Perryville soccer team's special cause: Pirates honor teammate who died over the summer

Like many other parents sitting on the sideline of their child's soccer game, Mark and Holly Behrle often find themselves searching for their son on the field, especially when the action moves to the portion of the field normally patrolled by him.

"You still look for him," Mark said. "You see his spot when somebody misses the ball and you're like 'Oh, it's not him.'"

It's not him because this July, six days into the family trip-of-a-lifetime at Disney World, Ryan Anthony Behrle collapsed at the park's entrance and died two days later.

He was 17 years old, and, until the moment he leaned onto the turnstile next to him and told his dad his left hand would not work, he was in perfect health as far as anyone knew.

The story of his death is heartbreaking and, though doctors can explain it, still impossible to understand.

Perryville soccer players wear #15 bands in tribute to teammate Ryan Behrle, who died suddenly in July. (Kit Doyle)

But it's Ryan's life, and not his death, that brought his family to this game. He didn't just play soccer on the Perryville High School team. He was a soccer player.

He began playing about the same time he started kindergarten, after a summer spent playing T-ball. Holly asked him if he'd like to try soccer next, and Ryan said yes.

"He wasn't very coordinated, though," Holly recalled, still sitting on the blanket. "When he was young, it sounds bad, but he was bad. He ran really funny. He just couldn't run and we'd sit on the sidelines just laughing and saying, 'Oh my gosh, how long is soccer going to last for him?'"

But Ryan never quit, and by the time he was in the fifth grade, he had his parents asking, "What happened?"

Ryan was selected to play on traveling tournament teams and continued to play in the Perryville youth leagues until the eighth grade. He then transitioned into the adult league, in part because there was no soccer program at the high school at the time. He'd also go to practices for his sister Madison's soccer team, which Holly coaches.

Ryan Behrle died while vacationing in Florida with his family this summer. (Submitted by Holly Behrle)

"He'd take them off to the side and do little drills with them and stuff and work one-on-one with the girls that needed work with and he really enjoyed it," she said. "You could tell."

He and his friends would gather at the tennis courts in Perryville Park to play six-on-six, or however many the gathered crowd called for, in the small space to increase the speed and precision of the game.

According to Chaz Favier, who would have been one of Ryan's two senior teammates this season, the games often went "all night long, and Ryan was always there playing with us."

Favier, a midfielder, and Ryan, a defensive fullback, played soccer in the same leagues, but usually not the same teams, since early in their elementary school days.

"I always played against him, and I always hated it," Favier said. "He was always better than me. I was always going up against him and he always beat me."

That gave Favier one more reason to be excited when it officially was decided that Perryville would field a soccer team for the first time last season.

"When we found out, we all had like a group meeting kind of, the older guys that played soccer," Favier said. "We went out and played one night and talked about it. Ryan was pretty excited because he'd always played and he wanted to play."

Jerry Fulton, who had coached Ryan off and on for years, was hired to lead the high school team.

"I remember at the first soccer meeting we had he was one of the first kids there. I mean, he was going to play soccer," Fulton said. "If he wasn't working, he was playing soccer. That's what he did."

Mark, Holly and Madison were there to watch as Ryan started every game as a junior wearing No. 15 for the Pirates on their way to a 16-7 season.

"He wasn't a senior, but he was one of the older ones and he always tried to step up and help others and kind of get them better," Holly said.

"He always tried to better himself all the time, too. He'd really work at things until he'd be as perfect as he could be at it. He's always about the competition and making himself better and making other people better so that everybody could be better together," she said, transitioning from the past tense to the present tense as she often does while talking about Ryan.

This season, there are 11 No. 15s on the field for Perryville at all times. Each player on the team wears a black band with Ryan's number stitched on it, a reminder to all that they are playing for him because he can't play with them.

The vacation

The bag Ryan took with him to Florida for a weeklong stay at Disney World with his family still is packed. It's lying on his bed in his room.

