A Rally bigger than basketball

Missouri lost a basketball game on Wednesday night. An 86-71 loss to Vanderbilt was Missouri’s ninth in a row and 16th in 24 games this year. There was a time--just a few months ago--that would have torn Brad Loos apart.

“I don’t react the same way to losses this year as I did last year,” Missouri’s second-year assistant coach said. “Winning and losing’s important, don’t get me wrong. It’s what we do. It’s our job. But at the end of the day, your family, your children, that’s what’s really important.”

A lot of coaches say they hold their sport in the proper perspective. And a lot of them may mean it. Few have the real life experience to test that statement that Brad Loos has.

Last October, Loos’ five-year-old daughter, Rhyan, was diagnosed with Stage Four neuroblastoma. In layman’s terms, that’s cancer. There are only four stages of cancer diagnoses. It doesn’t get much worse than Stage Four.

Late last summer, Rhyan Loos developed a limp. It would come and go and it drew opposite reactions from her parents.

“Jen, with the motherly instinct that she has, she said, ‘Hey, something ain’t right about this,’” Loos said. “Me being the dad, ‘Hey, tough it out.’ I was saying, ‘Leave her alone, she’s fine, she’s five.’”

“Kind of her whole attitude and demeanor just kind of started going south,” Jen Loos said. “She’s usually a fairly energetic and happy little girl and after going to kindergarten, she would come home, lay on the couch, fall asleep. Her appetite was getting kind of bad. So we just knew something wasn’t right.”

In early October, Brad and Jen took their daughter to the doctor. Her hip was X-rayed. The initial diagnosis was arthritis. The doctors wanted to put Rhyan in the hospital, in case it was septic arthritis, which is caused by bacteria or fungus in the body.

“I said, ‘Is there any way this could be cancer?’” Jen recalled. “She kind of looked at me like, this is arthritis, why are you even going there? It was just something, maybe like a motherly instinct or something, that I just knew it was something bad. When we got admitted to the hospital, I just kept asking and they just kept looking at me like, that’s kind of worst case scenario. Work through this and don’t even go there yet. But I just had this horrible feeling.”

At some point--Jen Loos says she doesn’t know how long it took; Rhyan was in the hospital for about two weeks and “those two weeks are just kind of a blur. I’m not sure when things happened and on what day. It all just kind of runs together”--arthritis was ruled out. The doctors believed Rhyan had leukemia. Twenty minutes after delivering that news to her parents, the doctors told Jen and Brad it wasn’t leukemia. It was cancer. They just didn’t know what kind.

“Talk about kicking somebody when they’re down,” Jen said. “You don’t think it can get any worse, but it did. It kept getting worse.”

By Friday, October 9th, Rhyan was diagnosed with neuroblastoma.

Neuroblastoma is a cancer that develops in the sympathetic nerve system--the nerves that carry messages from the brain to the body. It begins with a tumor, most often in the kidneys, which is where Rhyan Loos’ developed. Approximately 700 cases per year are diagnosed in the United States, almost exclusively in children 15 years old or younger. Nearly 40% of the cases are diagnosed in infants before they are a year old and 90% are found in children who have not yet celebrated their fifth birthday.

“I knew nothing about cancer going into this. I was completely ignorant to the whole deal,” Brad Loos said. “Now we feel like we’ve got a decent grasp of it. I wouldn’t say a good grasp. I don’t know that you can have a good grasp without a doctorate in this stuff, but we have learned a lot, there’s no doubt.”

The first step is chemotherapy. Rhyan has finished five rounds.

“Obviously it’s tough on Rhyan. It was tough on us as parents just to see your kid go through that and not be able to do anything to help her,” Brad said. “It’s just one of those things where she has to go through the process of letting that chemo break her body down and then her body just recovering. You know, just as a parent it’s hard. It’s hard to watch your child sit there and go through that.”

The next step is surgery to remove the tumor. Rhyan will have that on March 2nd at Sloan Kettering in New York City. The surgery is scheduled six days before her sixth birthday.

“It’s been hard. It’s kind of changed he and Jen’s life dramatically. They’ve been very strong. Probably sometimes stronger than me,” Missouri head coach Kim Anderson said. “Hopefully everything will go well.”

