TicketsSept. 8, 2010
By Dave Malaska
GoBEARCATS.com
It's the winter of 1997, and youth soccer in Cleveland has moved indoors. In goal, the 7-year-old keeper has been a virtual stone wall. Still, his teammates haven't dented the net and the buzzer marks the end of the first half, a scoreless tie.
For the second half, the keeper has moved to forward, scoring four goals in a rout that leaves the folks in the stands dumbstruck. "Who is that kid?" asks one parent. "Where did he come from?" posits another.
One of the coaches, Ron Stelmak, sports a Cheshire grin. He knows, of course, but he doesn't say a word. It's not the only reason he's grinning, though. He's got other reasons: Pride. Relief.
It was months earlier, the Friday of a Memorial Day weekend, when the coach was watching his third or fourth soccer game of the week as the father of three soccer-crazed kids. Just 30 seconds into the match, his players sprinted up field zigzagging through defenders like a Car & Driver test drive leading to the inevitable goal and celebration. One player, though, lagged behind. It was his youngest son, Branden, the one kid who never did anything at half-speed. Something was wrong.
Hours later, after taking their youngest to their pediatrician, they'd learn just how wrong.
"Am I going to die?"
Today, Branden Stelmak is a few games into his final soccer season at the University of Cincinnati. Practice has just finished, and he walks over to talk to a reporter. At 6 feet, if you account for his haircut -- close cropped on the sides, the longer blond hair atop his head styled into a near-Mohawk -- he's the image of a blond-haired, blue-eyed All-American athlete. Even after the two-hour workout, he looks as if he's barely broken a sweat.
The forward is coming off his first point of the season, an assist in UC's 1-1 tie against Detroit. It's the first notch towards matching last season's four-goal, four-assist career-highs for the senior.
Head coach Hylton Dayes calls him one of the team's spark plugs -- good things always seem to happen around the Cleveland native.
It's hard to reconcile all of that with Stelmak's past, particularly the three years he spent going through chemotherapy to treat leukemia.
From the start, his father says, Branden was destined to be a soccer player. By the time the third child of Ron and Cindy Stelmak was born, his 6-year-old brother, Dustin, was already playing the sport, while sister Ashley, four years older than Branden, was already getting a taste of soccer.
"There was no doubt that Branden was going to follow in their footsteps, but it was going to be on his terms," says Ron Stelmak. "I came home from work one day and there was a soccer ball in the living room. I asked my wife what was going on. She said 'Relax. Watch.' Branden was walking for the first time, and there he was, kicking the ball up the hallway."
As soon as he was old enough, the youngest Stelmak joined his first team, with his father as a coach.
He quickly showed a talent for the game, and just as quickly became one the best players in the highly competitive Cleveland youth leagues.
Then came that Memorial Day weekend game.
The Stelmaks quickly took Branden to their pediatrician after the final whistle. The doctor noticed petechia, tiny skin hemorrhages on Branden's chest, and quickly ordered blood tests at the Cleveland Clinic.
The Stelmaks spent hours at the prestigious hospital, stashed in a supply closet because there wasn't a normal room available, IV tubes criss-crossing into their son. When the test results came back, doctors pulled Ron and Cindy aside for the diagnosis: Leukemia. Had they caught it in time? The doctors didn't know.
Devastated, it was then the Stelmak's turn to decide how much of that news to share with their 7-year-old son.
For Branden's part, that was the scariest part of the ordeal, he says.
"There I was, stuffed in some closet and I had all these tubes running into me," he explains, "As a 7-year-old kid, the big question I had was 'Am I going to die?' I didn't care what else was going to happen, I just wanted to know that."
Long Road To Recovery
The only other thing Branden remembers of that day was his mother's calm edict. "I remember my mom, specifically, coming back into the room and telling me that if we do everything the doctor tells us to do, everything will be fine," he says.
In truth, it wasn't quite that simple, says Ron Stelmak. Doctors had already talked to him and his wife about the chance of traditional treatment failing, and the possibility of needing to enter Branden into experimental drug trials.
"For whatever reason, though, maybe our faith, we felt that Branden was going to respond to treatment. We were sure of it," says Ron.
Hospitalized immediately, Branden would soon enter a three-year treatment regime of chemotherapy and steroids to fight the cancer. To gage his recovery, he also underwent regular blood tests and painful spinal taps.
Though Branden responded quickly to the treatments, he was still locked in for three years of this. Patients who don't have a higher recurrence rate of Leukemia, doctors explained. So, the Stelmaks stayed on course, difficult as it was.
