LEARNING TO COPE
Player’s cancer diagnosis, coach’s death weigh on Hartley football team
“You don’t even conceive of someone this age getting cancer. It’s uplifting to see him and talk with him during practice. He’s still a full-fledged member of the team. He’s a great teammate.” Tony Thivener Hartley senior offensive linemen/linebacker, on offensive lineman Jake Skelly (below)
Coach Brad Burchfield apologized for using the adjective surreal repeatedly when describing Hartley’s 2020 football season. h “It’s the only word I can think of,” Burchfield said. “It’s like a fog has been hanging over our heads out here on the field every day. How are we coping with all this turmoil? I don’t know how to answer that. How does anybody cope? You just do.” h What Burchfield refers to has nothing to do with the COVID-19 concerns dogging everyone since March. This involves much deeper topics: cancer and death. h Just a day after committing to play football at Ohio University on May 6, first-team All-ohio offensive lineman Jake Skelly noticed unexplained bruising and bleeding and a lack of appetite — a red flag if there ever was one for a 6-foot-4, 255pound athlete. His family doctor referred Jake to Nationwide Children’s Hospital.
The diagnosis was crushing. Skelly had leukemia. He spent the next 10 days receiving aggressive chemotherapy to eradicate the cancer cells. He lost 25 pounds in that initial phase of treatment. Every two weeks since, he has returned for a 24-hour drip of methotrexate.
Extremely upbeat, Skelly comes to practice most days to support his teammates and has been a fixture on the sideline at every game. The Hawks (5-3) play host to Thornville Sheridan (8-0) in a Division III regional semifinal Friday.
“It’s been smooth sailing so far,” Skelly said. “Except for some days after chemo, I’m feeling really good for the most part. Right now, I’m cancer-free, but there’s a process to follow over the next year or two to make sure it doesn’t come back. As long as my numbers stay where they should, I have the go-ahead to play baseball in the spring and go forward with football at Ohio U. next fall. My offensive line coach there has been great.”
Burchfield and Skelly’s teammates understandably were stunned by the news.
“Jake had told me about it over the phone, but being the team leader he is, he waited to announce this at our next team meeting when he was out of the hospital,” Burchfield said. “It was just stunning. Just dead silence in the room.”
Senior offensive linemen/linebacker Tony Thivener said some players did not know how to approach Skelly to show their support.
“You don’t even conceive of someone this age getting cancer,” he said. “It’s uplifting to see him and talk with him during practice. He’s still a full-fledged member of the team. He’s a great teammate.”
The notion that lightning never strikes in the same place twice was
disproved on Oct. 12 when beloved Hawks assistant coach Chuck Wooten died on his 66th birthday after a long battle with bone cancer that he revealed to few.
Wooten had spent the final 25 seasons of a 40-year coaching career at Hartley, where his son Randy is an assistant. In June, he told Burchfield and a few other coaches of his illness, but he insisted on otherwise keeping it private.
“Chuck was out there at practice just a few days before he died and we were all talking about how the late Gale Sayers was the Barry Sanders of his time,” Burchfield said. “I remember that he gave a really fiery speech to the kids later that day. We had no idea how bad it was.
“He gave it everything he had right to the end. Chuck bled Hartley football. It’s never going to be the same without Chuck here on this field with us. Not only was he a tremendous coach, but he was mentor to the kids and the coaches alike.”
Randy Wooten said that his father was thrilled to watch his grandson Joey, a freshman running back, score his first varsity touchdown against St. Charles just a few weeks earlier. Randy’s younger children, Justin and Jasmine, are a ballboy and ballgirl for the Hawks and frolicked with their grandfather each day.
“Dad went out just the way he wanted to, doing what he loved to do,” Randy Wooten said. “He kept this to himself
because football is all about the kids to him and he didn’t want to be a distraction.”
Senior running back/linebacker Marcelis Parker said the players were stunned to learn that Wooten had died.
“I don’t think many of us even knew he was ill,” Parker said. “What a display of toughness for him to come out here every day to practice in the condition he was in. He was a father figure to all of us in the program.”
Added Skelly, “It just pains us to know that we lost one of the greatest coaches, and greatest people, in the history of Hartley. It’s just not the same out here without him.” sblackledge@dispatch.com @Blackiepreps