The longterm prognosis is unknown because, Loos says, so much about the disease is still unknown. There are debates about how to proceed with treatment following the surgery. Rhyan is older than most neuroblastoma patients. The five-year survival rate for children between five and nine has doubled in the last four decades. In 1975, it was 34%. In 2010, it was 68%. Sixty-eight percent seems like a pretty good number. Until you’re talking about a little girl’s life.

“I don’t look at stats or statistics or rates. Those don’t apply to me really,” Jen Loos said. “If she had a horrible diagnosis that was a one percent survival rate, I would expect her to be that one percent. So when that gets brought up, I kind of shy away from that because it doesn’t matter what the numbers say. In my head, it’s our daughter. And we’ll get through it.”

Anderson offered immediately to let Loos take the year off from coaching. At the time, the stance was simply that Loos would return to his job when he was ready.

“It was a discussion me and coach had,” Loos said. “I think me and my wife both agreed that me being there full time would only do more damage than good. This has been good for me. It allows me to clear my mind and concentrate on basketball. It makes me appreciate my wife even more because she doesn’t get a break. She does this 24/7 and my daughter won’t let her go ten feet from her.”

When Jen Loos spoke for this story, she did so in an office at Rhyan’s elementary school in the middle of the day on Tuesday. She goes to kindergarten with Rhyan every day.

“They joke around about how I’m the new kid in class,” Jen said. “She’ll spend a week or two in the hospital and then she’ll come back and spend a week or two in class. It’s hard for her to get acclimated back into a routine at school and feel comfortable and confident. She does great. She does great. I sit in the back of class and I don’t do anything. She does her own thing. But I think it’s just the security blanket of me being there. So I do it.”

“I knew my wife was tough going into this, but I had no idea how tough. She’s been an inspiration to me,” Loos said. “When you’re alone and you have time to sit and think, that’s when it gets really tough. You can’t help but think about what can happen negatively. For me, those have been really tough times. She doesn’t get that opportunity just because she’s always with Rhyan. She always has to put on that strong face. She always has to not let Rhyan see any cracks in her armor. Her toughness has just been amazing.”

As for Rhyan, her parents say she’s dealing with her fight as well as could be expected.

“She’s been unbelievable. She’s incredibly tough,” Brad said. “I sit there and I watch her go through chemo and watch what she has to deal with and I can’t say that I would handle it anywhere close to as good as she has. She’s a little soldier.”

“She has changed. I think any child that has to go through something like this will change emotionally, physically,” Jen said. “But the cool thing is seeing her bounce back so quickly. When she’s at school she’s a five-year-old little kid going to school with her friends. Nobody cares that she doesn’t have hair, nobody cares that she’s wearing a hat or that she’s lost weight. She’s just Rhyan here. At our house, when she comes back from the hospital, she’s just Rhyan.

“If it was an adult, I’m not sure that an adult bounces back that quickly because they look into the future and they remember the past. But she pretty much lives in the moment.”

Brad and Jen have two other children. Brady is six years old. Charli is two. Brad and Jen have let Rhyan’s brother and sister in on the process as much as children that young can understand what’s happening to their sister.

“Brady had questions at first,” Brad said. “It was tough on him at first just because he went to school and kids being kids, they weren’t trying to be mean or anything, but some kids said some things. Maybe their uncle or grandma or grandpa had cancer and so they heard that word cancer and they immediately thought of, you know, sickness and death and all the bad things that go along with it.

“We tried to break it down to him as best we could and try to simplify it for him so he could understand, yeah, your sister’s sick, but we’re gonna get her through this and everything’s going to be okay in the long run. It’s just going to be a long run.”

“Brady’s back to annoying her and Charli’s back to taking her toys,” Jen said.

At least one good thing has come from Rhyan’s disease for Brady and Charli. They get to see their grandma a lot more. Jen’s mom lives in Kansas City. Well, sort of.

“She’s probably spent more days in our house than she has in her house the last few months,” Jen said.

The Loos family moved from Warrensburg to Columbia in May of 2014 after Anderson got the job at Mizzou and wanted Brad to join his staff.