"It was hard to stick to it," says Branden's dad. "He would work hard to bring himself back to being the Branden we knew, athletic and full of energy, and then he'd have to go back for more treatment and be a 'cancer kid' again -- he'd lose his hair, get bloated because of the steroids. He'd lose his energy, be sick. We tried to keep his spirits up, keep him positive, though."
They also challenged him to get better.
"Every time he was in the hospital, we'd tell him 'Somebody needs this room more than you,'" Ron Stelmak remembers.
It worked.
Amazing his doctors, Branden returned to the pitch only months after his diagnosis and played throughout his treatment. He had to wear a padded shirt to protect a plastic injection point surgically embedded in his chest and bruised easily because of his treatments. He also couldn't stand the rigors of an up-and-down game, initially.
"It was just important to me to get back on the field. I just couldn't run the length of the field in the beginning, so that winter I played a lot in goal," he says.
Slowly, the treatments became less frequent, down from three times a week initially, then to once a week. That became once-a-month, then once every three months. By the time Branden turned 10, he was officially in remission, though he'd continue to be checked regularly for the next five years.
When he marked his 15th birthday and the leukemia hadn't returned, doctors officially declared him "cancer-free."
By then, Dustin was playing college soccer at John Carroll University, while Ashley was the family's soccer star, playing Division I ball at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. Brandon, however, was back at his natural soccer position as a forward and was creating quite a buzz in northeast Ohio soccer circles.
UC Comes Calling
He went on to star at Brecksville-Broadview Heights High School, scoring 37 goals and adding 29 assists during his prep career, earning NSCAA/adidas All-American honors to go with conference and state honors and a nod by Rise Magazine as one of its "Prime-Time Players." He also was a standout with the Super-Y League and Ohio Olympic Development Program, earning plenty of notice from Division I college coaches.
That's where Dayes first saw him.
"It was clear he was a special kid, aside from all the accolades. Watching him play, you could see he played hard all the time, and he had a lot of talent," says Dayes.
It wasn't until later, though, that Ron Stelmak pulled the UC coach aside and told him the rest of the story. Branden, after all, was only a few years removed from that "cancer-free" proclamation.
"It didn't change our recruitment of him at all," says Dayes. "If anything, it gave us perspective on how Branden was going to be in the face of adversity. At the end of the day, his abilities stood on their own."
Stelmak ended up signing with the Bearcats, a decision Dayes hasn't regretted once. "From day one, he's been a tremendous worker, someone who's been a real team leader. We've never had to motivate Branden. He's motivated the minute he steps onto the field, every time," adds the coach.
During his first season in Clifton, Stelmak played in 17 matches as a true freshman and was named one of College Soccer News' Top 100 Freshmen to Watch. He followed that up by starting all 19 games on the UC slate in 2008 as a sophomore, leading the team in scoring while notching game-winning goals in three of the Bearcats' seven wins. During his junior campaign, he upped his output yet again, scoring those four goals to go with four assists and leading the team in scoring yet again.
Now, as a senior, Stelmak says he's focused on helping the Bearcats return to the NCAA Tournament. The last time UC made that national stage, in 2006, Stelmak was still a recruit.
"Only one guy on this team has been to the NCAA's. Other than that, nobody has, so it's something that especially the six seniors want to experience more than anything else before we're done," says Stelmak. "Those four years go fast. I remember my first days on campus and, I mean, you look at these guys out there, particularly the freshmen, and you want to tell them to enjoy it. You want to tell them not to take anything for granted."
No one probably knows that better than Stelmak.
Though he's reluctant to talk about his battle with leukemia much -- some of his closest teammates still have not heard the story -- Stelmak does take time to go back to Cleveland from time to time and donate his time to Kids Kicking Cancer, a physical fitness program that pairs college and pro soccer players with young cancer patients. And, in his mind, his ordeal was a mixed blessing.
"It was hard, emotionally, on my parents and my brother and my sister. It changed their lives. And for me, it was physically tough. But was it the worst time of my life? I don't know," he says. "Honestly, it helped make me who I am. Between the ages of seven and 10, I was dealing with things that most people don't until much later in life."
On any given game day, if you look up in the stands, there will be one father still sporting that Cheshire grin. Ron Stelmak, who is self-employed, still makes almost every of his youngest son's soccer games. His wife, Cindy, a teacher, has a tougher schedule, but still drives down from Cleveland with him for weekend games. Both are proud of their son for not only what he survived, but how he emerged from his battle with Leukemia.
"His character is unwavering," says the proud pop. "I think he still defines himself a bit by those three years, and he knows how lucky he is, but Branden was always a special kid even before the cancer. We feel -- and this is probably a little philosophical -- but we feel he was put on this earth to do bigger things. The cancer was just a stop along that road."