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Game of the Heart
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Bellevue Christian girls coach
Beth Campbell and her son Steve applaud the introduction of the King's
High School team Thursday afternoon at the SunDome.
GORDON KING/Yakima
Herald-Republic |
Basketball more than wins,
losses to Bellevue Christian
coach Beth Campbell and her family
By
SCOTT SANDSBERRY
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC
Basketball has always had a place in Beth Campbell's heart, but it has a
place in her life only because she was told it would be OK by a boy who
can't speak. He told her with his heart.
In her world, the boy comes before the game and always will. But in the life
of Bellevue Christian girls basketball coach Beth Campbell -- the only
female head coach in the 2003 Class 1A state basketball tournament -- the
game, and sports in general, arrived much earlier.
It was already arriving when she was a little girl in Bellevue sitting on
the steps outside the Boys Club, having to wait for her brothers to finish
shooting baskets. She wasn't allowed inside because she was a girl and, in
those days, there wasn't such a thing as a Boys and Girls Club.
The game already had a place within her during elementary-school recess,
when the boys were allowed to check out balls and girls were allowed to
check out ... jump-ropes. "Girls couldn't check out a ball. That was the
rule," she says. So she played with the boys, and her fifth-grade teacher
wrote on her report card, "Beth plays too much with the boys."
Not that her parents would have worried too much about that. Beth and her
twin sister, Lynn, had started as tomboys and morphed into young athletes,
and their parents were fine with that. "They were very supportive," Campbell
says. "They made sure we had every ball, bat and glove we wanted." Not to
mention the sport court in the back yard, where Beth and Lynn would go
nose-to-nose against each other, or against their brothers.
By the time she entered Bellevue High, the girls were anxious to play prep
sports -- but this was 1971, pre-Title IX, and the high school didn't have
much to offer. "They had gymnastics and tennis, the ones that could be
so-called 'feminine,'" Campbell says.
So Beth, Lynn, their sister and some teachers generated a survey of students
and parents within the Bellevue School District to determine the interest in
girls' interscholastic competition in things like basketball and volleyball.
When they took their favorable results to the school board, though, Campbell
recalls, "They turned us down."
A year later, though, with Title IX and its promise of gender equity fast
becoming a reality -- or, at least, an inevitability -- the school district
was singing a different tune. "So we were able to play basketball my senior
year," Campbell says.
She became a standout member of the first girls basketball team at Bellevue
High School and, after that, played on the University of Washington's first
official women's basketball team. "At least," she says, "the first one
allowed play at Hec Edmundson (Pavilion)." She was team captain in 1975.
And two years later she was coaching at Mercer Island High, where she was
reminded just how far girls' basketball had NOT come.
"It was really bad," she says of a program that at one stretch lost 32
straight games. "The girls there weren't ready to play real basketball. I
had one girl who was just beautiful to watch, she was like ballet on the
court. After two weeks of practice she came to me and said, 'My parents told
me I can't play basketball anymore, it's not feminine enough.' "
Campbell coached at Mercer Island for six years, during which time she
married Scott Campbell, a young attorney she'd known since high school.
Shortly after the end of the 1982 season, she became pregnant with their
first son, Chris, who was born in the middle of the Mercer Island basketball
season. The next season she was bringing him to practice in a playpen. A
players' mother knitted him a tiny letterman's sweater. "It was great,"
Campbell says. "I had 12 built-in baby sitters."
After that 1983 season Campbell quit coaching to raise Chris, then had a
second son, Steve, three years later. Steve had special needs, and would
become both the reason she stayed away from coaching for so long ... and
perhaps the very reason she is once again a head basketball coach.
Campbell says doctors don't quite have a name for what Steve has. It's not
cerebral palsy. It's not Downs syndrome. But pieces of his puzzle are
missing; all of the wires are not connected. He is unable to speak and,
Campbell says, "he has trouble motor-planning. When your brain tells your
body to do something, all of your connections work and you just do it. With
Steve, his connections don't work and he can't process all of that."
Steve didn't walk until he was 5. He can walk now, but not long distances
and not well in unstable circumstances; a flight of stairs, for example,
would be difficult without help. Steve, who requires round-the-clock care,
understands most of what is said to him, but processes it with the innocence
of a child, not the worldliness of a 17-year-old. He loves unconditionally
... everyone.
Steve's favorite thing? His mom's basketball team.
Beth Campbell returned to coaching four years ago, but not as a head coach
-- as an assistant at Bellevue Christian. That meant she could be home with
Steve all day, and after school somebody else -- Scott, or Chris (now a
sophomore at Seattle Pacific University) or a caregiver -- could take over
while she was at practice. It worked out.
For three years, Campbell worked under three different head coaches, watched
the players have to adjust to a new coach and a new system every year. Steve
was like a favorite fan, a mascot almost, because he so obviously adored the
players and the game they played. Practices, games, it didn't matter. It was
all good. And just because he couldn't speak didn't mean he couldn't root
and clap and RAAH with everybody else. Nobody applauded the player
introductions like Steve.
Last spring, Campbell learned the school would be looking for yet another
new head coach in 2002-2003, and she couldn't stand the idea of the players
having to go through another change like that. "She really loved the kids on
this team and she felt a responsibility to help them," says Scott, her
husband. "We knew it was really going to be difficult with Stevie, though."
Beth struggled with the decision. "I felt called to doing it, but I felt it
would be too difficult with Stevie, arranging care."
One morning, though, she went to Steve's room to get him up for the day and
the first thing he did was make a big smile and, with his hand, a little
dribbling and shooting motion -- his sign for basketball.
Or, in this case, a sign. Period. "Right then, I decided this isn't going to
be a bad thing," Campbell recalls. "I knew it would be a wonderful thing for
Stevie."
Then the problem of taking care of Steve solved itself. A month before the
season, a friend -- Kathy Langston, women's coach at Northwest College --
told Beth about a non-scholarship player whose part-time job at Starbucks
wasn't working out and who needed a job with after-school hours. Perfect.
Since October, the young woman, Amanda Yackley, has cared for Steve while
Campbell attends to basketball responsibilities.
"She's been a blessing," Campbell says. "It's like she was a gift from God,
like he brought her into our lives. I really feel like God's coaching this
team and I'm along for the ride."
And what a ride it was. The team lost its best player, all-league forward
Megan Doellefeld, to injury midway through the season, but her teammates won
their next six games, including three must-win games that got them into
district, and earned the Bellevue Christian's first girls state-tourney
berth since 1988.
They lost on Wednesday and Thursday at the SunDome, so their stay was brief
... but memorable. Campbell made sure her team reveled in the off-the-court
experiences of the tournament -- staying as a group at a hotel, getting to
know players from other schools around the state, going to Franklin Middle
School so the players could talk to sixth-graders about the value of sports
and academics.
"I'm very competitive, but I want my kids to experience the fun of this,"
Beth Campbell says. "Building this community with other people is much more
important than being first. Only one team is going to be first anyway, so
you might as well enjoy the journey."
And her family has been part of that journey. In the stands this week were
Chris, Scott and, of course, the Vikings' biggest fan.
"He absolutely loves coming to the games," Beth Campbell says. "And the
players all love him, too. They're wonderful with him -- the boys and the
girls both."
It must come from the heart. ©
2003 All photos, content and design are
properties of the Yakima Herald-Republic.
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