The Best American Sports Writing 2013 (11 page)

After all, Brendon wasn't like most kids in Williamsport, a town of about 2,100 in the northwest corner of Maryland, just across the border from West Virginia. Hemmed in by interstates, it's a place young people dream of leaving, a town on the way to everywhere but seldom a destination. Here U.S. flags dot porches, families swim in the muddy green Potomac River by the power plant, and jobs have been scarce since the leather tannery shut down eight years back. It's a baseball-mad hamlet where adults sit in their pickup trucks beyond the left-field fence at Williamsport High and where the local newspaper streams Little League state tournament games on its website. A place where someone like Brendon, the 2011 all-county pitcher of the year, can become a hero.

Brendon was the rare high school ace who “pitched backward,” relying on his precipitous curveball rather than his fastball to start off each hitter. But more than that set him apart. Tall and skinny, with fine, almost elfin features, he wore crisp Nike T-shirts and spotless Air Max shoes while his friends sported sleeveless camo and cutoff jeans. He went to all the parties but didn't drink, seeming both younger and older than 17. On Saturdays, when the other baseball players trolled for catfish, dips wedged into their lower lips, Brendon instead wandered the banks, hurling rocks over the hulking power plant. Life was too short to sit on a plastic bucket all day.

On May 5, though, he wanted to stretch out the night forever. So if Brendon took a longer route back from Shepherdstown, West Virginia, if he dallied for the sake of dallying, it was with good reason, for Sam sat next to him. With dark blond hair and large blue eyes, Samantha Kelly was homecoming queen and the star of the volleyball team. She mingled with adults as easily as with teenagers and took to Twitter not to gossip but to post maxims such as
Don't be afraid to stand up for what you believe in
. That she'd chosen Brendon—the kid who'd never had a serious girlfriend, who'd been shy and a bit of a goofball much of his life—came as a surprise to many. She attended all his games, and she was the only girl allowed when the players gathered at the Waffle House on Saturday mornings to eat syrup-drenched chocolate-chip waffles and fire spitballs. Brendon's teammates teased him—“She's too good for you,” they'd joke, or “You better wife her up”—but they all saw how happy he was.

Now, driving home from the prom with Sam, she in a blue strapless dress and he in a white suit with a powder-blue tie, Brendon must have been exhilarated to rocket through the countryside, windows open to the warm spring air. From Lappans he turned left onto Sharpsburg Pike and then left again onto Rench Road, which wound through darkened farmland, with only grass and trees abutting the white lines. As they crossed the railroad tracks, Brendon accelerated. If he saw the yellow sign at the top of a small hill, the one that read 30
MPH
with a left arrow, he didn't heed it.

 

Five hours later the cell phone of Williamsport High baseball coach David Warrenfeltz beeped, jolting him from an uneasy sleep. Upon grabbing the phone, he saw a backlog of text messages and missed calls and felt nauseated with fear. Please, not again, he thought, remembering a call he received at this time of the night three years earlier. That one was about Nick.

The two had met in 1994, on the baseball field, when David was seven years old. Though neither tall nor strong, David was the son of a coach, the kind of smart, unassuming player who would earn the tag of
gamer
. Nick Adenhart was the opposite, the boy the coaches talked about in low, admiring whispers. Whereas most kids threw in loops and arcs at that age, Nick reared back and cracked the mitt. Plenty of kids were afraid to catch him, but not David. Over the next half-dozen years the two would be a tandem, the cocky right-hander and the smaller kid known to many only as Nick's catcher. They spent summers long-tossing, Nick pushing to throw from farther each time. Later David would look back on this time and credit two men with instilling in him the love of baseball: his father and Nick.

By the time Nick and David reached Williamsport High, Nick a class ahead, they were two of the best players on the team. But even though David was good, a savvy defensive catcher with in-the-gap power, he was nothing like Nick. By the spring of Nick's junior year, in 2003, major league scouts were flocking to his starts. They weren't disappointed; Nick's fastball was clocked as high as 95 miles per hour. The
Washington Post
sent a feature writer to see him, the local cable channel carried two of Williamsport's games, and
Baseball America
dubbed Nick the top prospect in the country.

Then, in the final regular-season game of his senior year, Nick blew out his right elbow. Playing DH, he still led Williamsport to the state finals, nearly winning the school's first title since 1975. After the season, he needed Tommy John surgery; as a result he dropped from a top-five pick in the 2004 draft to the 14th round, where the Angels chose him.

