Youth fishing event to be held in honor of Cheney High student who died in PE accident

A fishing event in honor of a Cheney High School student is happening in August.

The Fish Pockets Inaugural Youth Fishing Event is Aug. 24 at Clear Lake, just south of Medical Lake.

The event will honor Cheney High School student Brayden Bahme, who died in a PE accident at school last year.

The event will be organized by the Isaac Foundation, whose executive director, Holly Goodman, is Bahme’s aunt.

“His favorite thing in the entire world was fishing,” Goodman said.

His family gave Bahme his nickname: Fish Pockets.

After fishing, he would often come home with fish in his pockets, “because you don’t have any place to put them, and God forbid we throw them back,” Goodman said.

She recalls how Bahme would also return from a fishing trip without his gear.

“He would make friends at the dock, or on the beach,” Goodman said.

“And he would show other kids how to fish. A lot of the time he would just give them his fishing pole.”

It takes two hands to teach someone to fish, she said.

And so, the Fish Pockets event was born.

The Isaac Foundation, which supports children on the autism spectrum and their families, will organize the event.

Goodman said Bahme was friends with her son, Caleb, and other kids with neurological differences.

“Brayden, while he was neurotypical and was not in special education, he was friends with people of all abilities.”

“Bahme,” according to the foundation’s website, “was an exceptional young man, with the ability to create authentic friendships with those with autism and other special needs through the shared activity of fishing.”

In his honor, the free event will match peers, with and without disabilities, in groups, so that they and their families can learn to fish.

Fish Pockets will have a variety of stations – including a water safety, first aid, casting, cleaning and awards station.

The foundation is also looking for adult and teen volunteers to assist at the event – those familiar and unfamiliar with fishing, as well as event sponsors.

Goodman hopes to make Fish Pockets an annual event.

“We would like it to be a perpetual event so that it’s something that family has to remember him, and that we remember what a cool kid he was,” she said.

“It’s the premise of everything Brayden believed in – people are friends. It doesn’t matter what their ability is.

“Friends come in all shapes, and sizes and abilities.”

Claire Lyle is a member of The Spokesman-Review’s Teen Journalism Institute, a paid high school summer internship program funded by Bank of America. As the only paid high school newspaper internship in the nation, it is for local students between the ages of 16 and 18 who work directly with senior editors and reporters in the newsroom. All stories written by these interns can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information, please contact our newspaper’s managing editor. Lyle can be reached at clairel@spokseman.com.