Showing Up For Val

Longtime assistants rally for family during loss of mentor

Val Whiteside’s longtime assistant coaches were absolutely positive what she’d do if she was in their place.

Kristen Duncan, Breanna Ray, and Ericka Hammett all had a close enough relationship with Whiteside to understand just what she’d do in the face of a family tragedy.

“She instilled in us that family is first,” Ray said. “There wasn’t any hesitation when we said we needed to have a day off because (Duncan’s) Nana was sick, because my daughter was sick, because E’s parents were sick. She just said ‘Go. We got it here. We’ll be fine’.”

So, they went. Specifically, they went to watch some basketball.

Let’s start with the basketball.

A Rare Talent

Basketball, after all, is where Whiteside made her name. She was a state champion at Chapman High, and a three-time All-State player for the Panthers.

The legend only grew in college. At Appalachian State, Whiteside turned into arguably the best player the Southern Conference, then the Mountaineers’ home, has ever seen. Her number 33 is retired at Appalachian State, where she holds 42 school records including career marks for points, field goals made, and rebounds. She holds the Mountaineers’ records for points in a game with 48 and rebounds in a game with 26, and put up career marks of 25.4 points and 11.8 rebounds per game.

At the Conference level, Whiteside held marks for points in a season, points in a career, season scoring average, career scoring average, career field goals made, and season and career free throw attempts. She was inducted into the Southern Conference Hall of Fame in its inaugural class, alongside such legends as Dick Groat, Charlie Justice, Adrian Peterson, Jerry West, and Arnold Palmer. She went on to an incredibly successful professional career overseas.

And then all of that walked into Dorman’s gym as a member of the coaching staff when Hammett was still playing.

“My senior year, she was on staff, and up until then, she was just Lia’s (Dorman and Clemson volleyball alum Lia Proctor) aunt,” Hammett said. “She’s coming to the games. We’ve seen her around. I didn’t know then how good she was. She was a post player and I was a guard, and I didn’t spend a lot of time working with them directly at practice, but you could look down there and see. She was just finishing up playing overseas, and she would work them at practice.”

Ray said the physical proof of Whiteside’s ability was something the players needed to see.

“You can just go look at the record books, and her name is everywhere,” Ray said. “These kids need evidence as opposed to you saying it. You can’t just bring out the record books and show them what she did at App State, they need to see it. They don’t believe anything we say until we show them. Val had to physically show them how to do certain things. How to get more rebounds. How to develop more post moves and score. They just didn’t believe her.”

Duncan remembers Whiteside’s playful nature accompanying that athletic dominance, even when she needed to display it.

“There would be a couple of times when we were working with the posts and they just couldn’t get it right,” she said. “And then it was ‘just give me the ball’. She’d do it, they’d move out of the way, and she’d say ‘I still got it,’ and do a little dance and walk away.”

Remarkably, that storied career is something she didn’t mention much. JJ Arcega-Whiteside, Val’s son, is an accomplished athlete himself- having been a Parade All-American in football, going on to star at Stanford and to an NFL career. He said his mother rarely talked about her time on the court.

“That’s something she never really talked about,” he said. “The accolades and accomplishments were great, and maybe one day I’ll sit and think about them, but her biggest accolade, to me, was as a fantastic mother and role model.”

She not only served as a role model to her players, but to those she worked with as well.

“When I first worked under her when I started at the middle school level, it was amazing to hear her talk Xs and Os and the way she thought through things,” Hammett said. “You could just tell that she understood basketball and knew the game. Her different perspectives of playing at the college level and playing overseas professionally are things I never would get to experience, or have any kind of exposure to otherwise. It was awesome to be able to learn from someone who played at the highest level for so many years.”

Friends, Family, and Val’s Fight

It’s one thing to say that your friends and coworkers are like family. It’s quite another for that to be true.

For Whiteside, Duncan, Ray, and Hammett, it was true. They coached together. They laughed together. They cried together.

They even had a nickname – The Dynamic Quad Besties.

When it was time for Whiteside to face the biggest challenge of her life, they did that together, too.

Whiteside’s breast cancer diagnosis a dozen years ago made her the athletic face of the battle against the disease in the area. She fought that battle from the sidelines, with her friends and assistants by her side.

