Deer Park baseball, Hilinski’s Hope partner for mental health awareness in high school athletics

May is mental health awareness month, but the Deer Park baseball program, in conjunction with Hilinski’s Hope, is kicking it off a few days early with a marathon baseball tournament and fundraiser for the foundation on Sunday.

Last year, the Washington High School Baseball Association challenged all programs in the state to add a mental health awareness day into their schedule. The organization, led until recently by the now-retired from coaching Brian Jackson from Graham-Kapowsin High, hoped that coaches across the state would find a way to shed light on the issue and provide resources for young athletes who might not feel like they have an outlet.

Deer Park coach Darren Snyder heard that call.

After months of planning, the event Sunday is an all-day baseball and softball marathon at the school starting at 7 a.m. and running until dusk. Games will feature the Stags’ varsity and junior varsity, middle school and Little League players, an alumni game, a softball game with the Stags’ varsity, a home run derby and a wiffle ball game. A silent auction will run all day to benefit Hilinski’s Hope.

“We just wanted to figure out a way to fill 12, 13 hours with different levels of the sport and get as many people as possible involved,” Snyder said.

Mark Hilinski, founder of Hilinski’s Hope with his wife Kym, will be in attendance and is going to present a “Tyler Talk.” The Hilinskis became advocates of college and high school student-athlete mental health awareness following the suicide death of their son, Tyler, the former Washington State quarterback, in 2018.

“It’s a reflection on what kind of kid Tyler was,” Mark Hilinski said. “Any time that we can, especially if its in the Pacific Northwest, Spokane or Pullman, if we can be here and add our support to it, we’ll really try to be a part of it.”

The idea has been germinating since before the pandemic.

“I came up with the idea a couple of years ago,” Jackson said. “One of the (Graham-Kapowsin) parents and I worked on it and we were going to try to pull it off, but COVID kind of put an end to it.”

Jackson wanted a way for the coaches association to branch out with more service-oriented activities and thought that bringing awareness to mental health issues was the place to start.

“I threw it out to about 20 guys in the coaches association throughout the state and no one bit for about a year on it,” he said. “Then finally Darren grabbed a hold of it and ran with it like crazy. … It’s gonna be a great event. And I hope we can find four or five other (schools) next year and even more later down the road. I really want to be able to donate on behalf of the coaches association to raise awareness for teenage mental health.”

When Snyder heard Jackson talking about the idea of a marathon day for mental health awareness at a coaches clinic, something clicked.

“It kind of stuck with me, but I didn’t act on it right away,” Snyder said. “I played phone tag quite a bit with Brian. He kind of explained his vision of what he thought it might look like. I’m an older coach and was looking for some way to kind of leave a mark and this seemed like something our community needed.”

Snyder runs an alternative high school in Deer Park and he noticed that post-COVID some of his students were struggling both with the effects of the pandemic but also with being “shut in.”

“We were looking at ways to get the fun back into high school,” Snyder said. “I decided to take a run at it.”

Early in the process he decided to reach out to the Hilinski’s organization to seek permission to use their name as the beneficiaries of the fundraising efforts. He was somewhat shocked to hear back from Kym Hilinski that not only could Snyder mention the organization, but that the foundation was completely supportive of the idea and that Mark Hilinski would make plans to fly up from California and address the community.

“(Kym) said they ‘would love to be a part of it,’ ” Snyder said. “We Zoomed three times and you could tell how genuine they were and how much they wanted to help.”

“Darren and his guys – it’s been amazing to watch,” Mark Hilinski said. “When he told me the idea that they would play 100 innings of ball in a day I thought, ‘Holy smokes, that sounds like fun.’ ”

The event has expanded from those initial designs several years ago to include the entire Deer Park community.

“It’s kind of blown up from the original idea,” Snyder said. “But it’s important at the teen level all the way through college the idea that we need to talk about mental health and we need to be able to communicate when we struggle with it.”

Much like the event itself, Hilinski’s Hope started as an idea and bloomed into something bigger. The marathon day might not reach national impact like Hilinski’s Hope has, but who’s to say it won’t in the future? Everything starts somewhere.

“When we started Hilinski’s Hope, our only thing was to try to figure out how to do something, build something, be something that would help other Tylers in the world make a different choice,” Hilinski said. “We want them to hear, the student-athletes, that we’re here for them. We’re fighting for them. If there’s anything they think they need help with, they’re surrounded by people who love and care about them.”

Hilinski is just returning from a series of talks in Alabama, where he met with a group of roughly 2,500 student-athletes. Every time he or Kym give a “Tyler Talk,” it reminds them of how hard it can be for someone to open up. It also reminds them of their son.

“Doing anything surrounding Hilinski’s Hope carries its own sort of burden,” he said. “You talk about something so personal, and it’s uncomfortable to talk about these things. We want kids to see that. … Kym and I, when we give these talks and meet with these students, we palpably feel the crisis that we’re in.”

As for the event Sunday, the parent group in Deer Park is completely behind Snyder’s efforts.

“I have a super supportive (parent) group,” he said. “When I took this program over eight years ago, we preached family and preached ‘program’ over wins and losses. I met with parents of middle schoolers in the parking lot and told them about building a program here in Deer Park. Those same parents are the ones that said, ‘Here you go again with a big idea,’ but they are all-in and it’s going to be crazy. but we’re going to support it.’ ”

To illustrate how much folks are looking forward to the day, Snyder got a phone call late Thursday night. He had “put the field to bed” after the varsity game and was out to dinner with his wife when a middle school coach called and asked if Snyder was at the high school field. When Snyder said no, the response was, “ ‘I wish you were, because you have six or seven former players having a full-fledged practice on your field to get ready for Sunday.’ ”