You can tell when an athlete is gifted. From a young age, their abilities stick out above the rest. They don’t have to do much; a lot of the time, they can show up and have success on any given day.
The rare cases when those gifted players combine their skill set with an undying commitment to work is when something special happens.
On the sideline of Laney Cosgrove’s basketball games, there would often be a 4-year-old girl doing drills. Gracie Cosgrove, Laney’s younger sister, would dribble two balls at a time, showing a heightened level of skill for a player her age. In her first basketball game as a kindergartner, Gracie scored 20 points. For four seasons, from the age of 4 to 7, she was recruited to play with boys.
It all started at a family Christmas when she was 4. Her extended family is so big they were forced to rent out a larger space to gather everyone in the same place. That space just so happened to be the gymnasium at St. Rita’s.
“Gracie took it upon herself and picked up two basketballs and started dribbling them around the gym without really having even been around a basketball much,” Gracie’s dad, Ben Cosgrove, said. “Then she’s going through the food line dribbling a basketball while making a plate. It was just like, ‘Okay, that’s just different.’”
“She’s definitely the athlete of the family,” Laney Cosgrove said. “I remember she was probably like 4, and she’d just be on the sideline of my games, passing them over, dribbling them, walking with them. It was insane. I knew she was gonna go places.”
Growing up consisted of endless competitive basketball games in the driveway between the sisters. Despite being six years older, Laney says there was no letting Gracie win, and it wasn’t a rarity that the younger sister would come out victorious.
With Gracie being a sharpshooter and Laney a talented defender, the innocent contests on the hoop at the Cosgrove house made for great practice.
“I would just play defense on her, and she would drain threes on me,” Laney told The Hamiltonian. “There was definitely a sibling rivalry. I didn’t want to lose to her, but I knew she was really good. A lot of times, we’d go to the gym and 1v1 each other. It was fun stuff to keep her training but also fun to have a competition.”
As Gracie got older and her skills became more apparent, the level of investment also went up. In fifth grade, she started working with trainer Carlton Gray, who has trained multiple high-level players, including former McDonald’s All-American and Winton Woods grad Chance Gray, who currently plays for Ohio State.
“Early on, the biggest thing we spent a lot of time working on was the consistency with her shot,” Gray said. “She’s always had a good shot. Consistency and the speed of her release are what I wanted to focus on early. Everything is kind of built off of that because the ability to shoot is going to force people to play you a certain way.”
In addition to the trainer, Gracie also jumped up in competition after her eighth-grade year, joining Midwest Basketball Club on the Adidas 3SSB circuit. After that season, she moved on to the West Virginia Thunder on the Under Armour Next circuit, one of the best women’s AAU programs in the country.
The concerted effort to develop every part of her game led to the record-breaking, 1,000-point scorer we see today.
On Jan. 12, 2023, the Badin Rams were set to play GCL rival Chaminade-Julienne. Cosgrove, the Rams’ combo guard, repeatedly went to the wing and awaited cross-court passes from her teammates. Fourteen threes and 48 points later, she had tied the state record for threes in a game and beat the school’s record for most points in a single game by a men’s or women’s player.
“I had no idea what was going on,” Cosgrove admitted. “They were guarding me, but you would have thought they would have started to pressure me more. I knew I had a lot, but I didn’t know how much until [my teammates and coaches] said, ‘Keep shooting.’”
Not every game is like that one, and what people notice about Gracie is her relentless pursuit of growth. After bad games or poor shooting nights, she’ll often ask her dad or sister what they saw and what she needs to work on. The same energy that would often cause people to doubt themselves she channels to learn and be the best player she can be. How she responds to failure is what makes her father the most proud.
“It’s fun to watch your daughter score 48 points in a game and receive accolades. But having coached her when she was little, all the way up until high school, I’ve seen the immature side of Gracie,” Ben Cosgrove said. “Just the absolute pure desire to be successful and the frustration that it causes when you’re not. The tears, the arguments, and all of those things.
“But to see her experience a little bit of failure at 15, 16, and now 17 years old and to respond to it like a mature, seasoned veteran—that’s what I’m most proud of because when the ball stops bouncing, that’s what you’ll be able to take away from the game.”
It shouldn’t be a surprise that college coaches are interested in the Badin product. She still remembers after a great outing against Purcell Marian earlier in her high school career, the first phone calls with coaches started to come in.
“It definitely took me by surprise because I would always say, ‘Maybe. I want to play in college, but I don’t know.’ After that game, when I had a few coaches contact my AAU coach, I realized maybe it is real, like I’m actually going to play in college,” Gracie said.
“The one thing that I know that translates at any level of basketball is the ability to shoot,” Carlton Gray said.
Gracie has goals for her Badin squad to finally get over the hump in the state playoffs and make a run toward a state title. She says the chemistry of the team can take them to the next level. As she continues taking visits and fielding calls from coaches, she can lean on the work ethic she has and the support she is given to carry her through the remainder of her career.
“She’s worked so hard, and this is what she wants,” Laney said. “This isn’t the end. College is hard. There’s still so much she needs to do, and I think she knows that. She’s always willing to figure out what she needs to do to take that to the next level. I think that’s what’ll get her there.”