“I remember that first diagnosis, she went to the doctor not expecting anything,” Duncan said. “She’d had a mammogram, and it had shown up fine. She did the self-test we should all be doing, found something abnormal, and that’s what came back.”

Whiteside had a double mastectomy, was undergoing chemotherapy and radiation, and headed back to the sideline.

“She came back, sat on a rolling chair, and I rolled her,” Duncan said. “I don’t think there was a day that she felt good, ever, but that year with that group of girls was one of the best. They understood how much adversity she was going through. They picked it up. They knew they couldn’t have an off day. They had it in their minds that they weren’t allowed to be in a bad mood or be sick, or be hurt, because look at Val. She’s dealing with this, and she’s still here coaching.”

JJ said there was a spark in his mother that dimmed a little after her diagnosis, but that she never let anyone see it.

“She never was the Val that we knew before she was sick,” he said. “I tell my wife all the time I wish she’d met Val before. She was always in the gym, playing pickup, running around the track. She was active, vibrant, lively. I think cancer took that away from her permanently. She couldn’t be herself without worrying. She had to be cautious of how she was feeling, and we did, too.  She couldn’t run and play and walk. It was a day to day struggle, and she never got back to the Val that we knew before. But just having her around was a blessing.”

The assistants did much more than just contributing to the game plan and helping with practice. They changed bandages. They helped keep track of Whiteside’s health.

“All of us knew she was pushing through all her pain,” Ray said. “I made sure she took her pills. I’m not sure she ever had a pain-free day.”

“I was the last one to get in, and she was a long time into remission,” Hammett said. “I remember the flushing of the pills and how excited we were for her. But she was scared. She was afraid to stop taking the pills, in case the cancer came back. And then it did.”

Whiteside felt some serious pain in her arm, and couldn’t get many answers. There were several diagnoses – fluid in her arm, lymph nodes not working, blood clots. She wore a specialized sleeve to help eliminate the causes and manage the pain.

“It got to the point where her arm was just useless,” Hammett said. “She’d still be trying to demonstrate things even with her arm not working the way it should. She’d go to the doctor and go straight to practice. Her condition didn’t deter her from being around the team and being at practice and doing the things she needed to do when it came to basketball.”

Whiteside had indeed suffered a cancer relapse, and this time there was nothing that could be done. In December, as she was nearing the end of her life, it again all came back to basketball. Her youngest son, Keenan, had games to play. He knew his mother would want him to.

He wasn’t going to face it alone.

“We can take care of those boys”

Keenan Whiteside was a fixture at his mother’s games even in childhood. He was a kindergartner when Duncan first met him. Ray recalls him hanging around much like a little brother. Hammett was still in school, with Val coaching her, and remembers him running around the gym.

Now, they’re part of his support system.

“Before everything with her health went down this last time, when she was no longer on campus, I was one of the only ones on campus who had known him since third or fourth grade,” Ray said. “I had to just try to help get him through high school, to be that mom figure since she was no longer there physically on campus. Take providing him snacks. Every day he’d come in the locker room and want sandwiches, hamburgers, chicken, everything you could think of from a 10^th-grade boy. One day we went to Sam’s and we got all his snacks, and we put them in my classroom. It was just part of being that mom figure that he’d always had at Dorman, and now in his 10^th grade year, he didn’t have it anymore.”

Duncan saw the same thing.

“I watched him grow up completely, as did E, because Val was coaching her when he was little,” she said. “When I moved to the Freshman Campus, he was making the jump from middle school. It was kind of the same thing as with Bre. He needed a Tylenol. Something hurt. It was just kind of being a mom that wasn’t in the room.”

Hammett remembers things being put on hold for both sons.

“We saw first hand that JJ and Keenan came first,” she said. “I’m going to be late. I’ve got to leave early. Whatever it might have been, they were at the forefront. It’s important to us to keep them at the forefront. They need to know that they’re important and that there are people who love them and who will drop whatever to do that stuff they need. Kristen’s right, the family rolls deep. They’re showing up to games right now 10 or 15 deep.”

