Donnalee "Mom" Velvick founded Hope House in 1973 as a home for "hard-to-place" kids - those with mental, physical or emotional challenges ranging from fetal alcohol syndrome to "incorrigibility."
Hope House accepts children from state agencies, private homes and local organizations unable or unwilling to care for them and includes a residence for disabled young adults.
The staff consists of 12 full-time volunteers who live at the home, college interns, student volunteers, teachers, cooks and support personnel.
You can help
Hope House is seeking financial donations to help pay for its new sewer system and to help several Hope House students, including seniors Stephenie Good and Amanda Taylor, complete medical assistant programs and attend college.
For details and to find out about more ways to help Hope House, contact Velvick at the Hope House office: 896-4673
The Hope House Heroes flopped on the floor in T-shirts and sweatshirts at a pre-tournament pizza party at their coach's house.
Senior Stephenie Good, known on the court for her "hot hands," darted around the room, slinging her arm around her teammates' shoulders, snapping photos.
Sophomore Tiffany Taylor, one of the team's best players but felled by an injury that put her leg in a brace, took up prime real estate in an armchair under a printed sign: "Tiffany's Territory."
"It's like when famous athletes get streets named for them," coach Maryanna Young explained.
The Heroes were getting ready for the Christian Schools Athletic Association basketball tournament. They were a surprising one-loss team, with an unlikely shot at the league title.
The Hope House in Marsing is home to children and young people with mental, physical and emotional challenges. For many, Hope House is the only home and family they've ever known. These members of the girls basketball team contend with problems far beyond the usual trials of team sports and growing up.
Tiffany Taylor, for example, lived in 10 different foster homes before she came to live at Hope House at age 10. One of her teammates has a hearing impairment, and two others have learning disabilities because their mothers used drugs when they were pregnant. Three players on the team came to Hope House as "failed adoptions" from Cambodia, Mongolia and Brazil after their American adoptive parents had second thoughts.
"I want the team to win. And I know what it is to lose," said senior Amanda Taylor, 17. "But for these kids to be on the court says so much more."
'WHEN YOU GET TO THE GYM, YOU LEAVE YOUR PROBLEMS AT THE DOOR'
Taylor, one of the team's three seniors, shared the year's Most Valuable Player title with teammates Stephenie Good and Liberty Barrett, because, as becomes quickly apparent, this is not a team that singles out stars.
She has played on the basketball team for seven years, earning a reputation as a good teacher. She has big blue eyes and serious way about her, though in her picture in the Hope House newsletter, in which she wrote about her summer mission trip to Tanzania, she's beaming.
Taylor is studying to be a medical assistant, knowledge that let her deadpan on half-sister Tiffany Taylor's injury: "The unofficial medical diagnosis is that it involves a ligament with a hard-to-pronounce name."
Taylor came to Hope House with her siblings when she was 10. She had left an abusive adoptive home, after shuffling between 27 different foster families. Basketball has helped her relate to other people, she said.
"So many of the players come from messed-up situations," she said. "Everybody has their own issues, but the team has an agreement: When you get to the gym, you leave your problems at the door."
Once inside that door, the girls do what all kids on teams do. They run drills. They congratulate other teammates on good plays. They use music to get pepped up before games, though the Heroes forgo classic bleacher-shakers. The closest thing they have to a team song is "Complete," by Christian rocker Andy Chrisman.
Sometimes, Stephenie Good plays the guitar.
AN ESCAPE FROM ISOLATION
Good lived in California until seven years ago.
"My parents gave me two options, boarding school, or Hope House," she said. "I heard Hope House was in Idaho and asked if that were a different country."
Her relationship with her parents, consisting of a few phone calls a year, "is over," Good said.
Living at a Christian school in Marsing doesn't make her feel isolated from the rest of the world.
"My old life made me feel isolated from the world. At home, there were no movies, no shopping."
Like Amanda Taylor, Good has taken mission trips - to Mongolia, to Peru. She wants to be a nurse.
She said she is "struggling with the Christian thing, to understand religion, and some of the hypocrisy." She plans to spend a year in Bible college to figure everything out. She's more sure about basketball, and the six years she has played with the Heroes.
"I'm part of something, a team member. I give what I need to give," she said.
Liberty Barrett comes a long way to be part of the team. The 18-year-old senior attends a Christian school too small to have a basketball team, so she drives from Boise to Marsing, 45 minutes each way, to play with the Heroes.
"It's very worth the drive," she said.
She mentions Christ in a frequent and disarmingly conversational way, whether she's talking about playing sports or about her ambition to some day open her own home for abandoned children.
JUST ONE REQUIREMENT: HEART
When the Heroes play in the Christian league, the bleachers usually fill with families of the opposing team.
