Saint Thomas stared into the mirror two Januarys ago and didn’t like what he saw. The light behind his eyes had faded. His mind raced with dark thoughts.

He had to will himself just to get out of bed, to brush his teeth, to take a shower — anything to help get his morning moving. But he dragged with everything he did. Darkness had stalked Thomas for weeks at the start of his sophomore season at Loyola Chicago. Now he couldn’t escape it. He no longer cared about basketball. Or anything, really.

Now he couldn’t shake the feeling that he didn’t want to live anymore. Day and night, the thought rattled around in his brain, leaving room for little else.

He’d known something was wrong for weeks, even if he couldn’t quite place what. His whole life, he was prone to high highs and low lows. But this time, he’d just kept sinking. Thomas told his mother back in Omaha, Neb., that he was “going through something.” He told teammates at Loyola, too. But he didn’t want to burden anyone, so he never told the whole story, tiptoeing instead around the depths of his darkness, never once uttering the word "suicide" out loud.

He tried to reach out for help at Loyola, even confiding in his coach about his feelings. But no one seemed to understand. His mother told him to push through. His coaches, Thomas says, were even less sensitive.

“I told them that if I kept pushing through it would get to a point where I can’t do it no more,” Thomas recalls.

He hoped the coaches would help build him up. But his depression only deepened. At one practice, as Thomas dragged down the court, Loyola head coach Drew Valentine called him out in front of the whole team.

“‘Everybody!” he announced. “Saint doesn’t want to be here!”

He wanted to lash out. But the comment left Thomas spiraling.

“I’m telling him I’m sad,” Thomas says, “and here he is telling everyone I’m sad and trying to pick on me even more.”

Basketball, once a sanctuary, became a source of anguish that 2022-23 season. He met with Loyola’s coaches around the new year to formulate a plan. But instead of a conversation, he says, they handed him a list of bullet-pointed stipulations. Among the requirements were regular check-ins, required meetings with advisors and department heads and, notably, weekly drug tests. If he wanted to stay, he had to sign it.

When asked about Thomas' account, a Loyola spokesperson responded, "We do not comment on personal matters as it pertains to current or former student athletes."

Loyola didn't offer the lifeline Thomas was looking for.

“When I saw the contract,” he recalls, “I called my mom. I called my trainer. They told me to sign it, and that I was an idiot if I don’t. I told them that I’m an idiot if I do.”

He’d already been asking God if he was even meant to play basketball. He told himself it was a sign.

So he left. He left the team, left Loyola, left basketball behind. He wasn’t sure anymore who he was without it.

But two years later, as Thomas leans back in a chair at the Galen Center while sharing his story for the first time, he says his perspective has been shaped by that dark stretch. He doesn’t begrudge anyone at Loyola. In fact, he says, he’s grateful. Now at USC, he’s become a cornerstone of the Trojans’ lineup, the do-everything wing with triple-double potential whose energy on the court is unmatched.

“He lights up a room,” USC coach Eric Musselman said.

He’s come a long way to find that light again. He never would’ve made it there, he says, had he not left basketball when he did.

“I feel like that was probably the best decision I’ve ever made in my life,” Thomas says.

Basketball always came naturally to Thomas. But it wasn’t his first love. That was baseball. His father first pushed him toward the sport as a boy, in hopes he’d develop hand-eye coordination. But growing up in Omaha, a boy’s love for baseball could be born of sheer osmosis. Thomas would sit in the stands for every College World Series game he could, and his mother stretched the budget for him to play on all the top travel teams, hoping it would set him up for success.

Thomas tried out at Millard North High as a freshman, expecting to join his teammates on the baseball roster. But he didn’t make the team. He was the only member of his travel team to be cut.

“I was humiliated,” Thomas says. “Even telling my mom I’d been cut was embarrassing.”

The humiliation stuck with him. He stewed in it for days on end, unable to shake it loose.

His mom knew the signs of depression when she saw them. She’d suffered from bouts herself. When Thomas first showed signs of panic attacks a few years before, she successfully tricked him into talking to a therapist. But now she wasn’t sure how to help. She tried to give him room to grieve.

