At times, the ball bounces off Tyler’s foot and goes onto the floor where the Spartans are practicing.

As the ball rolls farther away, Tyler shyly looks at the grown-ups before mustering enough courage to scurry out to retrieve it.

Finally, the Spartans take a break to shoot free throws. Tyler stops dribbling and looks up.

Two days before a pivotal Big Ten game against Purdue, the team’s business-like mood quickly shifts to an emotion that only can be evoked by a child.

“Heyyy Tyler!” senior forward Aisha Jefferson says, waving flirtatiously.

“Ahhhh!” screams freshman center Kelsey Smith, making a funny face as she rushes to him.

Then, the moment Tyler has been waiting for arrives. His mother, MSU head coach Suzy Merchant, nods in approval. He bursts into a sprint, runs into her leg and clings to it as she rubs his blonde hair.

After free throws, the players go to the weight room. Merchant speaks with the media — breaking focus only when Tyler begins crying after getting hit in the nose by a ball — and practice ends.

As the media disperse, Tyler runs up to Merchant and says, “Let’s go, mommy.”

“Where do you want to go, buddy?” Merchant asks.

Tyler takes his mother’s hand and leads her off the court.

“Do you have practice, mommy?”

The first year was the toughest.

As MSU’s new head coach during the 2007-08 season, Merchant wasn’t only adjusting to her job. She also was juggling being a first-time mother.

Each day, she walked out of her home feeling guilty about leaving her son.

MSU men’s basketball head coach Tom Izzo warned her the worst was yet to come.

“‘You really miss him now and you’re going to miss him, you’re going to feel bad, but you just wait,’” Merchant recalled Izzo telling her.

“‘You just wait until they start talking and telling you, ‘I miss you, stay home, do you work today?’”

Three years later, Izzo’s warning is becoming reality.

“Just today he said, ‘Do you have practice, mommy?’” Merchant said on April 15.

“It’s just starting because he’s 3-and-a-half and because he’s just starting (to realize).”

Merchant knows she’s feeling the same guilt as every parent. She wants to be with Tyler, but also must coach, recruit and run the MSU women’s basketball program. Although her job is more high-profile than others, it’s a fine line every parent must balance — a word at which Merchant laughs.

“With the dynamics of everything, I don’t think ‘balance’ is the right word. I don’t think there is balance,” Merchant said.

“I think it’s just literally about being in the moment of ‘mom mode’ or ‘work mode, coach mode.’ You have to separate them, and when you can blend it, it’s great.”

One reason Merchant is able to juggle ‘mom mode’ and ‘coach mode’ is her parents.

They’re also the reason she came to MSU.

When Merchant first was offered the job, she told her parents, Glenn and Mary Ellen, that she couldn’t accept it.

“‘I can’t leave this baby in daycare; I just can’t do it,’” Mary Ellen recalled Merchant saying about Tyler, then 4 months old.

Mary Ellen and Glenn, retired and living in Traverse City, Mich., refused to watch their daughter’s dream slip away.

The two offered to move to East Lansing to help Merchant and her husband, Gary Rakan, raise Tyler. At first, Merchant balked, telling her parents it was too much to ask.

Her mother pressed.

Now, Glenn and Mary Ellen live in an in-law suite next to the family’s main house. When Merchant and Rakan are at work or away on business, they never have to worry about Tyler.

Merchant said her parents’ move was “probably the most unselfish thing I’d ever seen.” Rakan, who started his own independent wholesaling management company, Infinity Capital Management, in September 2009, called his in-laws “one of our true blessings.”

Mary Ellen and Glenn — whom Tyler calls “Mimi and Papa” — said they are the ones who are blessed.

“What a joy it is to be able to take care of him and be able to share in as much of his time as possible,” Mary Ellen said.

“We’re both 65 and we really should be in rocking chairs instead of chasing him around, but it’s been awesome. He really keeps us young.”

Being there

There are benchmarks in every child’s life.

First steps. First words.

Truthfully, Merchant said she isn’t sure whether she was there for Tyler’s. (Mary Ellen said Merchant didn’t miss them.)

The thought of not being there for those things stings Merchant, and she admits she doesn’t know how she’ll react when she undoubtedly misses some of Tyler’s games and school functions.

“I’m not going to lie, that was hard when you come home and they’re like, ‘Oh, he said this today,’ and you’re like, ‘Oh, I did miss it,’” Merchant said.

“But that’s kind of what technology is for. We’ve got it on film and I’m going to see him continue. I think the most important thing isn’t so much about the first, but it’s that you’re there for them when they need you and they know about the love.”

To this point in Tyler’s life, Mary Ellen said Merchant has made “an almost heroic effort” to miss as little as possible.