“We hadn’t been in Columbia for more than a year-and-a-half when this happened so we hadn’t developed strong relationships with a lot of people yet," Jen said. "But the amount of good friends that we’ve made since this happened is amazing. You can really tell peoples’ personalities when something devastating like this happens.”

The support poured in from all over. Friends in Warrensburg started a Rally for Rhyan Facebook page. The phrase started popping up all over the place. Various teams at Missouri took pictures or videos with signs of support, including the women’s golf team snapping a photo in front of the Welcome to Las Vegas sign on the strip. The basketball team handed out bracelets around town. High school teams, elementary schools, people from all over took up the Rally for Rhyan cry.

“I’m not really even sure where the Rally for Rhyan hashtag came from,” Brad said. “It just so happened to coincide with a lot of people’s team pictures. A lot of teams started holding up that hashtag Rally for Rhyan in their team pictures and it just kind of became a thing. It’s kind of neat to see the effect that a little five-year-old girl can have on so many people in such a short period of time. It’s unfortunate that it has to happen, but there has been a lot of good that’s come along with it.”

Loos reached out to two of his colleagues in the coaching profession. Chris Harriman is the associate head coach at New Mexico. His son, Avery, is nine years old. He was diagnosed with leukemia in 2009. He was two. He had a bone marrow transplant and was deemed cancer free more than a year later. He has since relapsed twice and had another transplant. Harriman coached at Nebraska prior to taking the job at New Mexico. His wife and kids moved back to Nebraska last fall.

"To be honest with you he probably shouldn’t be with us right now," Harriman said of Avery. "He’s been through so much and was fortunate to have a donor that was essentially almost a perfect donor. Been through hell and back, but doing really well right now."

Avery Harriman's situation has been publicized over the years in the national media. Loos reached out to Chris via email shortly after Rhyan's diagnosis, though the two did not know each other at all.

"My heart dropped as soon as I read it," Harriman said. "It made me recall how it was when things started to happen with my son and having to go through it. I reached out to him immediately and we’ve been talking ever since."

Brad and Rhyan Loos are four months into their battle. Chris and Avery Harriman have fought it for six years. If there is anyone who can tell Loos what his life is going to be like, it's Chris Harriman.

"You never want to feel like you let your team down or you weren’t prepared or you weren’t doing your job. But obviously all that is secondary to your family and what he’s going through," Harriman said. "People cannot understand the amount of times I was in a hospital room at 3 a.m. working on a scouting report or making overseas recruiting calls. A lot of it’s coffee, a lot of it’s adrenaline, a lot of it’s just trying to figure out how to manage your own time."

When Avery was first diagnosed, the Harrimans had just moved to St. Louis. Chris was an assistant for Rick Majerus at St. Louis University.

"I was like, ‘Coach, I can’t do this anymore,’" Harriman recalled. "He was like, ‘No, this is what you do, this is who you are. This helps provide insurance and everything else. It’s life.’ I don’t mean to minimize what he’s going through but it’s part of what you have to deal with in life. There’s a lot of people going through it."

So Chris Harriman kept coaching.

Kathy Becker is the director of operations for Clemson’s women’s basketball team. In June of 2014, Becker’s son, Colt, was diagnosed with neuroblastoma. He was three weeks past his first birthday.

"You never think you’re gonna hear someone say that about anyone you love or care for, let alone your own child," Becker said. "My reaction was ‘Why him? What did this one-year-old do to deserve to go through all of this?’ I try to live my life right, but I’m sure I could have done something to deserve it. But what could he possibly have done to deserve to go through all that?"

Colt went through eight rounds of chemotherapy. He then had his surgery at Sloan Kettering, just like Rhyan will in three weeks. Surgeons removed a softball-sized tumor from Colt's stomach. After two more rounds of chemo, the cancer had been removed from Colt's body. He has been in remission for nine months.

"We feel pretty good," Becker said. "Definitely the further away we get from it the better we feel and the less worries we have. From what I understand he’s gonna be going back to the clinic and being tested, like they said until he’s married. So basically the rest of his life."

A friend of Becker's works for a non-profit organization raising money for pediatric cancer research in Charleston, SC. He sent an article on Rhyan Loos to Becker in January of this year.

