Sports concepts — especially winning and losing or coming from behind and powering through or giving 110 per cent for the team — are excellent metaphors for life.
This became especially apparent to Wildcats softball manager Gary Kingman when he told the 14-year-old athletes he’d coached for four years that he had cancer.
"We were going to battle this. We were going to beat it," he said.
When he informed parents and players at a team meeting more than two years ago, he couldn’t imagine they even understood the words non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. "I didn’t know what it meant so I don’t know they did," he said Tuesday. The cancer now in remission. "You say the word, and everybody goes sideways."
He felt no pain, but chemo left him exhausted, with too little energy to attend many games and, when he did one sunny day in March, his body was left with too few defences to keep from catching a fever and then pneumonia. "I just couldn’t stay away," said Kingman, who had been on the leadership executive of the Vancouver softball league for two decades. He recovered.
"It was a pretty sad moment for all of us," said pitcher Julia Jachimowicz, 17, who started on the team when she was 10. "It’s hard to remember because it was a life-altering thing for us. He supported us through so much and we’re more like a family than a team. He’s put so much of his time into the team. He didn’t have to but he did because he cares so much."
Robyn Newell, the team’s assistant manager and at the time a PhD candidate in biomechanical engineering, coached the team in Kingman’s absence. Before that winter, the Wildcats played in the B division and in 2009 and ’11, they won bronze at the B.C. championship. In 2012, the year Kingman was diagnosed, the Wildcats were moving up to the highly competitive A division.
“They didn’t realize how tough it was going to be," said Kingman, noting many A teams aspire to win national championships. The Wildcats had a tough season with the absence and frightening potential loss of their coach, but also because of the many losses on the diamond. Still, they created a tribute to try and keep spirits high. The Wildcats hung a photo of Kingman in their dugout for all the home and away games they played until their coach returned.
"We hung it up even in the rain, so it started to get a little crinkled, but we kept using the same one," said Amanda Percival, 16, who plays shortstop. "That probably made him feel pretty good and pretty loved. It gave us another reason to push hard and do our best for him."
Kingman, now 71 – "But I try not to act 71," – saw the portrait when he attended a few innings of a game.
The players and their parents also organized to prepare meals, ones like lasagne and soup that Kingman could freeze and then heat up and eat for several days. “That was amazing,’’ he said.
At the Canadian Open Fastpitch Championship earlier this month, the U18 Wildcats played well but won only one game in the consolation round. Kingman said they get the challenge they wanted in the A division and the record isn’t their only measure of success. They had already supported their coach in a much bigger game.
"I think it helped them," Kingman said about his surviving cancer. "It really did because adversity is what this whole thing is about."
On life and sport, the coach added this: “Baseball and softball, it’s probably the toughest game to play. It’s a team game but it’s an individual game ... It is a brutal game and it’s unforgiving if you make a mistake because it will come right back at you. The baseball gods are seriously mean, is all I can say, and that’s what I tell the kids.
"It’s such a life game, too. Softball and baseball, or any competitive sport, is about learning how to live. You’ve got to battle out there."