But, as Val was fading, they couldn’t show up at all. So three of the Dynamic Quad Besties stepped in to try to help fill the role of the fourth. Knowing that there was little they could offer at Val’s bedside, and that there were family members filling those needs, they turned their attention to Keenan. Duncan, still a Dorman assistant; Hammett, the head girls coach at Union County; and Ray, the Boiling Springs girls head coach; started showing up at Keenan’s games.

“I think that he and JJ both know that we’re Val’s crew,” Duncan said. “It was important that Keenan had us around to make sure somebody was that Val figure for him when she couldn’t be, and outside of the family I think we were the closest thing to that.”

“It meant a lot to me having them there to support me,” Keenan said. “Just seeing them there was a big thing for me, for sure. She was just always at my games. No matter how sick she was, she was always there. And them being there helped me, for sure.”

JJ is grateful for the support, but not surprised by it in the least.

“I knew they would do anything we needed, because they wanted to,” he said. “They didn’t have to be asked. It’s something they wanted to do. If you told me they took him out to lunch and washed his clothes, that wouldn’t surprise me either, and I’d believe it 100 percent. They were a big part of a group of people we could trust to just help us through things.”

They were also, as he saw first hands, a great help for Val.

“There was one day she was very sick, couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t talk, nothing,” he said. “They came by, and it was a complete change. She snapped back to normal, almost. She was laughing, talking, getting up, joking around. That showed me how much they meant to her. It made her feel instantly better. It was like it made her snap out of the sickness.”

And then, of course, she was gone. And the trio sometimes finds themselves feeling a little bit adrift without their fourth.

“I’m going to be honest, I’m not handling it well at all,” Duncan said. “Having to look at that court every day is probably the worst feeling ever. At the end of the day, in my mind, this season is for her.”

Hammett, running a program of her own, now can’t pick her mentor’s brain .

“I find myself picking up the phone to text her a question, and even type out the text, and there’s nobody to send it to,” Hammett said. “It’s a simple as a play or a drill. It’s a situation on the team, how would she handle this? She was the queen of second, third, and fifth chances. I guess it was New Year’s Eve, we were talking about it, and Kristen said that Val would want us to do things a certain way. She’d want us to love on them.”

Ray also misses the opportunity to talk to Whiteside about basketball, and about life.

“She’d been rooting for this opportunity that I have for so long, and now that I’ve got it, and can’t talk to her about it, it’s just unreal at times,” she said. “I can go visit her grave whenever I want, because she’s five minutes from the school, but it seems unreal that I can’t just pick up the phone anymore. You just have to talk to her spiritually and hope that you get a sign. And normally, you do. She’ll send you one. And that’s all you can hope for.”

Val’s memory will help provide hope for even more people thanks to a Pink Game and Alumni Night to be held at Dorman, with proceeds from T-shirt sales going toward breast cancer research.

“That was something she always did,” JJ said. “She wanted to raise money to donate to those who needed it the most. She’d raise thousands and thousands of dollars and a lot of times lose money doing it. She’d spend her own money if there weren’t as many shirts sold, for example, and make up the difference if she knew somebody needed it. When she passed, so many people reached out to me to tell me they’d been on the receiving end of that. It’s encouraging to see Dorman doing this to honor her memory.”

Each of the three knows they’ll move forward by honoring Val. And each has some plans on how they’ll make it happen.

“A lot of our heroes in basketball aren’t here anymore,” Duncan said. “Kids don’t know who Pat Summit is, but you teach her teachings, and the way she went about things. I feel like no matter where we go, Val’s legacy always needs to be taught. She’s an instrumental part in all of our careers and making us who we are as individuals. There won’t be a team I’m involved with who doesn’t know who she is. And we can help take care of those boys.”

“When we’re coaching our teams, we can make sure they know that family is first,” Ray said. “She instilled that in us, and we can instill that in our teams, and we can take care of those boys when they need us. That’s how we can honor her.”

They’re already helping to take care of Val’s boys.

“We were talking the other day, and with all of us at different places, our schedules hardly ever match up,” Hammett said. “But whenever I can, I’m going to be at Keenan’s game. He might not know I’m there, but Val would want us to be there, and I’m going to.”

That, JJ said, is as fitting a tribute as Val would ever hope for.

“She was an amazing role model to the community,” he said. “That’s all she cared about. She wanted to raise my brother and me to be the best me we could be, and to give very player the same chances she gave to her own children.”