Numerous times, Tyler has gone on the road with the team. When he was an infant, travel was easy because he couldn’t move. When he was 2, “I mean, he just had his own vision,” Merchant said.

“He was starting to become independent.”

As Tyler continues to grow more manageable, Merchant said she has been able to more frequently blend ‘mom mode’ and ‘coach mode.’

During fall recruiting weekends the entire family enjoys Saturday tailgates and football games.

Throughout the year, they attend as many MSU sporting events as possible — football, hockey, baseball, softball and, schedule permitting, men’s basketball — and sometimes Tyler accompanies his mother to charity functions.

Attending college athletic events is fun for any young boy. The lessons Tyler learns by spending time with his mother at Haven House, which provides temporary shelter for homeless families, is another thing for which Merchant is grateful.

Above all, Merchant said she and Rakan continually talk about how fortunate Tyler is to be growing up on a college campus.

“Some families don’t even talk about college and some kids don’t even think about going to college, and from the time he’s been here he’s been around that,” Merchant said.

“He’s around a college campus and we can talk to him about going to school. … I just think the value of him being around a higher educational institution — there’s going to be no doubt in his mind that he’s going to have an opportunity for higher education and it isn’t like that in everybody’s family.

“Sometimes when I’m gone or sometimes when I’m busy, I think about the value that he’s getting growing up in this world and how blessed he is, and that usually makes me smile.”

Tyler

It’s safe to say that at 3-and-a-half years old, Tyler Rakan is a chick magnet.

After all — at least in his mind — he has 15 girlfriends, all of whom happen to play basketball on his mother’s team.

“When we’re not able to travel we watch the games on TV. When he sees Suzy walk across the screen, he says, ‘Did momma win?’” Mary Ellen said.

“Then he asks, ‘Did my girlfriends win?’”

He’s also quite the athlete. Merchant and Rakan played basketball and football, respectively, at Central Michigan, and Tyler has his parents’ genes.

His favorite sport is hockey — “That boy is hockey, hockey, hockey,” Merchant said — and his mother said Tyler can hit the five-hole and do slap shots, wrist shots and trick shots over his shoulder.

He loves every sport, and Merchant proudly said she sometimes catches people watching him hit golf balls as they drive by their house.

The family lives in a neighborhood full of young boys who often play together, akin to Tyler’s favorite movie, “The Sandlot.” Merchant said Tyler always is the youngest one playing, and one of the neighborhood favorites is tackle football.

When Tyler is out and about, Merchant’s ‘mom mode’ is on full alert.

One day, Tyler was walking near a boy swinging. A few yards away, Merchant envisioned what was about to happen. The boy swung up and, on the way down, hit Tyler in the forehead, sending him to the ground. Tyler, who already has had six stitches, was fine, but Merchant said she often catches herself taking the big, deep, mom-like worried breath.

“(Children are) so fearless and you’re so panicked about what could happen, because you know what could happen, but he really hasn’t had too many issues,” Merchant said.

“Those things always concern you and, the way he plays, he’s aggressive, probably beyond his years at his activities at this point.

“And he plays with older boys, so yeah. You’re always like, (deep breath).”

What really matters

In November 2009, Merchant announced she was pregnant. Less than a month later, she lost her unborn baby.

Merchant said she doesn’t mind talking about it, understanding that many women also have suffered a similar loss. Although it was one of the most difficult periods of her life, she said, in a way, it brought her back to reality.

“As tough as losing a baby is, there are so many people that would put their arm around you and say, ‘I lost one too,’ or, ‘We’re with ya,’ and it really made me appreciate how the Spartan fans and community and family really cared,” said Merchant, adding she and Rakan, both 40, are hopeful for another child.

“You don’t always realize that when it’s about wins and losses. When something so personal happens, just to get the outreach and people caring for our family, I was really, really touched by that and it helped me get through it.”

Going home to Tyler also helped. Every day in her office, Merchant catches herself looking at a family photo taken when Tyler was an infant. The change in Tyler from that moment to now amazes her.

“I look every day across that way and I see a 3, 4-month old,” Merchant said.

“Now to see him running around … he’s like a little boy.”

Sometimes Merchant gets home well after Tyler’s bedtime.

It could be after a win, it could be after a loss.

She could have signed a heralded recruit or missed out on “the next big thing.”

Or, it simply could have been just one of those days.

No matter what, she quietly cracks open Tyler’s bedroom door, walks in and lies next to him on his big boy bed.

“I lay down right next to him and just kind of unwind and just know that I feel a lot better just sitting in his bed. When he was a baby, I’d sit in his room in the rocking chair and just kind of get back into mom mode and appreciate the blessings I have — that he’s healthy and well-taken care of and well-loved,” Merchant said.

“And that kind of helps you compartmentalize a little bit, I think, and brings you back to the ultimate things that really matter.”