Some other people weren’t so sure about the little boy who’d been born to a mother with an ongoing drug problem that she had passed onto her newborn child.
“He was born tox positive,” Marquessa said. “He had illegal substances in his system, so he had to detox as a baby. And based on the fact of his birth mother’s history, they terminated her parental rights. So when he finally left the hospital, he went into foster care.”
He first ended up with another family who kept him for a short while, but, when he was about five months old, she said: “They noticed he wasn’t developing as he should. He’d hit a certain point that was typical and then start to regress and that can be an indicator of mental or physical abnormalities.”
In some cases, those can be quite severe and when that first family gave him up, he bounced back into the purview of children’s services.
That’s when he found the match made in heaven.
Marquessa, her husband Scott and their 3-year-old son Zeke — who also was adopted and had begged his mom to get him a baby brother — opened their home and their hearts to the little boy who had had such a rough start in life.
“It just felt right,” Marquessa sa.d, “That’s not to say there weren’t some challenges, but after a while you saw his smile and who he really was.”
And that’s when Marquessa looked at the child they’d named Solomon and saw a sweet, sweet boy.
That when he became her “Sweet Solly.”
“Nobody knows that name here,” Solomon Callaghan said with a bit of quiet, but amiable embarrassment as he heard his mom’s pet name suddenly reappear outside the Wright State practice gym.
He’s a 6-foot-2, redshirt freshman guard for the Raiders out of Wadsworth High School. He was redshirted last season and will make is college debut Nov. 4 when the Raiders open at Kentucky.
He’s expected to play a lot this season.
Soon after he settled into a study area near the basketball coaches’ offices earlier this week to talk about the season ahead — and his past — you saw what had inspired his mom.
His easy smile, his warmth, his charm soon filled the small room.
“When I look back, I guess I do kind of have a cool story,” he said. “But there definitely are facets that are kind of tough ... and sad.
“I try to embrace it all because that’s what made me who I am.”
And at Wadsworth, he was Mr. Everything.
He graduated in 2023 as the all-time career scoring leader for Grizzlies’ basketball — and fourth in Medina County history — with 1,460 points.
He was just as good in baseball but gave it up to focus on hoops.
Beyond athletics, he was even more impressive.
He carried a 4.0 GPA was in the National Honor Society and on the Student Council. He was the class president all four years of high school and he was the homecoming king.
Clint Sargent, Wright State’s head coach, smiled and nodded when I recited that resume:
“Yeah, he’s as good as advertised in terms of his habits, his accomplishments and his personality. But what I love the most is how close he is to his teammates.
“Often when you hear somebody with all those good things, it’s too good to be true. But I’ve seen the sincerity and genuineness in his off-the-floor relationships.
“I love how he’s blended with his teammates, especially while he was going through his redshirt year. It would have been easy to back away from that when you’re going through the mundane things day after day and no one’s watching. But he showed joy through it all.”
Such assessment makes you appreciate him more after hearing Marquessa’s stories of her son’s start in life.
“When Solomon was first put in our home, he was almost stone faced,” she said. “He was very pensive. He just watched but was expressionless. He just looked at you. We couldn’t get him to smile.”
Except for Zeke.
He was his little brother’s Pied Piper.
“When Zeke walked into the room, Solomon just lit up,” Marquessa said with a laugh. “He’d kick his legs in excitement. He loved Zeke and Zeke loved him. It was just instantaneous.
“Eventually he bonded with Scott and me too, but Zeke was first.”
And Zeke was key in helping Solomon develop.
“When Solomon first arrived, Zeke was obsessed with him,” Marquessa said. “He’d begged for a brother and now he had one. And it was really funny. He practically petted him.
“He was like, ‘Oh, look at my brother! Look at him! Look!’”
As Scott and Marquessa worked to develop Solomon’s fine and larger motor skills — at 10 months he hadn’t been able to roll over — Zeke took the lead.
“Oh yeah, Zeke was totally on board,” Marquessa said. “He got Solomon to do things through play. We’d roll a ball and try to get him to go after it. But Zeke was the master of that and would urge his brother: ‘C’mon, you can do it. You can.’”
And Solomon just kept progressing.
If Zeke struck a chord with the little boy, so did basketball, which is a big sport in the Callaghan family.
Scott, who teaches at Wadsworth, was a longtime coach in the area.