The Behrles left Perryville on July 2 and spent the next five days staying out late together, watching fireworks and, in general, soaking up the Disney World experience. Ryan went off by himself one day and returned with a newly purchased Adidas jacket, which his family poked fun at him for wearing in the 90-degree heat.

The highlight of their sixth day spent at Disney World was to be lunch at Magic Kingdom. Despite a late night out Tuesday, Holly woke up early Wednesday and took the short bus ride down to the park to explore the shopping at Magic Kingdom while the rest of the family slept in and agreed to meet her for their reservation.

Mark, Madison and Ryan left their hotel room together about 12:15. Ryan seemed tired but otherwise fine as they walked up the park's entrance.

"I went through first, Madison was right behind me and then we turned around for Ryan and he was kind of leaning up against the turnstile," Mark said. "He looked kind of white and pale and I asked, I said, 'Are you OK?'"

Ryan said no. His left hand wouldn't work and he couldn't get his wallet out of his pocket, where his pass to the park was stowed.

Mark ran to his son. He suddenly was very hot and just a few moments later his entire left side stopped working.

And then it got worse.

He began to scream in pain, to scream that his head hurt. His speech became slurred and his words became hard to understand.

Ryan was rushed to the nearest hospital where, after a CT scan, Mark and Holly simply were told that he had a brain bleed and that he needed to be moved to another hospital.

After a delay due to the weather, Ryan was transported by helicopter to Orlando Regional Medical Center, where a team was waiting to perform surgery.

"[The doctor] told us that he had had a massive hemorrhage and that there was so much blood that it actually shifted his brain over to the left side of the skull," Holly said. "He said they had removed all of the blood and that the surgery was successful and that his brain went back to where it was supposed to go.

"He said everything looked real good at that point except that people who come in with this condition, less than 50 percent will survive. So at that point you're hearing that your child has less than 50 percent chance of survival and he keeps telling us, 'Well he's young and he's strong and he's an athlete, so he's got all that working for him and you got him here quickly.' He said if it had been a little bit later, he wouldn't even have made it," she said, cutting her thought short as tears streamed down from behind her sunglasses.

Ryan woke up around 11 p.m. Mark shakes his head almost as if still in disbelief when Holly explains how alert Ryan was. Despite the tube down his throat, he continued to try to talk and pelted his parents with questions. When they couldn't understand him, he would trace letters on Holly's hands to spell what he wanted.

He also talked to a nurse, who, like Ryan, knew the alphabet in sign language. He told her he didn't remember what happened and she told him that the best thing he could do for himself was to stay calm.

"Things were looking really good," Holly said. "We were real hopeful. They took him for a CT scan at 3 a.m. to make sure there was no more bleeding and the radiologist even said, 'I don't even know why he's here. It doesn't look like anything happened to him. It looks great.' So we're like this is good, we're going to be taking him home."

By the next morning, though, Ryan's demeanor had changed. He still was awake, but the Behrles' usually laid-back son suddenly was much more agitated than he had been a day earlier.

"We noticed a huge difference," Holly said. "Everything bothered him, every little thing."

Mark was worried about his son's mannerisms because he said they reminded him of when Ryan first collapsed.

It was during this time, though, that Holly shared a moment with her son that she'll never forget. Ryan tried for several minutes to communicate what he wanted with Holly and a nurse who did not know sign language. He appeared to want a drink, but he knew that was not allowed.

Holly racked her memory, desperately trying to figure out what he needed and eventually realized that he wanted the inside of his mouth swabbed with a wet Q-tip, something another nurse had done earlier.

The look on his face said thank you and he raised one of his hands to make four signs. Holly immediately recognized the last sign as meaning 'I love you.' She also recognized the shape of the letter "o" in the middle.

He had signed, "Mom, I love you."

Around noon Thursday, about 24 hours after this nightmare sequence of events had started, Ryan was taken from his room to have an angiogram done in hopes of learning what had caused the initial hemorrhage.

