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published December 25-26, 2001 :: Home |
Stakes of the Game
Chapter Nine: The Morning After The six suspended players were instructed to go to the early-session games that day at the UPS Fieldhouse, for a couple of reasons. One, that the parents who hadn't heard the news, or who were only arriving in Tacoma that day, would be notified at the fieldhouse. And two, that it was better for the kids to face the music now -- to take whatever the community wanted to heap upon them -- then to hide from it. When those six left the room so that DeHoog could go over the game plan with the six who would be facing Lake Roosevelt that night, he told the ones who stayed: Support your teammates. They're going to need it ... maybe now more than ever. And then he described just exactly how the six boys in that room were going to beat the top-ranked team in the state. For the other six, it was a difficult day from the beginning. VanderYacht was devastated. "He had the sheets pulled up over his head," says Kingma, who had to all but drag him out of bed before the meeting. After the team meeting, though, VanderYacht found his parents' RV in the UPS Fieldhouse parking lot and told them the dreaded news. His father, Dale, could tell how hard Duane was taking it and took some of that weight off. Hey, I was 17 at one time, he told his son, I probably would have done the same thing. "Their thing was, OK, learn by it. Learn by your mistakes," VanderYacht says. "So I was feeling pretty good. My mom and dad patted me on the back and said, hey, life goes on. But I'll never forget: Walking from the motor home to the gym -- maybe a three-minute walk -- I had probably three or four adults that I looked up to ... that just laid into me. How could do this to the team, how could you do this to Lynden ..." Each of the six got that to varying degrees, but the worst was reserved for Huizenga, dubbed the ringleader as the guy caught with the baggie. Here's something nobody knew: When police showed up, Huizenga shoved that baggie in his sock ... but it wasn't his. It belonged to a teammate. For a quarter-century, that was a burden he carried himself, and never told. He wasn't going to lessen his load by pointing the finger at a teammate. Principle. Hard choices. Huizenga chose to take the rap, and he took it from nearly everybody. From the people who got right in his face to the ones who only glared, whispering to their friends: There he is. There's the one that got them all in trouble. Not everybody, though, condemned him or the others. Marie Kaemingk, whose son Galen had graduated the year before (and is now the head football coach at Omak High School), walked up to Huizenga and told him not to take it so hard, to hold his head up high and not to worry about what anybody else might be thinking or saying -- that she didn't think badly of "you boys" and that she knew some others felt the same way. "That's the way the Christian attitude should be," Huizenga says. "It's not just to scorn us and shun us, but to try to understand and be forgiving. And she was nothing more than that. I'll never, ever forget that." Nor will VanderYacht ever forget a woman he'd known for years all but cussing him out that morning. "It was tough to respect her after that," he says. "Some of the things she said, I know she didn't mean it -- but kids are lot more forgiving than grownups. "And it made me realize how big into sports Lynden is, the community. They took it very seriously. This was their chance to get the championship, and now we weren't going to."
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