FOOTBALL-FAMILY PLANS TO EXEMPLIFY FALLEN BROTHER
By John Hales

EPHRAIM-Members of the Snow College football team plan to honor a deceased teammate by adopting some of the traits he exhibited during his lifetime.

Susan Whiting, director of the Wellness Center at the college, conducted a grief-counseling session for the team last Friday after the team received word that a red-shirt freshman teammate from Magna had died in an auto accident the day before.

"There are two ways you can deal with tragedy," she told the team. "You can let it take you down, or you can let it take you up."

She then gave the team an idea for letting it take them up.

"Take a quality you learned from him and pay it forward: exemplify it in your own life so that his life has meaning through yours."

Nery Sanchez had been in Salt Lake at a doctor's appointment. As he was returning to Ephraim, says Snow's public relations director Rick Pike, he apparently rolled his vehicle on the freeway near Nephi. The vehicle came to rest in the median, and Sanchez died at the scene. No other vehicles or people were involved, and Pike says that police suspect Sanchez fell asleep at the wheel.

At the time of the accident, Sanchez was driving back to Snow so that he wouldn't miss the team's weight-room workout that afternoon.

After hearing the news, Snow football head coach Titan Trimble cancelled Friday's workouts and called a team meeting, where Whiting introduced the "pay it forward" concept.

Whiting says the idea resonated with the team. "They picked up on it. They made commitments to exemplify qualities Nery had."

Whiting says she heard probably 60 different comments about Sanchez, but two that came up most often were that Sanchez was a hard player and that he cared personally about his "football family." The idea of a team family is something coach Trimble has tried to instill in his players since he took over the program in December.

Trimble says that Sanchez had really responded to that idea. "He was embracing the structure of the new coaching staff," he says, "He was becoming a player that fit in well with being a Badger."

The coach says Sanchez' loss is especially hard-hitting because of the kind of camaraderie engendered by the team's family outlook.

"Whenever you're trying to build a family and something like this happens, it's hard." Whiting's pay-it-forward idea had an impact on everyone on the team, even those who were less-acquainted with Nery. Says Trimble, "Some of the guys who didn't get a chance to know him were saddened because they didn't have that opportunity."