Friday, April 11, 2014

Scott Hettinger: From Paralysis to Coaching


GRANBY, Mo.—Scott Hettinger quietly watched practice at midcourt of East Newton High School’s gym as his team ran through drills on a Monday night in late March.
After a few behind-the-back passes in a 2-on-1 drill got the players riled up, the coach stopped practice and wheeled toward his players. He needed to refocus his team.
“There will be none of that nonsense,” Hettinger said, perched on his electric wheelchair. “You can tell your teammates, ‘Good pass,’ but no whoopin’ and hollerin’.”
Then he wheeled back to midcourt and resumed practice.
Hettinger, 43, has been a basketball coach for 20 years. He’s been paralyzed for the last 24.
He’s spent the last eight years coaching Midwest Mission, a competitive travel team based in southwest Missouri that Hettinger started when his son was in high school. The team combines court skills and Christian values that he believes will benefit the young boys’ lives.
In the short history of the team, more than 40 players Hettinger coached on Midwest Mission have earned scholarships to play basketball in college. Other players have gone on to play college baseball and football.
His exceptional coaching ability and others-first personality have drawn many other players to the team since 2006.
He’s had to overcome various challenges associated with being confined to a wheelchair his entire coaching career. But those adversities helped shape him into the coach he is today, a coach that has won hundreds of games while impacting countless lives.
That these boys ever got the chance to play for Hettinger is nothing short of a miracle.
Rise and Fall
Defending conference champion Carthage High School was picked to finish last in its conference in 1989 thanks to returning a lack of size on its roster.
Hettinger, then a senior, was the tallest player on the team. Standing 6-foot-3 and weighing 185 pounds, he was still three or four inches shorter than the person he guarded in nearly every game.
“He was as tough as there was,” said Dan Armstrong, Hettinger’s head coach at Carthage. “The more you told him he couldn’t, the more he did it.”
Despite the height difference, he averaged a double-double by scoring 20 points and hauling in 10 rebounds per game as the Tigers defied the critics and won the conference.
After the season, he was named team MVP, first-team All-Conference and first-team All-District. He earned a scholarship to play at Grand View University, an NAIA school in Des Moines, Iowa.
Hettinger was one of the first players off the bench as a freshman at Grand View, but basketball began to take a back seat to partying as the year progressed.
“I was becoming a mess,” Hettinger said. “My life was spiraling out of control.”
His drugs of choice were marijuana and alcohol, but he also tried cocaine and, on one occasion, crack.
The partying continued at Missouri Southern State University in Joplin, Mo., after he transferred because of differences with the coach at Grand View.
Over the summer and through the fall of 1990, Hettinger worked out and practiced with the basketball team as much as possible. Then in October he was the last player cut from the roster and was offered the team manager job.
“The decisions I was making back then weren’t real good,” Hettinger said. “I was too arrogant to accept that position and within a month of quitting the program, I was in the accident.”
The Accident
Hettinger doesn’t know why, but after helping a friend move into an apartment on Nov. 28, 1990, he and another friend snuck out the back door and headed to a party.
They didn’t stay out too late because finals were coming up. Around 10 p.m. they got into Hettinger’s 1968 Ford Mustang and headed home.
Both of them had been drinking and Hettinger’s friend was erratic behind the wheel. Shortly after leaving the party they hit a parked car head on.
“I remember being in the car with my head forward like this and I could see my feet,” Hettinger said, while demonstrating in his wheelchair. “I went to sit up and I couldn’t.
“There was a tingling in my body, but it wasn’t apparent to me that I was paralyzed. I had a cut on my head and I felt the warmth of the blood come on my face and that’s when I went out.”
The next day, Hettinger woke up in the hospital and began a four-day stretch in which it wasn’t known if he would live or die. The whiplash in the accident broke his neck at the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae and left him paralyzed from his Adam’s apple down.
At one point a minister was called in to pray over him. Hettinger even told his mother to unplug him and let him die.
Armstrong’s most vivid memory of the accident was seeing Hettinger in the hospital room during that period.
“He had one of those halo braces on,” Hettinger’s former coach said. “I remember that more distinctly than anything. Seeing him with screws in his head. It was heart-stopping.”
Finally, Hettinger’s body stabilized enough for surgery and his spirits lifted. He wasn’t able to talk yet, but he mouthed to his mother, “I want to talk to children.”
Recovery
After a month at the hospital, Hettinger spent an additional five months at a rehab facility in Colorado where he had to relearn how to do simple tasks such as breathing.
When he returned home in May of 1991, Hettinger knew he needed to get stronger because he couldn’t sit up straight in his wheelchair without a seat belt. So he hired a personal trainer and spent the next 18 months working out rigorously.
It paid off. Hettinger could not only sit up straight, but he also regained movement in his arms.
In 1992, he reenrolled in college and four years later he graduated and began his ascent through coaching ranks.
He got his first job as a head coach of a homeschool program in Joplin when he was still in college. From there, he took a couple of junior high head coaching positions before being hired as a junior varsity coach at Carthage, his alma mater, in 1998.
When the head-coaching job at Carthage came open, Hettinger applied but was passed over, in part, his high school coach believes, because of his disability.
“They didn’t have enough courage to give him the head-coaching job at Carthage,” Armstrong said. “He didn’t get the job and that really hurt him.”
But Hettinger didn’t let it keep him down for long. In the fall of 2006, just months after stepping down at his alma mater, he and Armstrong started Midwest Mission.
The team grew rapidly and had enough players to form five teams at one point.
Hettinger knew that his personal experiences could be used as a teaching tool for kids in the area, but his basketball background has also been an attraction for parents.
“His values and Christian principles are some of the biggest draws for me to him,” said Phil Wise, who has had two sons play for Hettinger, “but to have that and the basketball knowledge he has is great.”
Every practice ends with a short lesson that has a Christian background, such as serving others with a servant’s heart and how to treat their girlfriends, and a team prayer.
Last season was supposed to be his final as a coach, but a few parents approached him in February about doing it again. What started as three players quickly expanded to three teams.
Hettinger saw it as an opportunity to continue making a difference in his players’ lives. Wise’s son, Alex, played for Hettinger in high school and said the coach made an impact on his basketball and spiritual life.
Alex is a sophomore baseball player at Northeast Oklahoma A&M, a junior college in Miami, Okla., and has signed to play at Oklahoma next year, but Hettinger still stays in contact with him.
“He is very inspirational. I learned a lot from him,” Alex said. “He was always there to talk to and was a guy that cared about you all the time. He still texts me from time to time.”
No Regrets
The 2-on-1 drill was over and Midwest Mission’s practice at the East Newton gym was winding down when Hettinger wheeled over to a man watching the team scrimmage.
“Do you have any regrets?” the man asked Hettinger.
Hettinger looked back out at his players running around the court and thought about the question for a few seconds before answering.
“To say I wouldn’t want to walk again would be a lie,” he said.
And while he is unable to walk or play the game he loves, the accident eventually led him to his wife, children and coaching career.
“Who knows what I’d be doing if I wasn’t paralyzed,” Hettinger said. “I am who I am because of what I have been through.
“The chair doesn’t define me. But I am who I am because of being in the chair.”

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