Sometimes a softball game is more than just a softball game.
“There’s much more than just sports. I know everybody lives and dies by sports, but there’s so much more,” said Nixa Head Softball Coach Matt Walker.
Tuesday night in Nixa, the Eagles and Ozark Tigers donned their usual colors of red and gray and red and black.
Yet, it was the gold on their shoes and in their hair that represented a greater cause.
Players paid $5 each for gold laces for their spikes. $1 from each player paid for the laces with the rest of the money going as a donation to Go4TheGoal, an organization that supports kids and families in the Ozarks battling childhood cancer.
“And we set up an online, basically, page for both of our schools to go to [to make more donations],” Walker said.
Together, the teams raised more than $2,000 for Go4TheGoal.
The organization has helped one of Nixa’s own — a senior and his family that know the struggles of pediatric cancer all too well.
“I had a baseball-sized brain tumor on my brain stem and it was crawling down my spine,” said Nixa senior Donovan Shuley.
“It’s something that never in a million years, would you imagine would be happening to your child,” said Donovan’s mom Leslie Sargent. “Nobody prepares you for the diagnosis of a brain tumor.”
When that diagnosis came, doctors told Donovan he would need surgery — and fast.
“I was pretty close to being dead,” Donovan said. “I would’ve probably died in [my] sleep [the] next week. I looked at my mother when I was in an ICU bed and I was like is this real? Am I going through this? Because it’s just so mind-blowing.”
And so on January 27, 2020, Donovan underwent successful surgery… on his birthday.
“Right on the back of my head, I have a four inch titanium plate, right on the back of my neck,” he said.
That plate brought with it a scar, and Donovan’s new outlook on life.
“The more negative you look at, the more negative you’ll be,” he said. “If you look at the positive, like the positive of me getting brain surgery on my birthday — my birthday was the brain surgery. I got my life for my birthday.”
It’s a life Donovan wants to live to the fullest.
So he didn’t hesitate when the Eagles asked him to throw out Tuesday’s ceremonial first pitch.
“To be able to see him throw that pitch and do those things, it just makes my heart full and happy,” Leslie said.
It’s the sort of happiness that can’t be found through hits and runs scored.
It’s the sort of happiness that can only be found when a game is more than just a game.
Donovan says his doctors gave him a 5-percent chance for a relapse.
He says he’s focused, instead, on the 95-percent chance that he’ll live on without any problems.
Donovan also says he wants to become a police officer someday.