It took five years, but Adenhart regained his velocity, and he entered the 2009 season as the Angels' third starter. On April 8, in his season debut, he threw six scoreless innings against the As. Back home in Maryland, an overflow crowd watched at the Buffalo Wild Wings in Hagerstown. Afterward, in the Anaheim clubhouse, Nick hugged his father, Jim, then headed out with three friends to celebrate. A couple of hours later, shortly after midnight in nearby Fullerton, a drunk driver in a minivan ran a red light and broadsided the Mitsubishi Eclipse in which Adenhart was traveling. Two of his friends were killed instantly; the third survived with serious injuries. Adenhart died two hours later at a local hospital. He was 22.

Warrenfeltz, by then a senior catcher at Maryland–Baltimore County, received the news when his cell phone woke him at 5:23
A.M
. He'd stayed up late watching the game on TV and planned on calling Adenhart in the morning to congratulate him. Now Warrenfeltz was devastated. For eight hours he sobbed, inconsolable.

In Williamsport hundreds of people gathered at the high school field that day. Later 1,500 people showed up at Adenhart's memorial. A shrine was fashioned at the field, a framed Adenhart Angels jersey was hung in the Buffalo Wild Wings, and the Little League diamond in nearby Halfway, Maryland—where Nick and David played growing up—was renamed Nicholas James Adenhart Memorial Field.

In the months that followed, Warrenfeltz was haunted by his friend's death. He wrestled with why this happened to Adenhart, not to him—why he was allowed to keep playing baseball when Nick couldn't. Even years later Warrenfeltz would be driving and suddenly have to pull over, tears blurring his vision. Maybe that helps explain why he returned home after finishing college, to make a life in the place his friends once dreamed of leaving. Why he became a coach.

When Warrenfeltz was hired to lead the Williamsport program in 2011, some of the locals grumbled—at 23, he wasn't much older than the players, and his only coaching experience was one season of jayvee. Heck, they said, Warrenfeltz even
looks
like one of the players: baby-faced, with short brown hair, freckles, and an unimposing build. He didn't act like a player, though; during his first season Warrenfeltz remade the program, stressing discipline and structure. He posted a daily practice schedule broken into 10-minute intervals and drilled the team on fundamentals, from pickoffs to bunt defense to footwork on outfield throws. “Do the small things, and it'll lead to bigger things,” he told the boys, sounding an awful lot like his father, Dave, a math teacher and former baseball coach at North Hagerstown High who valued ethics over flash, hard work over talent. The Wildcats, a sub-.500 team before Warrenfeltz, caught fire. They finished the 2011 season 17-5 and, behind Brendon's pitching, advanced all the way to the state semifinals.

Warrenfeltz rarely talked about Adenhart, but he didn't need to. The boys had watched Adenhart pitch, and when he died, they'd grieved too, if in a different way. Warrenfeltz had lost a friend; they'd lost a hero. So if their coach seemed stricter than he needed to be, they understood. Like at the beginning of the 2012 season, when Warrenfeltz suspended five of the team's best players, including Brendon, for being out late at a St. Patrick's Day house party that was broken up by police. It didn't matter that Brendon hadn't been drinking or that none of the players were arrested. To Warrenfeltz, it was about making good decisions.

Some parents, including Brendon's father, Chad, didn't like the suspensions. The boys would miss the games against Walkersville, a powerhouse, and rival North Hagerstown. The Wildcats had been moved up to Class 2A, making them the smallest school in the West region; they could ill afford to start 0-2. Yet they did, getting blown out in both games. From there it went downhill. Four key players got injured. Zach Lucas, the team's first baseman and best hitter, went into a slump. Even Brendon struggled, giving up six runs in three innings against Brunswick the day before the prom. Heading into the playoffs, the Wildcats were 9-9-1 and had lost their final three games by a combined score of 31–3. All the promise of the previous season—the trip to the state semis, the magical team chemistry—had dissipated. The players were frustrated and the parents angry.

Warrenfeltz might have tried to sweet-talk the critics, but that wasn't his style. Meticulous and stoic, he spent hours reflecting,
Did I get the most out of practice today? Could I be reaching this player more effectively? How am I preparing these young men for the rest of their lives?
Which is why, on the Friday of prom week, he'd gathered the boys in the locker room and urged them to be safe on Saturday night. “Have fun, but be careful,” he said, “and don't do anything to jeopardize yourselves, the team, or anyone around you. See you on Monday for the game.”