“I let him sit in it for a while,” his mother, Terra Brown, says. “Then I told him to get off his ass. ‘This is not who you’re going to be. You’re getting up and you’re doing something.’”

But loss and pain followed him like a shadow throughout that year. He told his mother that after a lifetime of yearning for a relationship with his father, he’d given up pursuing one. Then, in a short period of time, several people close to him died — among them his great uncle, who was his “sounding board,” and his best friend’s mother, who died by suicide.

He buried the feelings about her suicide deep. “He really didn’t want to talk about it,” Brown says.

Thomas had been a constant presence at his friend's house before his mother's death. But when he tried to stay over one night, Brown got a panicked call in the middle of the night. Thomas couldn’t stop thinking about the woman's death, he told her. He couldn’t be there anymore. So she went and picked him up.

In a tempest of tragedy, basketball was his life preserver. With baseball behind him, Thomas put everything he had into basketball. He started working every day with his trainer. Then twice a day. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Thomas says, “I just lived in the gym.”

His game took off as a junior, and Thomas helped lead Millard North to the Nebraska state title game. But with three minutes remaining, Millard North blew a 14-point lead to Bellevue West. Thomas lost the turnover that led to the final bucket.

“No one would blame me,” Thomas says. “But that stuck with me until the next year.”

He avenged the state title loss as a senior, by which point Thomas had sprouted to 6-foot-7 and the scholarship offers started rolling in. Through a whirlwind recruitment, he connected most with Loyola’s Valentine, who, at 29, had just become the youngest coach in college basketball. Taken with Valentine’s passion, Thomas committed right away.

But as soon as he arrived in Chicago that summer, Thomas struggled to adjust. The big city wasn’t doing him any favors, with its bustling nightlife and a Raising Cane's Chicken Fingers right next door. Suddenly, no one was holding him accountable.

“I wasn’t making the smartest decisions,” Thomas admits. “I wasn’t thinking about the main goal of who I wanted to be.”

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Coaches would call out his work ethic in practice, hoping to motivate him, and he would stare back at them, shrugging with both palms up. Multiple times he was kicked out of the gym for talking back. Thinking back on his younger self, Thomas recognizes he was often in the wrong.

“I always had something to say back,” he says.

He barely played as a freshman, but by season’s end, he found stable ground. When Loyola won its conference tournament, Thomas didn’t play a single minute in the title game. But, he says, “that was still probably one of the best feelings in my life.”

Valentine told him he was bound for a bigger role as a sophomore. “It was everything I’d ever wanted,” he says.

But a depression crept in unexpectedly in the months after that. He smoked more and more marijuana that summer, hoping to numb the feelings. At one point, he failed a drug test.

After a rocky start, Thomas still opened the season in Loyola’s starting lineup. But his role diminished after just a few games. In mid-November, with Loyola 2-3, coaches took him out of the lineup.

In hindsight, Thomas knows he should have attacked the problem head-on. But he slid back into self-pity instead. Dark thoughts followed.

“I just fell in this hole, just asking myself, ‘Why me? Why me?’” Thomas says. “I couldn’t get out of it.”

It was around that time Thomas started dreaming every night about his best friend’s mother. He didn’t know why he felt so close to her suddenly, four years after her suicide. But at the time it felt as if he finally understood. At his lowest, Thomas recalls her appearing to him one night in a dream and repeating one word over and over.

“Purpose.”

Was basketball his purpose? Thomas wasn’t so sure anymore. It was all anyone in Omaha ever asked him about. But who was he beyond that?

After returning from winter break, Thomas played just 15 minutes across two games. That’s when Loyola presented him with the contract.

Everyone in his life told him to sign it. But he couldn’t.

It took everything in him to admit it to his mother. He felt like a failure. She couldn’t believe his decision. The two of them argued. For months, they barely spoke.

When Brown thinks about that time now, she starts to cry. She admires now how her son walked away. But she regrets how she handled the situation.

“I felt like I failed him, to a degree,” Brown says. “I didn’t support him when he absolutely needed me to be there.”

Back in Omaha, Thomas stayed with his AAU coach. Though he never actually asked him to move in. “It just kind of happened,” Tyler Moseman says.

