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A Season of Change
Chapter Four: A Team But the team's supporting cast turned out to be special, not suspect. There was forward Albert Timmer, who was barely 6-foot-2 but extremely powerful -- an all-league linebacker in football who could hold his own under the boards against much larger players. In a time when lifting weights was still a rarity in high school sports, Timmer lifted. "He built himself into a force," recalls a teammate. "When he planted his feet, you couldn't move him. ... And when he went up, he was so strong that if you were over him with an arm, it was just WHAM -- you're right out of the way." There was Weg, the tough little senior point guard. An inveterate jokester, Weg had what a teammate would later describe as "a larger-than-life personality" jammed into a 5-foot-8 body. He would do anything on a dare -- like the October night when he streaked "The Voo," a popular Lynden burger drive-in and teen hangout, wearing nothing but a pumpkin over his head -- and celebrated victory as hard as he detested defeat. Weg's cut-up counterpart on the Lyncs was 6-foot-3 senior Bob Huizenga, the star center who was almost certainly the most-liked guy on the team because of his gregarious, friendly nature -- his way of joking with anybody, the popular and the unpopular. When Huizenga made you the butt of a joke, it was his way of including you, of letting you know you were part of the group. "He was very sensitive to other people's feelings," recalls a teammate. "He had a way of just making everyone feel liked." Huizenga also had an innate feel for the game that rivaled -- and complemented -- that of Dykstra. "Bob could often appear laid-back and slow, but you better look out -- because he knows what Glen's going to do," recalls Mark Bratt, another senior on the 1976 team. "And the moment Glen's going that direction, Bob is moving this way because they're both going to meet right about there, and nobody knows it but the two of them. And the second Bob gets the ball you don't know if he's just going to bounce-pass it back to Glen or go up to the basket. "That was the heart to the Lyncs team. Not a lot of height. Not a lot of superstars. But those two." Huizenga was also, at 6-foot-3, the tallest starter; his backup and the first reserve off the bench, junior Barry Berendsen -- "Couldn't meet a nicer guy," says Huizenga -- was 6-foot-4. After those two, the Lyncs were fairly small by basketball standards. Bratt was 6-foot-2 and had shown promise as a freshman and sophomore, when he was tall for his age. But he plateaued early, and while he had good rebounding and defensive skills, he lacked quickness. And Bratt also had one other flaw -- poor depth perception, the result of being blinded in one eye by an accident when he was 12. So he found himself relegated to the bench alongside senior Jeff Jansen. Those two were good friends -- fellow starters on the football team, fellow benchmates on the basketball team, and fellow members of an Explorers search and rescue group, helping locate missing hikers, snowmobilers and hunters. On one Sunday morning, the group was called to locate the victims of a plane crash. The Explorers found them, all right -- parts of them over here, parts over there. If Bratt and Jansen sometimes seemed a bit more mature than their teammates, perhaps that sort of experience was one reason why. But Jansen had left childhood behind years before. He had been more of a typical, happy-go-lucky kid until the summer before he entered sixth grade, when his older brother Joel -- the closest in age of Jeff's seven siblings -- drowned in Wiser Lake, right in front of the Jansens' house. "Psychologically, that really changed me," he says. "I became very serious -- serious about life and death, serious about things going on in the world, that type of thing. Not saying that what the other guys were doing was frivolous -- but drinking, smoking, taking drugs, anything like that was just frivolous to me." Jansen focused on his grades, on doing the sort of things that would make his parents proud, in a way trying to fill the void created by Joel's absence. He was voted class president four years in a row. He competed in three sports -- running back and defensive back in football, one of the WCL's fastest sprinters in track. And he remained such a straight arrow -- the only one of the 12 on the varsity basketball team, in fact, who never so much as tried marijuana that year, even to see what all the fuss was about -- that his teammates took to calling him by his middle name ... Hoover. Jansen joined Bratt on the bench, where for the first month of the season they sat alongside Ron Kok, another senior on the varsity for the first time. Kok's slender, 6-foot-1 frame and quiet studious nature belied a toughness -- in football, he started at linebacker, ahead of bigger, stronger athletes -- and a burning sense of honor. When some of his teammates would become all but piloried by some in the community -- and they were, following events to come -- Kok was perhaps the first and most vocal ally to come to their defense. He was that kind of a teammate. He had your back. So, too, did Mike Kingma, who carpooled every day with Timmer over the 10 miles from Laurel, where they both lived. Kingma was another strong farm boy, quarterback on the football team and ace pitcher on the baseball team. He was also a tough kid, never one to walk away from a scrap -- or from a friend in need. "Tons of integrity," a teammate says of Kingma. "The person you wanted to go into battle with, because he would jump in front of the bullet for you. He'd back you up 100 percent. He was a great teammate." Kingma, too, spent most of his basketball time on the bench, as did fellow juniors Bryan Korthuis, Harold Oosterhof and Duane VanderYacht. For VanderYacht, the bench was an odd fit. He came from one of Lynden's most prominent families, was already a successful businessman -- part-owner of a Lynden clothing store -- was the younger brother of a former Lyncs star, was himself a three-sport athlete and had begun the season as a starting guard. Since DeHoog substituted only minimally, preferring to stay with a set five for most of the game, VanderYacht spent the first month of the Lyncs' 1975-76 season on the court. But in a late-December game at Ferndale, the Lyncs played poorly against their opponent's 2-2-1 zone press, turning the ball over so often that DeHoog was disgusted. He benched VanderYacht -- perhaps considering that the junior would have one more year to be a starter -- and brought in Kok, the cerebral senior, to start for the rest of the season.
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