Whittles feels the prayers of people he doesn’t know. 4 for senior night against Loyola Blakefield. Many players are hoping he’ll be standing on the field Nov. Spalding community members have been wearing bracelets and T-shirts emblazoned with the message “Keep fighting Coach Whittles.” Gilman coach Biff Poggi donated $10,000 to Whittles. The football community has shown its affection for Whittles as well. I just want you to be where your happy place is.’ It was just so neat to see him from that vantage point. “He told them, ‘I just wanted to get back here. “Mike was tired and his voice kept cracking,” Diane said. Recently, Diana quietly walked in to locker room and saw her husband place his leg on a bench and face his team to deliver a pep talk. If it’s bad, he always brings us up and gives us high spirits.ĭiana had never been in the team’s locker room before a game until recently. “He’s always there for us,” center Matt Wicklein said. Whittles’ passion and compassion have earned him fierce loyalty, and quarterback Brian Louck refers to him as “the papa bear of our organization.” Some refer to him as their father. “It’s kind of funny how we’re all connected by this game.” Whittles’ parents live in Delaware but attend every game. None of it could have been accomplished without family support. The team moved up to the A Conference this season thanks to the program’s success. “I always thought we were going to go 9-0 every time we entered a season,” he says of the early years. ![]() Prior to his arrival, Spalding had gone through seven coaches in 15 seasons. It’s a far cry from the early days when Spalding struggled to get one win. He built the Cavaliers into a juggernaut that appeared in five of the last six B Conference championship games. Whittles, who has been the Spalding coach since 1999, is known as a mountain of a man striding the sideline with boundless energy. “I’ve never seen a group of guys go from cloud nine to feeling the worst (like that),” Gabelman said. The squad had won last season’s Maryland Interscholastic Athletic Association B Conference title and thought they were being given their championship rings. Soon after Whittles’ diagnosis, Spalding players were told in the school’s chapel. It could be the tumor pushing against the nerve endings in my spine.” “With the pain I’m in, I’ve got to be medicated,” he said. He insists that if you saw him, you wouldn’t know anything is wrong. The perpetually-positive Whittles has lost weight and hair during his illness. Despite his diagnosis, he missed just three practices until that point this season. He’s been in the hospital since mid-October, but has been receiving radiation and chemotherapy treatments during the last several months. “Cancer doesn’t know who it’s messing with,” Nick said. ![]() When Whittles broke the news to his three children – Jessica, Mike and Nick – there was one particular response that made the father swell with pride. The one-year survival rate is 20 percent and the five-year survival rate is 4 percent. Pancreatic cancer is largely considered incurable. The sobering news came with some hard-to-swallow statistics. “I kept asking if he had the correct chart.” “It completely blew my mind because I had a couple of CAT scans, a couple of MRIs and nothing came up,” Whittles said. 23 that there was a golf-ball-sized tumor wrapped around his pancreas and that he had Stage IV cancer. ![]() “I can tell you that once they left, I had a good cry, but the difference was these were happy tears,” Whittles said.ĭoctors told Whittles and his wife, Diane, Feb. The story still brought goose bumps to Whittles days later as he spoke over the phone from the hospital. “Most of us were struggling to keep it together,” receiver Richard Gabelman added. “He instantly started crying tears of joy,” lineman Malik Johnson said. In just a few hours, they had a game against Calvert Hall, but they needed to be with their leader in Glen Burnie first. 21, he was laying in his Baltimore Washington Medical Center bed during the afternoon when his players filed into the room. With intravenous feeding and medication tubes running through him Oct. SEVERN – Mike Whittles was coming to terms with the fact that for the first time in his head coaching career, he was going to miss an Archbishop Spalding game.
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