Naylor athletes fight house fire, then go to game

Sometimes, being a winner has very little to do with the score at the end of the game.

Take the Naylor High School basketball team. On Monday, despite a 105-17 defeat that put their record at 1-18, the team went home winners, their coach said.

"They put the needs of others before their own," said Naylor coach Andy Roberts. "You do something like that, you're a winner."

Team members Chad Rideout, a senior, and Shawn Hogan, a junior, bypassed the normal pre-game routine Monday afternoon when they helped fight a fire that eventually destroyed a home and threatened other buildings in Naylor.

"It's kind of hard in a small town not to help, because you know everybody. If you see a fire, you're going to go ask if you can help," Hogan said. "You would want somebody to help you if your house was on fire."

'Buddy's house'

Rideout was eating pizza at his girlfriend's house around 3:15 p.m. when he saw the fire trucks rush by. Hogan was driving around town. They both arrived at the burning home near the corner of Kelsey Street and Lyons Avenue at about the same time.

"I thought it was one of my buddy's houses, so we hurried up and got up there," Hogan said. "My buddy's house was next to it. His house was getting real hot and the shingles were starting to smoke."

Hogan used a garden hose to wet down the neighboring house. Rideout kept the engine on one of the pumpers running. They helped knock holes through a privacy fence to fight the fire from a different angle. They moved hoses. They managed to get one of the pumps started. They tapped into fire hydrants. Hogan even joined firefighters holding one of the main hoses, said Naylor fire chief Don Young.

Young believes the fire started around a flue pipe from the wood stove. Two people were in the home when the fire started, and neither was injured.

Naylor's fire department has 15 trained volunteers, and they often depend on help from town residents during a fire, Young said.

"A lot of people just show up and try to help," Young said. "We just stick some of our regular trained firefighters with them," Young said. "It sounds kind of weird, but it works pretty good. Actually, it works well. Everyone shows up to help a neighbor."

Rideout and Hogan - representing a third of Naylor's six-boy basketball team - stayed at the scene for more than an hour, then left to catch the bus for Monday's Ozark Foothills Conference Tournament game in Greenville.

Smell of fire

"I was a little wore out," Rideout said. "I live too far away to go home and change clothes or anything like that. So I just smelled like a burned house all night. I was pretty tired at the game." Hogan said, "I still had wet pants on."

"We're having a down season. The kids play hard every game - they give everything they can," Roberts said. "As a coach, if they give their best effort, that's all you can do." Hogan said that although the team "takes some pretty hard thumpings, we just stay with it." The majority of Naylor's basketball team are playing varsity for the first time this year; this is also Roberts' first year as a coach.

"I am really proud of those two for doing that, because they didn't think twice about helping someone out. In the scope of life, that's a lot more important than basketball," Roberts said. "Helping people when somebody's in trouble - those things are a whole lot more important than who wins or loses a basketball game, in my opinion. Their attitude was kind of like it was just something that we had to do. They went ahead and played."