"I immediately felt like I needed to reach out to Brad. I kind of looked him up and sent him an email. We kind of just started talking from there," she said. "I can’t say that we’ve figured it out, but we made it through and I just wanted to kind of be there if him and Jen had questions, if they just wanted to talk about it, whatever. I wanted them to know that there was someone else that has been through it in a similar situation."

Rhyan's diagnosis came the week Missouri started practice, right at the beginning of the season. Loos has continued to work. Becker found out Colt had cancer in the middle of a Clemson basketball camp, of which she was in charge. She worked from home and snuck in trips to the office between appointments and during naps. When the season started, she was back at work, but did not go to most road games.

"That was really just more out of fear that as soon as I got on the charter plane and was a thousand miles away and no way to get back something would happen," Becker said. "Any trips that were close, I would just drive myself so that I had my car, but other than that I didn’t travel."

It is a battle fought day by day for all three of these families, all of whom are in different stages of the process, but the same in their emotional approaches.

“People say that to us all the time, like, ‘You’re so strong’ and ‘I don’t know how you can do it. I wouldn’t be able to do it,’" Jen Loos said. "You would. Whether you’re a mom or a dad, it’s your child and you do everything possible to make them better. That’s what we’re doing.”

Becker and Harriman agree. They fight and they deal with it. Because they have no other choice.

"You go from living life week by week or month by month or season by season to really living it day by day. You figure out what you’re gonna do today. Then you figure out what you’re gonna do tomorrow," Becker said. "You can’t just go in a corner and cry for a year. You have to be strong for yourself, your family, your kids, your spouse. You really have no choice."

"I feel like I’ve almost lost him three times and been there to witness it," Harriman said. "When you see those things and you see your child fighting for their life, who are you to say that you’re tired or you can’t get up or you want to feel sorry for yourself or you’re having a tough day? When you look at it, you say to yourself, ‘There’s no way I can stop. I’ve got to keep fighting.’ I’ve got to keep doing this for my family, for my son, in Brad’s case for his daughter. You just keep going."

Three basketball coaches, separated by geography but linked in crisis, have formed a bond through their common experiences.

"Right now it’s a pretty new relationship. I hope that maybe once the season’s over, our families can get together," Becker said. "I don’t want to burden them. I know they have a lot going on, but I want them to know that there’s somebody here for them and if they have questions, please don’t ever hesitate to ask, email, text, call whatever. Because it’s a process and if you don’t have people you can talk to about it through the whole thing, it’s even more daunting."

"I’d love to kind of spend some time with him and see Rhyan," Harriman said. "The biggest thing I’ve told him is my phone is always on. I know how it is. You have dark days and you have times at two in the morning when you’re in a hospital or you’re on the road. A lot of it’s those conversations. You need someone that can relate to it. And I’ve just tried to have him lean on me. By no means am I doing anything extraordinary, it’s just trying to be there to help. There’s no question this will probably bring us closer."

The support for Rhyan Loos will take center stage at Mizzou Arena on Saturday afternoon at 2 o’clock. The Tigers face the Tennessee Volunteers in what they have dubbed the "Rally for Rhyan" Game.

Fans can make a donation to help Rhyan, and to help fund research for pediatric cancer, at the door. With that, they’ll get a free seat in the upper deck to watch the game.

“They came to me with this idea and I was unsure how this would turn out,” Brad Loos said. “I know there’s a lot going on in the athletic department, but, man, everybody’s really jumped on board on this and really given it a hundred percent and so I can’t say thank you enough. I think it’s huge. I really do. Not only for Rhyan, but to just raise awareness for pediatric cancer research.”

Rhyan had two appointments with her doctor this week. Her mom said her counts were trending positively and she expects the family will be able to go to Saturday’s game.

“It’s really, really awesome to see the support that the school has given us. And it’s gotten us a chance to be vocal about pediatric cancer,” Jen said. “This is our chance to do something. We have a platform, we have an opportunity. We hate that we have to do this and we hate that we’re in this situation. But, you know, it is what it is and we need to help people. So many people have helped us and we don’t want to just take, take, take. We want to give back and we want to help people.”

Clemson's women did something similar in the fall. They had Colt's game, pledging money from made Tiger free throws to pediatric cancer research.

