CAN HER PLAYERS BREAK THE CYCLE?
At the heart of the opioid crisis, a football coach asks:
ASHTON, W.VA. The high school football coach watched as the senior defensive end sneaked onto the field for pre-game warm-ups. Kellie Thomas waited a minute before walking over.
“I know you’re going to hate me,” she said, placing a hand on 18-year-old Noah Montgomery’s shoulder pad. “But your health is more important to me than this game.”
Montgomery took his helmet off and began to cry. A medical condition had kept him off the field for weeks, and before the game he and Thomas had agreed he would have to sit out the team’s game on senior night. But all he had wanted was one last chance to play for the Hannan Wildcats. He wrapped his arms around his coach, finally accepting that his football career was over, as the rest of the players watched in silence. They all knew her for moments like this.
They never call her Coach — just Kellie. She is the first female high school football head coach in West Virginia, yet when she took over two seasons ago, she had little interest in making history or worrying about the team’s win total. She was more concerned with protecting her players, using football to help them navigate the everyday challenges brought on by the state’s opioid epidemic, which has been especially cruel in rural and economically diminished places such as here in Mason County.
Some of her players have loved ones battling addiction, and some are at risk of getting caught up in drug use themselves. Most others have faced so many of the issues affecting young people across the region, including child neglect, poverty and depression. Many of them cling to Kellie as their caretaker, not just their coach.
They all eventually walked back to the team’s locker-room, housed in a big blue shed. Montgomery took his pads off and changed back into his street clothes while Thomas finished passing out hand-warmers and addressed her team.
“I’ve been saying it all season, but I want you to know that you can beat any team you step onto the field with,” she said.
Her players, who had won just one game all year, clapped and shouted together, “Yes, ma’am!”
West Virginia is the epicentre of the opioid crisis, which was declared a public health emergency in 2017. The mass distribution of pain medicine in the area had started long before that, and Mason County was among the hardest hit between 2006 and 2012. More than 15 million pills, enough for 82 per person, were supplied to the county during that period. In 2016, more than 880 people died in association with drug misuse in West Virginia.
Thomas, 48, lives in Huntington and travels up Route 2 to school every morning, and even on the surface she can see how the situation has ravaged the backcountry. In some areas of the road, stores have closed and churches have become dilapidated.
She still shows up every day before the sun rises and stays past dark, to a country school that has spotty Wi-fi and cell service. Here in Ashton, the median household income is $38,381, which is more than $5,000 below the state average and more than $20,000 below the national average. Unemployment is 6.9 per cent, nearly double the national rate. Some parents work in agriculture, or at the nearby Toyota plant, or on boats that drag the Ohio River for coal. Most others are on government assistance.
The harsh reality is that most children at the high school are exposed early on to not just drug use by family members, but the ripple effects of it.
“A lot of kids here are faced with it,” Thomas said. “Several kids here have become the parenting role, I think, because of the parents. A lot of them are being raised by grandparents, aunts, uncles, or some of them just go couch-surfing. It’s sad.”
The football team has become the closest family many of her 25 players have. That has been the case for Montgomery, who was familiar with the daily impact of the opioid crisis even before he and his family moved from the suburbs of Akron, Ohio, a year earlier.
“I’ve always grown up around it,” Montgomery said. “I’ve always gone toward sports to get away from it.”
Montgomery had heard about the team’s lengthy losing streak when he joined last year, but he quickly became close with Thomas, who made news in becoming the first female coach in the football-crazed state’s history. He said the sport has helped him deal with his anger issues, allowing him to hit people without consequence.
“It does work. It helps me,” he said. “It helps me stay out of trouble. That’s a good thing.”
“Open up your books,” Thomas told her late-afternoon health class at Hannan. “We’re going to talk about coping with loss and grief. I’m sure you’ve lost someone close to you.”
Thomas can speak from experience. She lost her father to cancer as a teenager, a grandmother a few days before Thanksgiving one year and an uncle right before Halloween another year. But perhaps her strongest connection to the experience of her students was that she has lost two loved ones to drug use.
Growing up in Mason County in the late 1980s, she had a cousin who used often, and on occasion she would watch as medical personnel came and went from his house. One day, she watched as a medical team finally brought him out of the house.
“He was just as blue as blue could be,” she said.
“He kept trying to do it, and they kept trying to save him, but he finally succeeded in overdosing.” A decade ago, she lost another cousin to suicide after he struggled with drug abuse.
