WHAT: Waynesville Alumni Benefit Basketball Games
WHERE: Waynesville High School Gym
WHEN: Saturday, May 16
Girls’ game 6 p.m.
Boys’ game 7:30 p.m.
COST: $10 per alumni player (includes shirt); $3 general admission
DONATIONS: (tax deductible) drop off or mail to LCNB National Bank, c/o Joe Bensman Family Benefit Fund, P.O. Box 495, Waynesville, OH 45068
Joe Bensman, a multi-sport athlete and 4-H champion, hadn’t been feeling well for the better part of his eighth-grade year at Waynesville Middle School.
There had been aches and pains and he’d been fatigued and then came a severe skin condition and itching.
“We went to a pediatric dermatologist, he had allergy tests and blood tests and we even thought he might have some kind of anxiety disorder,” said his mom, Christine. “He just wasn’t himself and we couldn’t figure out why.”
Then last May came the annual eighth-grade class trip to Washington, D.C. It’s a big deal for the students who raise funds for it by working at the town’s Sauerkraut Festival each fall. And Joe had a little extra spending money from the sales of the 4-H animals he’d brought to the Warren County Fair the previous summer.
But the morning of the trip he wasn’t feeling well again and told his mom his chest hurt.
“I said. ‘Look, we can’t get a refund so you’re going on the trip,’” Christine said quietly. “I said, ‘Just take a Tylenol, you’ll be OK’ ”
She shook her head and managed a weary smile and a shrug: “Yeah, there’s a lot of mommy guilt there now.”
After Joe boarded the bus for D.C., Christine had gone on to her job as a classroom aide at a school for emotionally and behaviorally challenged kids in Franklin, while her husband, Tom, went to his IT job at the University of Dayton and their other children, Paul (then a sophomore) and Caroline (a sixth-grader,) headed off to school.
In Washington that evening, Joe was rooming with his pal Daniel Papanek, whose mother Holly is an emergency room doctor at Miami Valley South and was one of the chaperones of the 2014 trip.
“When they’re getting ready to tuck in, Joe notices how his neck has swollen up and says something like, ‘Oh, this is cool,’ ” Christine said.
“Being a doctor’s kid, Daniel says, ‘Naah, I think we should show my mom this.’ And once they did, Holly called me and said, ‘Joe’s lymph nodes are swollen. I don’t want you to panic. There are a lot of reasons that could be happening, but check in with your pediatrician as soon as he gets back from D.C.’”
But by the next day, Joe’s lymph nodes had ballooned up and Dr. Papanek called again, saying, “This isn’t good.” She said they were taking him to Children’s National Medical Center there.
Back on their farm southwest of Waynesville, Christine quickly packed a bag, grabbed son Paul as a co-pilot and — as Tom stayed home with Caroline — began the all-night drive to Washington. Once there, she was met by a team of doctors and it was soon confirmed that Joe had Stage II Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.
That pain in his chest?
“It turned out to be “a football-sized tumor,” Christine said.
While Paul returned to Warren County with Joe’s class, Christine stayed in D.C. until Joe was able to travel and then they drove home. By the next day they were at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
Initially, the family was in a free-fall, Christine said:
“Your kid goes off on the bus to Washington, D.C., and comes home with cancer.”
A second battle
Joe is now a 15-year-old freshman at Waynesville High. He’s tall and lean and his reddish hair has grown back curly after his first round of cancer treatments.
He’s also very quiet.
“He’s just a naturally introverted kid,” his mom said. “He just doesn’t like the attention drawn to him. And now he doesn’t want to be ‘The Cancer Kid.’ He doesn’t want that to be his identity.”
And in so many ways it is not.
While his treatments caused him to bypass several sports this past year, he did make the high school tennis team. And over the past years he’s really made his mark with his 4-H projects, raising and showing steers, market hogs, chickens, goats and now turkeys.
Like Paul, he’s also a member Warren County Junior Fair Board.
“Since all this started Joe’s only had two moments when he broke down and really was in tears,” Christine said. “One was the diagnosis itself. And the other came last year when he found out he wasn’t going to be able to go to the fair … That hit him almost as hard.
“Luckily for him, and I don’t know if it was sheer will power or what, but the week of the fair he had chemotherapy on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and then he was sent home. So on Thursday I said, ‘OK, what do you want to do today?’
“He said he wanted to go to the fair and I finally thought, ‘Well, he already has cancer. What more can happen?’
“He went and he was able to be in the barns a while with his animals. He even got to show his hogs in the sale ring and that was a big deal. He was completely bald — so even those who weren’t in our 4-H club had an idea – and he ended up getting a standing ovation.”
Following months of radiation and chemotherapy, Joe was in remission the first part of this year. But on April 6 it was discovered he’d relapsed and the news devastated the family.
