Long-distance relationship no problem to couple
Desiree Rogers heckled Patrick Richard while he was on the basketball court at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.
“You know, I think I might have liked it,” he says.
In January 2011, Desiree and the female UCA basketball players took the court first, against the women from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, La.
Patrick had taken note of Desiree on the court.
“She was really kicking our girls’ team’s butt,” he says. “And she was really pretty so I was just watching her game, but I was trying to stay focused for my game.”
Then Desiree and her teammates watched the men play.
“We were cheering for our team and we were just joking around and we called out his name while he was shooting or something,” she says.
Patrick turned in that moment and his eyes locked on Desiree’s.
“I just kind of froze,” she says. “He kind of looked at me and gave a little nod like, ‘Oh, yeah, I see you.’”
Patrick had heard Desiree and her friends throughout the game, and he says it was just a coincidence that he looked directly at her.
“But I guess it was meant to happen,” he says.
He finished his shower early and sat in front of the locker room door waiting for his teammates to finish so they could board a bus for the 8-hour ride back to McNeese.
“Normally I’m the last person out of the showers, but on this day I was finished early,” Patrick says. “It must have just been fate.”
He was surprised to look up and see Desiree standing in front of him. He took off his headphones, they introduced themselves and talked just long enough to exchange numbers.
“I knew where their locker room was and I knew where he would come out so we were just kind of hanging around a little bit before we went home,” says Desiree, who had been hyped up by her friends. “When he got on the bus, he texted me.”
“I just said something like, ‘You are so beautiful,’” he says. Then he called.
“We talked the entire eight hours he was on the bus,” she says. “I guess when we started talking, it just felt so natural and we just kept talking and the hours just passed.”
A month later, there was another UCA-McNeese double-header in Lake Charles and they saw each other again.
“It just felt right,” Desiree says. “But we would just talk a little bit here and there. I don’t think either one of us thought it would be anything serious.”
After the season ended Desiree and her sister and another friend took a weekend trip to Lake Charles.
“That’s really the first time we really got to spend time together,” Patrick says.
The weekend was low-key. “We were still playing so we would go work out and little things like that,” Patrick says. “It just kept growing and growing. I would make trips there or she would make the trip, and it was just kind of alternating.”
Patrick played one more season at McNeese and then started playing overseas. They adjusted to time differences and new schedules and their long-distance relationship continued.
“That first year, I ended up going to Australia to play,” Patrick says. “It was a crazy 15-hour time difference or something crazy like that. It was very difficult.”
Desiree was teaching in Conway at that time.
“We just kept rocking on,” Desiree says.
In 2014, Desiree made her first European trip to see Patrick with his parents while he was playing in Germany. He proposed while they were having dinner in a restaurant owned by a friend of his basketball team.
“It was so crazy because she went to use the restroom or something and when she came back I was on a knee,” he says. “She was looking at me like, ‘What are you doing?’”
They were married June 12, 2015, at the Pulaski County Circuit Court in Little Rock.
“We were thinking like, ‘OK, we’re going to be overseas together, so we need to be connected, like in marriage,’” Desiree says.
The next year, on July 23, 2016, they had a more formal wedding celebration in Lafayette, La.
The Richards have three children — Ava, 8, was born in Arkansas. Amia, 6, was born in Israel, and Ace, 2, was born in Romania, where Patrick plays now. He has also played in Spain, New Zealand and Italy.
Desiree and Patrick split their time during his off-season between her family in Arkansas and his family in Louisiana.
“It’s weird to think back about how did we even last from just seeing each other, like a little glimpse here and a little glimpse there,” Desiree says. “But we were pretty solid.”
When Patrick is finished playing ball, he thinks he might coach, either at the high school or college level.
“But when I retire, I want Desiree to maybe pick something she wants to do, because this is a sacrifice. I mean, it’s not, because we’re together as a family, but it is,” he says. “So I’ll kind of follow her.”