"We’re trying to do whatever we can," Becker said. "Anytime anybody calls, we get the cancer society calling us and the clinics and other foundations, will Colt do this, will Colt do that, do you mind doing this? We’re like, absolutely not. We will do whatever we can do to help."

Missouri is mired in a miserable season, its second in a row. The Tigers won nine games last year, their fewest in nearly half a century. They may struggle to match that total this year.

“Let’s do something really good. This is about more than basketball,” Anderson said. “This is about a little girl’s life. It’s about a lot of kids’ lives. Whether or not we’re winning games or losing games, this is much more important than basketball. This is about can we, can all of us, help five-year-old Rhyan Loos or some other little girl or boy somewhere in the United States? So, yeah, I hope we have a big crowd.”

For a day, the final score won't be the most important thing. It hasn't been for Chris Harriman for three-quarters of his son's life.

"When you’re leaving a game and you just lost at the buzzer to Michigan at home and you’re driving back over to the hospital, you quickly forget about that loss when you see what’s really important in life. There's no question I've changed," he said. "You’re still going to do everything you do to the best of your ability, you’re still going to try to compete and prepare your team and do everything you’re supposed to do. But when it’s all said and done, you know, you drive home."

The doctors told Brad and Jen to take things day by day. Get to the next morning. Get to the next appointment. And, to some extent, they do that.

But Rhyan will have surgery in three weeks. After that, she will begin radiation treatments. Next up is immunotherapy treatment, where doctors will infuse her system an antibody called 3F8 which is designed to kill off any cancerous cells that have survived the chemotherapy, surgery and radiation. The Loos’ will continue to battle for, and with, their daughter.

“I think people kind of shut their brain off when they hear about kids getting sick, or they see a commercial with a sick kid or a child with no hair because it is sad,” Jen Loos said. “But the reality is it does happen. And it doesn’t matter who you are. It affects anybody and everybody. It doesn’t matter if you have never had cancer in your family like us. We were a very healthy family with not really any health issues. But it affected us.”

As it does some thousands of other children every year in the United States. And now, while they battle with Rhyan, the Loos family also wants to fight for other kids with cancer.

“The research is underfunded, it’s undersupported. And it may make sense. It’s not, it doesn’t raise a lot of money, it’s not very profitable for the drug companies to put very much money into this just because there’s not very many cases. And so they put their funds elsewhere,” Brad Loos said. “You know, there’s a big group of kids that unfortunately aren’t getting their due diligence.”

"Pediatric cancer’s one of the lowest funded, which is an embarrassment to be honest with you," Harriman said. "Those are the kids that are the next generation. Those are the kids we need to be putting all our time into. I’m without question passionate about it. It’s one of those things that you’re not necessarily working to find a cure, but you’re trying to help families deal with it because you can’t possibly put into words how difficult it is."

“Wherever you live and whatever your thing is to support, I really encourage finding something and supporting it,” Jen concluded, when she was asked what she would want people to know about her daughter’s fight. “Because you never know what’s going to happen to you and you never know what’s going to happen to a neighbor or a family member or somebody. And these organizations are so important to families. Just find something and support it.”

Maybe it will be Rhyan Loos. Maybe it will be Colt Becker or Avery Harriman or someone else’s child who reaps the benefits of increased effort and awareness. Brad and Jen just hope they can do something to help prevent other families from what they’ve gone through for the last four months.

"I told Brad there’s going to be a lot of good that’s going to come out of this," Harriman said. "It’s just hard to realize that right now and hard to go through that right now. You just wish you could take that cancer away from your child and you could have it yourself because Lord knows they don’t deserve to go through it."

“I remember sitting, actually, in the arthritis doctor’s office thinking, ‘Oh my God. This little girl’s gonna be in pain her whole life and she’s not going to be able to do sports,’” Jen said. “Thinking now what we’re dealing with, I would give a million dollars to go back to that arthritis diagnosis.”

Click here for more information on Saturday’s Rally for Rhyan Game.

Fans who cannot attend can buy a t-shirt to support the cause online here or send a cash donation to:

#RallyForRhyan

c/o Brad Loos

230 Mizzou Arena

Columbia, MO 65211

Here are a couple other links with information on Rhyan Loos and ways to help the Loos family:

Rally for Rhyan Facebook Page

GoFundMe site