The Behrles made a quick trip down to the cafeteria, where they purchased their food and immediately returned to the ICU in case Ryan got back early from the procedure.

"As we were walking down the hall with our food, the nurse is waving me in," Holly said. "She's like, 'Hurry up, the doctor wants to talk to you.'"

Holly rushed to the phone where she was told that they had discovered that Ryan's brain once again was swelling, this time so rapidly that the doctor suggested what he called an aggressive move, removing a bone flap from Ryan's skull to allow more room for his brain to expand.

They never got to perform the angiogram, but the doctor told Mark and Holly that he almost was certain that Ryan's hemorrhage had been caused by an arteriovenous malformation, or AVM, which is an abnormal connection between the arteries and veins in the brain. People are born with the condition, but often do not know it until it ruptures.

"He basically told us when he came in he had less than 50 percent chance of survival," Holly said. "He said now, with the swelling, he said less than that. He was basically preparing us because he didn't think he was going to make it."

The Behrles spent one more night staring at their son, now in a coma, through the glass doors of his hospital room because that was the one thing they felt they could do to help him. The doctor had requested that Ryan be kept in a low stimulation environment, with little light and as little noise as possible.

"They said we could go in his room if we wanted to but don't talk to him, don't touch him, just stand there, so we couldn't do anything for him but pray," Holly said "We were helpless."

Ryan never woke up again. Friday morning his reflexes, which had been the one positive the family had clung to, changed from the good kind to the bad and Mark and Holly had to face the news that their son was going to die.

Two doctors explained to them at length Ryan's condition and what had caused it, and they made the painful decision to donate Ryan's organs.

On one hand, they knew the daughter of family friends had been saved by a liver transplant and that it would be rewarding to provide that service to other families. But on the other hand, they had to deal with the cruel reality of selecting which of Ryan's organs to give away and that he would have to be kept alive on life support for several hours while the organs were placed.

"I said organ donations saved their baby's life," Holly said, referring to their friend's child. "I said if I can save somebody else's life through Ryan, I want to do that. My baby can't be saved, but I want to save somebody else's baby this heartache."

Ryan's heart went to a mom in her early 30s with two kids and two days to live, his liver went to a grandpa. But Holly's favorite story is about the 19-year-old boy who received one of Ryan's kidneys.

In the letter the family received telling them whom the organs where given to, it said the boy was looking forward to lifting weights again and to playing football.

"I just cried and cried and cried when I read the letter," Holly said. "A little part of him is still out there in the world, living on through someone else and it's a comfort knowing that."

Ryan was buried is his white home soccer jersey. He was the first person to ever wear that jersey and the No. 15 for Perryville soccer, and he will be the last.

When Mark called Fulton to ask if it would be possible for them to have the jersey, the coach responded that he already had it ready and waiting for them. He also told Mark that the number would be retired.

Three of Ryan's soccer coaches, including Fulton, and three of his teammates, including Favier, served as pallbearers.

The team gave Mark and Holly Ryan's away jersey in a shadow box complete with a team picture and the signature of every player on last year's team. Even Ryan's signature was included since he had signed it the year before.

It is those signs of support and love for Ryan that bring Holly and Mark back to the sideline this season. Watching the game is hard, but it's also fun. It's strange, and it's also where they know they belong and where Ryan would want them to be.

"The first one I watched, it was odd and felt funny because I'm like who am I cheering for?" Holly said. "I'm here cheering for the team, but you're always rooting for your own kid and I didn't have that."

She did have the team's promise not to forget Ryan. A promise it keeps by chanting his name before the game, by wearing the black bands with his number emblazoned on them and by talking about him even though it hurts.

"They thanked me for being there that first game," Holly said. "It just means a lot. Some of them have told me they've been out to the cemetery to visit his grave and it means a lot that they're remembering him. They're good kids."

"I'll always be a Perryville High School soccer fan -- all the time now," she said.

That only seems right because her son will always be No. 15.