 2011-2012 Honda Sports Award NCAA Division II Female Athlete of the Year. She and her mother Caroline were flown out to Los Angeles, where they appeared on ESPNU as part of the network’s celebration of the 40th anniversary of Title IX.

She got to hang out with Division I basketball stars Brittney Griner (Baylor) and Elena Delle Donne (Delaware) and rub elbows with some of the women who have blazed the trail in women’s athletics.

“Just the relationships I was able to form while I was out there, it was incredible,” she said.

Daugherty is quick to point out that awards are not the reason she plays basketball.

“I just hope that people see that I don’t play for myself in that I am playing for a much higher purpose than any award can receive,” she said.

Her teammates could not be happier for her. Sophomore guard Taylor Woods said Daugherty has been a role model for the entire team.

“She was before, but I just feel like, especially after all of this, how could you not listen to her?”

An education major, Daugherty has long seen herself staying close to home as a teacher and basketball coach. However, her experiences this past year may have opened doors to opportunities far greater in scope and reach.

“I think she can make money (playing basketball) if she wants to,” Jabir said.

While in San Antonio for the Elite Eight, Ramsey was approached by Dan Hughes, the head coach of the WNBA’s San Antonio Silver Stars. Hughes saw Daugherty play against Bentley and said that she was “a very special young lady.” If the WNBA does not come calling, Daugherty said she would be willing to play professionally in Europe.

Near the end of that Quincy game, Daugherty felt like she could do no wrong. If she missed a shot, if she threw an errant pass, even if her team lost, everything would be all right. As long as she gave everything she had, she knew God didn’t want anything more. It was all in His hands. She has since applied that philosophy to all areas of her life.

Expectations for the Eagles will be higher than ever when the new season begins in November. With everyone returning but Stutzman, and Gerbec returning from injury, they will surely begin the season ranked in the top five. Don’t expect Daugherty to wilt under the pressure. She has already found what she was looking for.