“When Solomon was about 18 months old, I had him in the stroller one day and as we came up to the garage, Zeke was in there dribbling a basketball with his dad,” Marquessa said.
“Well, Solomon threw a fit and wanted out of the stroller. And when I lifted him out, he grabbed a basketball and just started pounding away on it in the driveway.”
It was moments like that — in Marquessa’s eyes — that he forever became Sweet Solly
Brother’s Day
Zeke — whose first name is Ezekiel, which makes the brothers an Old Testament double team — came from Guatemala.
“There was never a question, we knew we’d been adopted,” Solomon said. “Of course I’d have pieced it together anyway. I’m African American in a white family.”
But he said race nor origin eclipsed the family bond.
As Marquessa has put it in the past: “I told the boys you may not have been born in my belly, but you were born in my heart. And there’s nothing more powerful than the heart.” She reiterated that the other day: “We’d tell them: ‘That’s what makes you special to us. Of all the children in the world who needed a mommy and a daddy, God found you and knew you’d be best for us.’
“I know in the big picture of the world it’s not like a miracle, but it’s one for us. We had wanted to have children, and we got these two wonderful little boys. We became a family in a different way and, in some respects, a better way.”
The two brothers — different in many ways ― became, as Solomon said the other day, “best friends.” “They even made up a holiday to celebrate being brothers,” Marquessa said with a laugh. “They knew there’s a Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, so they invented Brother’s Day.
“They started celebrating it on June 7th and still do. They’ll hang out together and do something and when they were at home, they’d exchange gifts. Mostly, it’s Zeke buying Solomon a gift because Solomon doesn’t have any money.”
Today, Zeke works in the IT Department at Buckeye Corrugated Inc. in Fairlawn, northwest of Akron.
Solomon said his appreciation of his parents is just as strong as his bond with his brother:
“Every day I try to tell them I love them. I can’t imagine all the sacrifices they made. They got out of their comfort zone and took on two adopted kids.”
Although his biological mom died soon after he was born and he believes his birth dad “never was in the picture,” Solomon knows for sure he was nurtured by two loving parents who did “an incredible job raising us.”
Sometimes that meant a pat on the back.
Sometimes it came with a splash in the face.
“That’s a funny story,” Solomon said. “I had my dad as an English teacher in high school and the first day of his class, I ended up falling asleep. He grabbed a water bottle and squirted me ‘til I woke up.”
From the time Solomon was a little boy, he said he’d accompany his dad to basketball practice:
“Sometimes I’d be down in the corner just dribbling away with the basketball and he’d have to tell me to shut up while he was explaining things to his players.”
Solomon appreciates the way his parents held Zeke and him accountable, while at the same time encouraging them.
Growing up with white parents and starring at a school whose student body was predominately white, Solomon said his dad told him he didn’t want him to assimilate.
He wanted him to stand out — for all the right reasons. Things like integrity and character.
“He stressed, whatever you do, try to be the best at it,” Solomon said. “If you were joining the student council try to be the president. If you’re playing basketball, be the best teammate you can be.”
WSU ‘the best place for Solomon’
Solomon averaged 21.7 points per game as a senior and won All-Ohio, Division I honors.
Even so, he said he got just three D-I college offers: Akron, Youngstown State and Wright State.
Sargent — then head coach Scott Nagy’s top assistant — recruited him and made a real connection with the Callaghan family.
“Wright State felt like the best place for Solomon,” Marquessa said. “It just felt natural and 90 percent of that was Clint.”
Sargent said the feelings were mutual:
“I think they hoped we’d be an extension of the things they’d been teaching Solomon. And for us, we try to stay away from transitional (players) who are with you one year and gone the next.
“We’re trying to build something, and we believe Solomon can be a big part of that.”
Although last year’s redshirt season was tough to deal with at first, Solomon said he came to appreciate it as a way to develop a deeper understanding both of himself as a player and of the team he hoped to help lead.
Sargent said he can add a lot — “especially as a physical on-ball defender,” — and he can score.
“I’m just ready to do whatever I can out there,” Solomon said. “I’ve waved towels before from the bench and I’ve been the primary player and everything in between. I just want to be the best I can be out there.”
And if that happens, people may parrot Zeke’s line: “Look at him! Look!’”
They may even adopt the moniker his mom gave him.
“I guess that’d be fine … if it’s because I’m playing sweet on the floor,” he said.
As he thought about it, Sweet Solly began to smile.
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