But now here it was, 5:20
A.M
. after prom night, and his phone was lighting up. Warrenfeltz didn't want to listen to the messages, wanted to freeze the moment before he heard the bad news. He called back the first number he saw. “It's Brendon,” catcher Ryan Butts said when he picked up. “He's been in a car accident. I'm sorry, Coach.”

Within 24 hours the police would reveal that Brendon had taken the curve too fast and lost control, sending the S-2000 careering into a tree head-on. Later, toxicology reports would confirm what Chad Colliflower had known from the start: neither Brendon nor Sam had been drinking or under the influence of drugs.

None of that mattered at the moment, though. All that mattered was what Ryan was now telling Warrenfeltz: Brendon and Sam were dead. It had happened again.

Grief washed over Warrenfeltz. He thought of the families, the school, and the town. More than anything, though, he thought about his team. The players would be looking to him for guidance, to explain the unexplainable. At 5:45, Warrenfeltz began calling his assistants. Then, just before sunrise, he sent a text message to all the players. All it said was, “I love you guys. I'll be at the field if you need me.”

 

One by one the players arrived on Sunday morning: Zach with his father, center fielder Tyler Nally with his dad, first baseman Tyler Byers with his parents. Some of the boys had known for hours; others were just finding out. Of all the players it was Zach, the sturdy, power-hitting senior, who had borne the greatest load during the night. He'd been the first player to arrive at the scene of the accident, the one who woke Chad Colliflower with a phone call and drove to tell Ryan the news.

As the sun rose on a clear spring day, more cars pulled up: parents, friends, other students and alumni, more than 150 people in all. They came to the field, as they had after Adenhart's death, because it seemed the right place to go. Some stood around the mound, others lingered in the dugout with Warrenfeltz and his wife, Stephanie. That the town came out wasn't surprising. Everyone knew Brendon and Sam, just as everybody had known Nick. Their successes were communal successes. That's why those men parked their pickups in the grass beyond left field, sometimes three trucks deep, drinking tallboys and honking when the Wildcats scored.

Warrenfeltz thought about this when he finally left the field on Sunday around 1:00
P.M
. He was conflicted. Monday's game, the last of the regular season, would be canceled. Should the team even practice? Would it be wrong to play baseball now? Or wrong not to? Needing counsel, he headed where he'd always gone: his parents' house. Only when he arrived, he was shocked to see who was sitting in the living room.

It was by a fluke that Nick's mom, Janet Gigeous, was in town that day. It had been years since she and Nick's father had separated. She spent most of the year in Florida now, but she still had ties to Williamsport and had come up for the weekend with her husband, Duane. Which is how Janet, one of the only people on the planet who knew what Warrenfeltz was going through, came to be at his father's house that afternoon.

For an hour the six of them talked and grieved: Janet and Duane, David's parents, and David and Stephanie, a tall, lanky former lacrosse player who'd been with him the day Adenhart died, back when she was David's girlfriend.

By the time David left, he knew what he needed to do. He sent a text to the boys. There would be no practice on Monday, it said, but he and the other coaches would be at the field after school.

 

What Zach Lucas remembers most is how quiet it was at school on Monday. Most students didn't even go to class; they just huddled near the gym, where an impromptu shrine to Brendon and Sam grew on the cork bulletin board: photos of Sam in her familiar number 2 volleyball shirt, of Brendon in a goofy pose when he entered a Ping-Pong tournament, of the two of them at the prom. Everywhere Zach looked he saw flowers, many of them blue or white, the school colors.

At 3:15
P.M
. Warrenfeltz made his way down to the field. To an outsider it wasn't much to look at: bumpy green grass bordered by chain-link fencing, two concrete dugouts with skinny benches and, off each foul line, a set of metal bleachers. The tiny pressroom behind home plate, up a set of vertiginous wood steps, was hot and dark. Regardless, Warrenfeltz loved it there. He went to the field two or three times a day in the summer and at 3:00
P.M
. during the school year, after he finished his day job as a third-grade teacher at Fountaindale Elementary. He turned on the sprinklers and planted seeds, locking the fence during the summer so kids didn't tear up the surface. If it began to rain, he could make it from his house in seven minutes flat to lay out the tarps. And on the rare occasions that he traveled out of town, he left a list of tasks for his father to perform. As he sometimes joked, “Since I don't have any children yet, this is kind of like my child.”