Winning ... for him
Crescent football rallies behind teammate battling rare condition
Entering the Crescent football field house, Briley Babb makes a beeline for the visitor’s locker room for a quiet and empty room to talk in.
He’s quick to zip past the meeting room where his teammates are studying film of an upcoming opponent, he doesn’t want to be a distraction. Mission failed.
Two teammates spot him and follow him down the hall to say hi.
“Briley!” One teammate shouts. “We miss you buddy. Love you.”
Briley shows a sheepish smile, shaking his massive mop of hair side to side like he’s embarrassed.
“They always do that,” Briley says. “They are always texting me to tell me how they are thinking about me or miss me. “I miss being here.” For the past 15 months, nothing has been easy for Briley or the Babb family.
Perhaps no team has been as dominant as Crescent in Class A football this season. The Tigers have rolled through one opponent after another on their way to an undefeated regular season.
They will square off this week in the quarterfinals against Oklahoma Christian Academy in their continuing quest to get the school its first gold ball since 1990.
It was supposed to be an epic season not only for Briley, but also his brother Bailey who is a senior on the team this season.
“We have always been that combo of rumbling and tumbling,” said Bailey, a junior. “On the field we were unstoppable. Now without him… it’s just different.”
In September of 2016, Briley was diagnosed with Aplastic anemia, a rare disease in whichthe body fails to produce enough new blood cells, resulting in constant exhaustion,
dizziness, shortness of breath and the inability for the blood to clot after a scrape or cut.
The first signs that something was wrong showed over the summer of 2016, when Briley was working a job and was coming home with bruises all over his body. Briley’s mother, Chasity, said she knew they needed to go to the hospital when after one of the first football practices of team camp, Briley came home with giant, purple bruises over more than half his body. “You could put your hand on him and leave a hand-shaped bruise,” Chasity said. “We knew something was very wrong.”
Thediagnosis meant Briley was done with football. Instead of practice time, Briley and Chasity would visit Oklahoma City three and four times a week to go to Children’s Hospital.
Briley was taking 30 pills a day of medication for months and still nothing was getting better.
Meanwhile, the Babb family fell on hard times.
Briley’s dad, Bryce, lost his job, Chasity was a fulltime caretaker to her four sons and the family was struggling to get by.
They lost their car, medical bills were mounting and they fell behind in their rent.
“Everything really just all happened at once,” Chasity said. “This family has been throughit all for the past two years.”
Crescent is a small town of about 1,500 people just 40 minutes north of Oklahoma City and like most small towns, the community within is tuned into each other’s lives.
Cars were donated to the family, rides were offered to Oklahoma City, the fees for athletics for the Babb’s two youngest boys were waived and a GoFundMe account was started in Briley’s honor to help the family.
Then over the summer after months of treatment the doctors had more bad news. Briley was an even more rare type of case, they would need to find a stem cell donor and then start chemotherapy to prepare him for a transplant. Briley is expected to start chemo next week on his 17th birthday.
In doing so he’ll be at risk for even more hardships. That afro he’s been growing out since elementary school
will fall out. He’ll feel symptoms of nausea for months and if his body rejects the transplant, he could be facing organ failure and even death. But the possibility, the ray of hope for Briley is worth it.
“What he’s missing,” Chasity said. “His future is being robbed. They told him the possibilities and he said he absolutely wanted to go ahead because even the chance of a normal life again is so worth it to him.”
Through all this Briley has tried to remain in the background, preferring to not be fussed over. Chasity urged him to keep his head up and to be there for his teammates. “If they see you on the sideline, they might fight harder.” Chasity said. “These are your friends, they need you.”
So Briley comes to games when he's able. He stands on the sidelines with his teammates, wishing more than anything he could be back on the field.
When Briley was able to play, he was a heavy-hitting linebacker and road-grating fullback. Through all of PeeWee and middle school, Briley usually cleared the way for his older but smaller brother as the combo tore up fields around the area.
"He crashed the hole and I followed right behind him," Bailey said. "This was our last chance to get to play together and we can't. That really hurts." Crescent coach J.L. Fisher said after Briley's diagnosis, they promised him he would remain a part of the team. He still has a locker with his jersey hanging in it, just waiting for the day when he might be able to return. “We talk about him a lot,” Fisher said. “It’s hard for a coach because you want to protect your players. But when you are hit with something you don’t have control over, you just have to put it in God’s hand.”
Briley said he’s try to express how much it's meant to him that he still has his locker and for the constant messages of support from his teammates and coaches, but words fail him.
“I just want to put those pads back on,” he said.
No matter how scary, or bleak things have gotten, Chasity says the family still has hope. They are with each other and believe that better days are on the horizon.
“I just want to see the joy on his face,” Chasity said. “I can’t wait for the sun to shine and for my boys to smile again.”