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.”
