The Sunday after the Cougars’ second round exit from the Pac-12 women’s basketball tournament, Washington State junior Pinelopi Pavlopoulou was chatting with her parents via FaceTime when they broke some bad news.
All the way from Athens, Greece, Pavlopoulou’s parents told her gently that her paternal grandfather, Vasilis Pavlopoulos, had died unexpectedly.
“It was sudden. I didn’t know it was coming,” Pavlopoulou said this week, tearing up as she remembered her grandpa. “I was expecting to go home and see him again.”
Pavlopoulou and her grandfather were close. Growing up in Athens, her grandparents lived 15 minutes away from her family’s home, and she usually visited with them three or four times a week.