Onalaska's Heliaz Lovely, center, positions for a rebound against Nooksack Valley's Jeb Hobbs during Wednesday's first-round Class 1A state game in the SunDome.   GORDON KING/Yakima Herald-Republic

By SCOTT SANDSBERRY
YAKIMA HERALD-REPUBLIC

The word on Heliaz Lovely was that he was a tough kid, with very rough edges. "Physically aggressive" — that was the term they used in the foster care system to describe kids like him. The first time he came to the family and place he now calls home, a sheriff's deputy brought him.

He was 11 years old then, already a product of the system and a veteran of dozens of foster homes. "Had to be 30 or 40," he says. "One year, I think there was 10 just in that year."

Most of those foster-home stays ended the same way — with Heliaz, sure that yet another family would send him packing whether he did something or not, doing something to hurry along the inevitable. Blowing out of a house, that's what the foster kids call it. That came easy for Heliaz, who could throw a tantrum — or, just as often, a punch — without much provocation if he didn't trust the people around him.

And he trusted no one.

That's why he went from home to home, school to school. Among school administrators' circles, he was almost infamous — the kid you could count on ending up, probably within his first week in the next new school, in the principal's office. Maybe eventually in jail.

That's why, a couple of years ago, a principal from another Southwest Washington high school spotting his name on the varsity basketball roster at Onalaska approached Loggers coaches to ask, "Is that the Heliaz Lovely? He's playing basketball?"

Yes, to that principal's amazement, he was. And that's nothing: This year, Heliaz is one of the Loggers' team captains. A college candidate who reads voraciously. A leader with a future.

Maybe Cindy Hanson didn't see all that coming. But she saw the twinkle.

* * * *

That first Friday evening seven years ago, a caseworker from the Department of Social and Health Services called Hanson, a single mom and long-time foster mother with a reputation for taking on the tough customers nobody else wanted. DSHS had a boy who'd gotten into a fight at his previous home — surprise, surprise — and the caseworker simply wanted to know if Hanson could take him for the weekend until a more permanent situation could be found.

"She'd been planning on going for a trip that weekend," Heliaz remembers. "She ended up not going."

Instead, when Hanson met the sheriff's deputy at the door with Heliaz, she saw something ablaze in the boy's big, brown, untrusting eyes. They played Scrabble together all that weekend. And Heliaz, though he didn't yet know it or believe it, was home.

"I tell him I couldn't see past the twinkle in his eye," Hanson says with a soft smile. "I did fall in love with him, the minute I met him. I don't know. I've only had two (foster) kids at my house that I've fallen in love with, and I've had about 40. I call them 'forever kids.' He's my forever kid. And I'm going to be his kids' gramma, when he has kids.

"He's just turned out to be such a great kid."

His rough edges, though, didn't soften easily. When he arrived at Hanson's doorstep, he was on a number of attention-deficit-related medications — meds to keep him focused, meds to keep him calm during the day, meds to help him sleep. He hated taking what he remembers as "like horse pills," though he had been taking so many pills for so long that he could even take those horse-chokers without water.

"He was so tweaked out," says Hanson, "he couldn't even sleep at night."

It took six weeks, Hanson says, to get him weaned off the various medications. That was a start. But Heliaz was a hard case, and trying to find other foster parents in the area to take him for a couple of days when Hanson needed a break was nearly impossible — he'd "blown out" of virtually all of their homes at one time or another.

The only other foster mom willing to take him, Marci Miess, fell for Heliaz just like Hanson did.

"We just love him," Miess says. "He'd had no reason to be good or do good. He was bounced from so many homes that I think he was out to prove he wasn't good enough to be kept."

That happened at Hanson's home, too. Once, probably within that first year, Heliaz stormed out of the house in anger and ran down the street. Hanson chased him and, when she caught him, grabbed him by the arm.

"You can't touch me!" he shouted, ripping his arm from her grasp. "That's against the rules!"

"I've got to get you to a safe place," she responded. "I'm going to keep you safe."

And she has.

It hasn't always been easy. Hanson's biological son, Scott Card — two years older than Heliaz — couldn't stand it when Heliaz smarted off to his mom, but Cindy would simply tell Scott to go into another room to prevent a blowup. Now, seven years later, Heliaz smiles about how things have come full circle.

"I'm the same way now," he says, and he means the same as Scott was then. Now, when one of the younger foster kids in the Hanson home mouths off to Mom, he's the one who has to swallow his anger, just as Scott did years ago.

And Heliaz has swallowed nearly all of those years of anger and abandonment. "It takes a lot," he says, "to get me angry."

Hanson agrees. "It's been several years since he put his fist through a wall. But the last time he did?" She pauses and grins, framing her hands six inches apart, "The hole was this big."

* * * *

In the middle, of course, was sports.

Not only did Hanson give the boy the freedom to play sports, she encouraged it — and he thrived. He played football and basketball, and loved them. On road trips, he was the kid who always had a book in his hands, reading everything he could get his hands on — sports books, science fiction, fantasy ... once he even read a world history textbook. Not one for a class, either — one he checked out from the library just to READ.

"The Mayans, the Romans, the Greeks, that kind of era," he says. "I'll read anything."

Heliaz still isn't the best student — some B's, mostly C's, though he did get a straight-A semester last year just to prove to himself he could do it. But Onalaska coach Dennis Bower is convinced Heliaz would excel in college just because he loves to read — and reading, lots of it, is precisely the undoing of so many college students. "He checks out books at the library here four and five at a time," Bower says. "That shows me right there he can handle any college load."

This year, Heliaz's second as a starter for the Loggers' basketball team, Bower gave Heliaz Lovely the ultimate compliment: He named him a team captain.

"Here's a kid who, if you told me four years ago if he'd be playing high school basketball, I wouldn't have been able to say if he would be in school, period," Bower says. "He's an example for other kids. I think this is what high school athletics are all about."

The Loggers didn't win their state-tournament opener Wednesday, having drawn as a first-round opponent possibly the best team in the tournament, Nooksack Valley. But Onalaska is here, and one of the reasons they are here at all is an under-sized, hard-working 6-foot post player named Heliaz Lovely.

Yes, that Heliaz Lovely.