PANDORA — When summer began, Autumn Sprunger was a typical teenager. The 16-year-old cheerleader with the long, blonde hair looked forward to her junior year at Pandora-Gilboa High School.
When the summer began, the players on the Rockets’ football team started brainstorming about what wacky thing to do with their hairstyles to start the 2016 season after wearing bleached hair one year and mohawks two other years.
Then the girl who cheered on the Rockets needed some support of her own. On June 9, Autumn learned she had T-lymphoblastic lymphoma, an aggressive and relatively rare form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. A cancerous mass formed in her chest, with smaller amounts in her spleen, left knee and femur and right upper arm. Aggressive chemotherapy began two days later, and eventually off came those long, blonde locks.
“We wanted to not just show Autumn we care about her, but also that we’re not just a bunch of meatheads out here hitting skulls and lifting weights,” said Jason Walther, a senior on the team. “We care about our community as much as everyone else does.”
As a show of support for the daughter of Nathan and Izzy Sprunger, most of the players shaved their heads Sunday.
“It’s pretty overwhelming,” said Izzy Sprunger, Autumn’s mother. “It’s a pretty cool thing, a cool thing about living in a small community.”
Pandora had 1,165 people in the 2010 U.S. Census. More than 600 people purchased “Team Autumn” T-shirts to show their support, more than half the village’s population.
“We have a small community, but it’s sure filled with big hearts,” Autumn wrote on a Facebook page, Cheering for Autumn, on July 3.
The football team will also wear #TeamAutumn stickers on their helmets this season.
“We just want to show her that we’ve got her back,” said Pandora-Gilboa coach Christopher Myers. “We know she’s going through a rough time. We support her. We just want her to keep on fighting.”
Football coaches often talk about needing heart to play well. This team may not have hair, but it has plenty of heart.
The players banded together to show their support for Autumn, a skill the coaches could never teach them on the field.
“We’re always talking about how important education is,” Myers said. “When you go into a job interview, the first question is not what record your high school football team had. Let’s develop life skills through football, things that are going to help us later on.”
Autumn recently finished a strong round of chemotherapy, her mother said. She wasn’t able to attend the start of her junior year of high school last week. She spent a few hours at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, her new home away from home, earlier this week. Still, she recognizes the support she has back in Pandora.
“I have been so overwhelmed the past couple of weeks, in the worst and also in the best possible ways,” Autumn wrote on Facebook. “Crazy how life can be completely turned upside down. There will definitely be tough days, but with God all things are possible.”
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