That’s when someone suggested they get in touch with Stephen “Goose” Gossard, the former Waynesville High basketball star, a two-time All Southwestern Buckeye League selection, who had been diagnosed with the same Hodgkin’s Lymphoma his senior year of high school.
He, too, had relapsed within a few months of his initial treatments, but he had gotten a bone marrow transplant — as Joe will early this summer — and had come back to be a walk-on player with the Wright State basketball team.
Over three seasons, the 6-foot-7 forward played in 21 games for the Raiders and became a crowd favorite.
“People kept telling me I needed to reach out to him, but I didn’t know him and I was nervous about it,” Christine said. “A lot of people are ravaged by the disease and I wasn’t sure if he was healthy or even how he would respond. I wanted it to be a happy ending story.
“Finally I did contact him and asked if he’d come out and he said, ‘Anytime.’ He was very gracious.”
Tom recalled Goose’s first visit: “It worked out well. I’d picked up Joe from tennis and we brought a pizza home. Goose pulled in right behind us. He had this little white Honda, but when he got out of the car he towered over it.”
Christine laughed: “I was pleasantly surprised. He was robust and healthy. It was a beautiful thing.”
The 230-pound Gossard, who graduated from WSU last summer and now volunteers as a strength-and-conditioning coach with Raider athletes, sat out on the Bensmans’ truck with Joe for some 15 minutes of private conversation, then came in the house to meet the family and have pizza. Later he stayed and talked to Christine.
“He said no question was off limits,” she said, “so I asked him everything: What his family did that he liked. What he hadn’t liked. What was helpful. He even compared scars with Joe.”
Last Saturday, Goose and his brother returned to the Bensman home and took Joe and Paul bow fishing in the Little Miami River.
“For us, Goose has been a breath of fresh air,” Christine said. “The beauty of it all with him is that his cancer is ancient history now.”
Providing a lift
Five years ago, Travis Williams — who had graduated from Waynesville High in 2009 as a record-setting 3-point shooter in basketball — wanted to revive the school’s annual alumni basketball game.
It was about the same time Gossard — who is a year younger but had played basketball with Travis and was his good friend — had revealed his cancer diagnosis.
“I think Travis was about the first person I called with the news,” Goose said.
And that’s when Kim Williams, Travis’s mom, suggested her son turn the alumni game into a benefit helping Goose and his family.
“I just thought, ‘What would we ever do if this happened to Travis or my daughter (Heather)?’ ” Kim said. “No family has enough money for all the stuff you face at a time like that, so I figured any amount we could raise would help.”
That 2011 game was a success and since then the annual effort has benefited three other Waynesville people in need: Rachel Jones, a 2008 graduate battling kidney cancer; Michael Brown, the husband of a school maintenance worker who has a rare autoimmune neurological disorder called Stiff Person Syndrome; and Bristol Reed, an infant born with bladder exstrophy.
“Their benefit game has blessed a lot of people,” Goose said.
Over the past four years, Travis said the alumni outing — players pay $10 to participate and fans pay $3 admission to watch the more than two dozen former players who take part in a women’s game and then a men’s game — has raised about $5,000.
Travis, who has coached the high school’s freshman basketball team and now will pilot the junior varsity, said they had no recipient for this year until a few weeks ago when they learned of Joe’s plight.
“I’ve never met the Williams family, but Kim called and asked if I was familiar with the benefit game,” Christine said. “I told her I remembered when they had it for Goose and how the community wore pink socks for cancer awareness.
“She told me every year they hope there’s not a family that needs it, but so far there has been and this year they wondered if we’d accept? I said we would.”
Christine admitted when the family first got into this ordeal, they turned down offers of help, saying “We’ll be OK.” Since then, especially with this second battle looming, they are grateful for everything, and the community has responded.
People have brought meals, mowed the yard, cleaned the house, offered gifts cards and even taken Caroline to get her hair cut.
“This has really humbled us,” Christine said quietly. “And now come these games.”
As she reflected, Tom’s eyes filled with tears.
“I just hope I can get through Saturday night,” he finally said.
Christine smiled: “We’re excited. It’s a really big deal to us.”
And Travis hopes everyone else feels that way, too:
“I know Joe is a little uncomfortable with all the attention, but I hope the whole school, especially his classmates and teachers, come out. Our community has always reached out for people here and I want to see the same school that I grew up in come out for this. I think people will have a good time.”
And if this game is like those of years past, he and Goose will be two of the primary reasons.
“Every year Goose and Travis have a little trick they do during the game,” Kim said with a smile. “Goose is so big and he just lifts Travis up so he can dunk it.”
Goose laughed at the play: “He comes to the basket and I lift him, just throw him up there really, and he just goes crazy with it. The crowd loves it.”
And this year that especially may be the case for Joe and his family.
Saturday night, Goose and Travis and the rest of the town hope to lift them, as well.
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