Canzano: Will you show up for those who show up for you?

"It's good for our team's soul."

Portland State basketball and football players worked at Camp Exceptional. Koren Johnson, a guard, gave instructions. (Photo: Jack Lewy)

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to see Jase Coburn and the Portland State men’s basketball team come through the gates of the parking lot at La Salle High School on Thursday.

They show up here every summer, after all.

Camp Exceptional is in its 13th year. It’s the summer sport camp run by the Bald Faced Truth Foundation. My brother and I dreamed this camp up on a park bench years ago. He’s a special-education teacher from California. I write a sports column.

The camp features typical kids and those with special needs, working alongside each other, learning sports skills and having fun. Coburn brings his team on the day the campers play basketball. I never ask him to do it. He just keeps showing up. On Thursday, I finally asked him the question.

“What do you get out of this?” I asked.

“It’s good for our team’s soul,” he shot back.

I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to see Chris Fisk, the new football coach at PSU, either. His predecessors, Bruce Barnum and Nigel Burton, both brought their football players to the camp. They volunteered for the entire week.

Fisk was hired in December, changed practice times, altered program protocols, ordered new equipment, and brought his own philosophy. It’s what new coaches do. They often go out of their way with intentionality, and refuse to duplicate the practices of the failed coaches who came before them.

Yet, here came Fisk, dedicating eight players a day as team leaders all week. And on Wednesday — the day of camp traditionally dedicated to flag football — dozens of his players piled into cars after their morning workout and drove from the downtown Park Blocks to the suburbs to show up for a bunch of kids they’d never even met.

“This stuff is important,” Fisk told me. “It’s a cornerstone of our program.”

A Big Sky Conference football program that has largely been marginalized and pushed out of its home football stadium, underfunded by its own school, relegated to playing in Hillsboro in front of a sparse crowd, decided for the 13th straight summer that it was going to show up for your kids.

How can we ignore that?

How can we forget that Coburn’s team, which won the Big Sky regular season men’s basketball championship last year, first spent a week last summer helping kids with intellectual disabilities and physical challenges?

Fisk had every reason to do things differently than Barnum. He could have blown off the camp. Everyone would have understood. Instead, he and his players decided that a thin, frequently unseen and overlooked stripe of society was too important to ignore.

Barnum got fired last season. His athletic director did the deed on the tarmac of the airport after a game. There are still bad feelings. But guess who reached out to me a few weeks before camp with a check-in call related to PSU?

Barnum said: “Is the new guy there supporting the camp?”

“He’s in,” I replied.

“That’s good to hear,” the former Vikings coach said.

Football and basketball players from Portland State work the camp every year. (Photos: Tim Healy and Jack Lewy and Parker Hulett)

I do all sorts of things in the media space that feel big and important. I report on the fall — and rise — of the Pac-12. I chase leads and weigh in on the Trail Blazers ownership saga. I travel all over during football season, covering big games. But when people ask me what the most important thing I do is, I always tell them about Camp Exceptional first.

“If it doesn’t challenge you!!!” my brother shouts at the campers.

“IT DOESN’T CHANGE YOU!!!” they holler back.

David Goggins would love this camp. It pits young people against their limitations. It arrives in the middle of July, laced with empathy, understanding, sweat, and lots of smiles. The sponsors get it. Adidas comes up big. Jamba supports. Lots of local businesses such as Shoe Mill, First Call Heating and Cooling, Gresham Ford, The Wall, Wilsonville Carpet and Tile, and others buy in. Parents adore it. The campers come back, year after year, eventually aging out at age 15 and then turning into volunteer team leaders.

People ask me where they should buy a car, get new shoes, or install new air conditioning, or put in carpets, or a patio. I always have the answer. Go with the company that supports your community, of course. So why not support the college teams and players that do the same?

I received a message a couple of months ago from a parent. He explained that his son had special needs and they were looking for a summer camp. The guy wanted to travel from out of state to attend and wondered if we had room for his kid. They’d exhausted the camp options in their area.

I talked all about how the camp builds relationships. It’s a sports camp, sure, but it’s more about the connection between young people and their sport-specific mentors. Some of the kids at the camp leave with more confidence. Others make a friend or three. One year, I had a parent approach me with glassy eyes and tell me it was the first time they felt like their child, who had a physical disability, was part of a team.

Room for a camper?

Sure.

Always.

“How old is your son?” I asked the guy on the phone.

“38,” he said.

Way too old to be a camper, but we’d try to find him a spot to volunteer, of course. I sometimes think there’s more in this camp for the people volunteering than the kids, ages 5-15, who are bouncing about, participating.

A 17-year-old named Parker, a former repeat camper with Down Syndrome, now serves as one of the official camp photographers. He’s been around all week, snapping photos.

Another former camper, Zach, has autism. He first attended Camp Exceptional when he was 7. He’s 21 now. He’s aged out as a camper and has served as a team leader for the last few summers. When Zach applied for a job a couple of years ago in the food service industry, I got a call from his prospective employer.

He’d put me down as a reference.

I smiled.

Of course, he did. He’s hard-working and relentlessly positive. He got that job.

Portland State athletes are here. Every year. Doesn’t matter who the coaches are. Doesn’t matter who the AD is. It’s almost inconsequential. The women’s basketball team came to volunteer one year. The women’s soccer team showed up another year. The football players and men’s basketball players have always been here.

The Vikings show up.

Will you show up for them this season?

Attend a game. Any game. Pick it on the calendar and bring your friends and family. Coburn’s basketball team played the best and most consistent college basketball in the state last season. Still, attendance was sparse. It shouldn’t be that way.

Fisk is new on the scene. He’s got challenges with his budget and a tough four-game stretch to start the season. His players start Fall Camp on Monday. They have the rest of this week off, but still showed up to help.

I was walking past a group of PSU football players earlier this week who were talking about their travel plans on Friday-Sunday. Two of them were planning to volunteer at camp through Friday at noon, then share an Uber ride to the airport, fly home for the weekend, then fly back on Sunday night for Monday’s first official practice.

Wrap your head around how important this must be to them. Decide if you’d like to make them feel important in return. I get it. We’re all busy. Excuses are easy to find. Apathy is real in today’s college ecosystem. But if you’re looking for a corner of the college sports world that is unselfish and soulful, I’m here to tell you it’s still out there.

The Vikings showed up again on Thursday.

Nobody should be surprised.

Will you show up for them?

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