1 of 2
Photo by Kamp Fender.
John White stands with his father and soccer coach, Darin White. The two recently won the Alabama Youth Soccer Association state championship for the Briarwood Presbyterian Church team and will compete in the regional tournament in July.
2 of 2
Photos by Kamp Fender.
Below: John wears the same pink gloves he wore during his run for a state championship with the Briarwood Presbyterian Church team.
In the past four-and-a-half years, John White, 15, has dealt with the death of his older brother and has undergone heart surgery to correct a life-threatening congenital heart condition.
So on Nov. 4, when John won the Alabama Youth Soccer Association state championship as the goalkeeper for the Briarwood Presbyterian Church youth team with his dad, Darin, coaching, it was a surreal moment. It captured a lot of the emotion from the past few years.
“It had special meaning for us, given his background and all we’d walked through in the past few years,” Darin White said.
John was born with severe Ebstein’s anomaly, a heart condition in which the valve between the two right heart chambers doesn’t work properly, allowing blood to leave the heart. The condition can lead to heart failure. Those who are diagnosed with the heart defect are not expected to live past their teenage years, his dad said.
“To make it all the way to 2014, they never expected us making that far,” his dad said.
In the summer of 2014, John underwent heart surgery in Michigan performed by Dr. Edward Bove, who designed a surgery to help correct Ebstein’s anomaly. John’s heart stopped before the surgery began and once during the surgery. Darin White said it was very “touch-and-go.”
When John woke up from surgery, he had one question: “Can I play soccer now?” He hoped to be able to play the sport his family was so passionately involved in.
Darin White, executive director of Samford University’s Center for Sports Analytics, started the men’s soccer program at Union University in the mid-1990s and coached with his father, Russ, who serves as an assistant coach for the Briarwood team.
Both of John’s brothers, Avery and Daniel, played soccer in high school. The family spends time watching soccer together and attended the Major League Soccer Cup, the championship game of the professional soccer league in the United States.
John could never join his brothers on the pitch growing up, given his heart condition. At its worst, he said the condition kept him from walking up the stairs without getting tired. So when the surgery was over, he wanted to know if he could play the sport he had grown to love from a distance.
While doctors were hesitant at first, they told him he could play, but only as a goalkeeper and only if his dad served as a coach or was in a position to monitor him. To Darin White’s knowledge, his son is the only child in the nation playing competitive soccer with his condition and the surgery.
John said he always appreciated the position of goalkeeper, as it allows you to be either a “zero” who lets in a pivotal goal from the opposition, or the “hero” who defends the net and helps his team win.
Right after surgery, he took the net for the first time in a recreational league. It didn’t go as planned, with his team losing 9-0 to Homewood. Still, John stuck with it and eventually became the goalie for the Briarwood team.
He continued to progress both on and off the pitch, before tragedy struck the White family.
In January 2017, his brother, Avery, died during his senior year at Samford.
“That was very unexpected for our entire family,” Darin White said.
The loss was hard, but giving up wasn’t an option, John said.
“Handling losing my brother was hard, but I just kept going through it, through the pain,” John said. “We just put our trust in God to help us through it.”
Not giving up became a goal, not just for John and his family, but for his teammates on the Briarwood soccer team as well.
At the halfway point of their current season, the Briarwood team didn’t look like they would compete for a state championship, having zero wins, one draw and two losses. The next game came against a good Decatur team, but Briarwood managed to pull out a victory, starting a win streak that carried them through the rest of the regular season and playoffs.
In the championship game against Homewood, the first team John played against after surgery, Briarwood scored 12 seconds after the first whistle in what became a “nerve-wracking” match, Darin White said.
Briarwood went on to win, scoring three goals to Homewood’s one. In their last seven matches, the team, led by John in the net, gave up just one goal. The team made its way to the stage to celebrate the championship, with all the boys jumping up and down as the theme music for the Union of European Football Associations played.
“It kind of mirrors what he was going through in his personal life,” Darin said. “... The idea of not giving up, that we can overcome, that theme ran throughout the season and it’s run throughout John’s life.”
The team will now go to the U.S. Youth Soccer Association’s Presidents Cup in June, the regional tournament pulling teams from all over the nation. If they win in regionals, they’ll go to the national semifinals for a chance to win a national championship, something no team from Alabama has done.
No matter what happens this summer, John and his dad said they’ve learned lifelong lessons from both the sorrows and the joys of the past few years.
“I’ve learned that whenever anything bad happens in your life, put your trust in God and he will help you through it,” John said.
One of their favorite quotes is from Clemson head football coach Dabo Swinney, who said, “There is no hope for a better yesterday.”
“Yes, you go through really hard things in life, but there’s always joy on the other side of it if you just keep pressing forward,” Darin White said. “... We try as hard as we can to learn what we can learn from it, and use that as motivation as we move forward in our life.
“This is just one example of how God continues to bless and continues to give us joy.”