Donnalee "Mom" Velvick, who founded Hope House 35 years ago, makes sure a legion of supporters from Hope House is there, too.
"We have our own gang. We're our players' family and we're here cheering for them."
That "family" includes 62 children and young adults, as well as cats, horses, dogs and birds. All live together on 58 acres in Marsing. The family goes through 224 gallons of milk and 60 tubes of toothpaste each month.
The nonprofit home operates with money from local private and corporate donors, churches and grants. In 2005, the J.A. and Kathryn Albertson Foundation gave the home $1 million, which let Hope House pay off its mortgage and do extensive repairs on its 26 buildings.
"So many children come here with negative thoughts playing over and over in their heads, like, 'I don't want you, I never should have adopted you.' Learning that you are worth something after that takes a lot of work," Velvick said.
She considers Hope House's athletic program, which started 12 years ago, one more opportunity for children to learn what accomplishment feels like. Forget teams that leave players on the bench because they're too short, too heavy, too thin or too awkward.
"We look for heart. Everybody plays a role on this team," Velvick said.
And none of the players gets a break from their chores, not even during tournament week.
Wednesday night after practice, Young was driving home when she passed several of the Heroes walking along the road.
"The kids were all smiles, looking like they were going to a party," Young said. She pulled over and asked them where they were going. Someone had just donated 10 tons of hay to feed the Hope House horses.
"They told us we had to come buck hay before dinner," said 10th-grader April Rogers, a player her teammates describe as a "super encourager."
"As a coach, I was freaking out. I didn't want them any more tired than they already were from practice, Young said. "They just told me, 'That's the rule.'"
A WELL-PLACED POST-IT NOTE
Team coach Maryanna Young had a very different childhood from the students at Hope House.
She made Idaho's all-state basketball team as a senior at Boise High. She played and coached at Oral Roberts University and managed and coached athletes at three Olympic Games. In 1993, she co-founded the Idaho Women's Fitness Celebration. Young, who has volunteered her time for four years at the school, is in her first year as the girls' basketball coach.
Her motivation for coaching the Heroes and for marking the entrance of her Meridian subdivision with a sign reading "Welcome to Hero Nation" and with balloons in silver and maroon, team colors, the night of the pizza party is simple:
"There is not a day that goes by where I don't experience significant life impact from one of my players."
After the party, Young's co-coach, Sheryl Good, known as the team's purple-wearing "medicine woman," whose only real flaw, according to the team, may be her inability to make free-throws, drove the team back to Marsing in a big white van.
Young found Post-It notes the players had secretly left around her house, each with a different encouraging message. The note on her bathroom mirror was from a player with a volatile family situation who has lived at the house for two years.
It read, "Never give up in life."
"How ironic is that, to have a kid who's had such a tough situation, leaving me a note?" Young said.
A SHOT AT THEIR RIVALS
Thursday night at the Oregon Trail Church in Middleton, the Heroes played their arch rivals in a gym that smelled like roast beef and garlic bread from the Valentine's Day dinner being cooked in the church kitchen.
The Falcons, from the Christian Homeschool Association of Malheur and Payette counties, were responsible for the Heroes' single loss of the season, and mention of their name elicited a roomwide chorus of "ugh" at the team pizza party.
Thursday night, the Heroes joined hands for a prayer circle.
Good thanked God for "being awesome." She paused: "Even though I get angry at you for being so confusing."
"Thank you for this team," Coach Young said. "Every life is amazing."
The room was still, except for Young's bouncing feet, tucked under her chair, giving away her nerves.
Falcon coach Curt McKinney interrupted the pre-game ritual with a knock. "You guys wearing light or dark tonight?"
"We only have one uniform, Curt," Young answered.
"Unless we can be skins," quipped eighth-grader Alex Croft.
On the court before the game started, the Heroes draped Hawaiian leis tagged with Bible scriptures around the necks of the Falcons - for friendship, they said.
In the end, the Heroes ran hard but lost the game. Later that night, they lost to the St. Ambrose Archers and had to settle for third place in the league. It wasn't how they wanted to end their season. The leis, though, were prophetic. The Heroes have friends, some they may not even know about.
Billy Carroll, football coach at Calvary Christian, watched the Heroes come, at one point, within three points of the Falcons.
He looked at the court where Hope House ninth-grader Amy Wilson had stolen countless balls and sped through a screen of players' arms and legs, where Stephenie Good had sprung back up after taking a hit to the face that knocked her to the ground, and where Amanda Taylor had rolled into a full backward somersault after diving for a loose ball.
"On paper, these kids shouldn't even be able to compete if you compare their backgrounds to the backgrounds of our kids," he said. "Luckily, things don't end on paper."
Anna Webb: 377-6431
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