“You don’t want them to be alone,” she told her students. “Are they going to take this to sleep? Are they going to have help, so they don’t overdose, or so they don’t have alcohol poisoning? Or they don’t shoot themselves in the head?”
Only after a mentor consoled her and refused to let her bypass college did Thomas make it. Her mom was a school cook and didn’t have money for college, but Thomas attended Marshall on a track scholarship and eventually earned her bachelor’s degree, specializing her work in alternative education.
By the time she became a mainstay at Hannan, she believed the generation she was teaching would have to be the one to break the cycle of opioid use in West Virginia.
“I tell these kids, even I’ve got druggies in my family. I have people that have committed suicide. I’ve got alcoholism that runs in the family,” Thomas said. “But what I want to get to them is, just because it runs in your family doesn’t mean you have to follow suit and go with that.”
Down the hall from her health class, the school day before the team’s senior night would bring another round of challenges for the administration. The school’s first-year principal, Stephen Pritchard, received a phone call that a student would be dropping out to home-school. “We’re going to lose her,” he muttered to himself, knowing that already 30 per cent of the school’s transfers this year have been for the same reason. He asked aloud who in those homes might be teaching.
Next door, counsellor Patty
Blake wondered how she might help the school’s roughly 250 students, a fourth of whom she said don’t live with their parents. She thumbed through a student’s journal, with one page that had been scribbled with the words “Kill myself, I won’t leave a note,” and formulated a plan to help. The day before, a student had stopped by to tell Blake that she had been experiencing anxiety over a loved one’s drug use, and that sports was the only thing that could keep her mind off it. Within a couple of weeks, a parent of a student would overdose and die.
More and more, Blake was seeing students with the “flat affect,” a severe reduction in emotional expressiveness. Sports has become the school’s best “connector,” as Blake puts it, keeping students invested in the school. (About 25 per cent of Hannan students attend a four-year college, Blake said, with around 40 per cent choosing community college or vocational schools.)
“The drug epidemic has hit West Virginia like a locust,” she said. “Kellie has made a difference. The kids love her.”
By this fall, they hadn’t won a game in nearly two years, but that had become secondary to keeping her players away from the problems that might be plaguing their families.
She set up a group text chat to build camaraderie. When one player needed a place to stay, she arranged for him to live temporarily with an assistant coach. She helped the school put together a pantry in the back of the school’s gym, full of second-hand clothes, deodorant and school supplies, because sometimes those things weren’t readily available at home. When one of her players lost his stepfather near the end of the season, she watched as her players, including Montgomery, consoled him in the days after.
But she maintained high expectations for the players on the field, even as they struggled through their one-win season. “Keep your head up!” she yelled at a player during a tackling drill before the team’s final game in November. She watched them giggle as they plowed through one another on the muddy field. “It’s like herdin’ chickens,” she muttered to herself in a thick southern drawl.
Thomas had a nasty cold and lost her voice in the hours before the team’s final game on senior night. “The refs lucked out tonight,” she said through a scratchy throat before dressing in her usual gametime attire for the 26-degree weather: a few sweaters and cargo shorts, with wool socks and a pair of Carhartt boots.
Cows prowled on the hill overlooking the school’s stadium. A concession stand served hotdogs with a special sauce made by Thomas’s mother. A few old pickup trucks pulled up to the end zone fence to watch.
Montgomery had asked his coach to walk him, along with his mother, to midfield to be honoured before the game. The announcer proudly stated that Montgomery wanted to attend college to become a diesel mechanic or to join the military. Thomas beamed and gave him a hug.
Her team eventually lost, 42-6, and the mercy rule was enacted with a running clock in the fourth quarter. She told her players to lock arms and walk the length of the field after the game, and some parents stayed to clap. It would be one of the team’s new traditions.
She met with her seniors one final time in the locker-room, telling them not to settle in life. They all nodded, and later, after they were mobbed by their underclassmen teammates in the parking lot, they all went their own ways down Route 2.
But before then, she shared a final moment with Montgomery. She wondered if she had spoiled his final high school football game. “Do you hate me?” she asked him. “No,” he said. “I love you.” Thomas stayed behind and began to pick up the field’s yard markers.
She still had three hours of cleanup duty to do.
What I want to get to them is, just because (drug or alcohol abuse) runs in your family doesn’t mean you have to follow suit and go with that.