The day after he returned, Thomas tagged along to Moseman’s son’s high school game in Omaha. Fans approached to ask Thomas for pictures. He wondered if they knew Loyola was scheduled to play that night.

He figured everyone in Omaha had him pegged to follow in the footsteps of his father, who let his own hoop dreams slip away years before.

“I didn’t want to be like him,” Thomas said. “I didn’t want to be a failure.”

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Moseman and his family would help assure that wasn’t the case. Tyler and his wife, Nicky, tried to give him a safe space. They made a point to eat dinner every night at the table. They never pressured him to share. But they also didn’t baby him.

Thomas grew especially close to their three sons, adopting them as his chosen brothers. An only child, Thomas liked playing the big brother. Especially to their youngest, Kobe. It was watching them play basketball that would ultimately pull him back. They reminded him of the joy the game used to bring him.

With time, the joy began to return. By March, Thomas was back to working out regularly. By April, he was considering school visits.

He told himself he was ready to return. Then, during his first visit in April, he committed on the spot.

Thomas told Steve Smiley that spring on his visit to Northern Colorado that he wanted to be different. He knew the coach had heard chatter about his last stop. “That’s not me,” Thomas assured him.

Thomas also wanted a coach who would have his back, who would care. So he opened up to Smiley about what happened at Loyola. He met his vulnerability with total support.

“A lot of people aren’t comfortable talking about it,” Smiley says. “But for Saint, it seemed therapeutic.”

Northern Colorado proved to be a perfect place for piecing back together his basketball career, as he stepped into the void left by future Lakers forward Dalton Knecht. But it didn’t start so smoothly. The assistant coach Thomas was closest to was let go. He bumped heads early on with Smiley. He found himself wondering why everyone kept failing him.

“But then, I kind of realized I have to write my own story,” Thomas says. “Or else I’m just gonna be back in Omaha, just like my dad.”

He had a standout season instead, setting the tone on both ends and stuffing the stat sheet with 19.7 points, 9.8 rebounds, 4.2 assists and 1.7 steals per game.

“It was a new lease on his basketball life,” Smiley says.

It was only a few weeks into his breakout that other schools started reaching out again. Smiley figured it would be hard to keep him. Wherever he ended up, he assured Thomas, he believed in him.

Thomas ultimately chose the bigger stage, and at USC, where passion for the hoops program has at times been lacking, he told Musselman he could ratchet up the program’s passion on his own.

“He told me to embrace and embody that everyday,” Thomas said.

Thomas has done his best to follow that directive, while also remaining honest with himself. He still feels down sometimes. He still takes losses hard. But he has the tools now, he says, to deal with that darkness. And in Musselman, he’s found a coach who is “always going to pick me up.”

The number of college athletes reporting mental health concerns has risen in recent years as young athletes now face more stress and responsibility than ever before. A recent NCAA survey showed that rates of mental exhaustion, anxiety and depression have remained twice as high as they were before the pandemic, while suicide is now the second-leading cause of death among college athletes, according to the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Scores of other college athletes still fall outside the bounds of that data. Thomas, for a while, was one. But he has come a long way since. He hopes to share his experience with other college athletes who are struggling.

Now he begins each day with natural sunlight in the first 20 minutes of his morning. He goes on long walks and leaves his phone behind. He journals about his ups and downs. He’s in a good place at USC. And soon, the NBA will beckon, another step in the journey.

His best at USC may still be to come. On Jan. 14, against Iowa, Thomas came alive, hitting nine of 10 shots on his way to a season-high 24 points. His mother watched with tears in her eyes.

“I couldn’t stop smiling,” Brown said. “It looked like the old Saint. He was laughing, making jokes on the court. It looked like my Saint.”

A week later, Thomas was back in Nebraska, helping USC knock off his hometown Huskers for the team’s third Big Ten road win. This time, his return was a joyous occasion.

He was back in the building where he won the state title. He thought about all that changed in the two years since he left Loyola and returned to Omaha.

There was no doubt now in his mind why he was here.

“I have a bunch of people who look up to me, who love me,” Thomas says, “and I’m capable of lighting up a room without an orange ball in my hand.”

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.