The Pink Game is more than just volleyball and an oversized check for Rock Hill High cancer survivors

Wigs don’t work for physically active cancer patients, especially volleyball coaches. Rock Hill High head volleyball coach Cindy Elder and her longtime assistant Janie Julian know this from experience.

“The wig wasn’t really for me,” Julian said on Tuesday afternoon before the Bearcats played Nation Ford. “When you’re moving around a lot it can get…”

Elder started laughing.

“I looked over at Janie one time when she was wearing one in 2015 and I saw her on the bench and it had gone up…”

“It goes up like a conehead,” Julian said.

They laughed.

“You try to find as much humor as you can,” Julian said.

They were still laughing and smiling later in the day while holding an oversized check presenting $2,500 to the American Cancer Society before Tuesday’s contest against the Falcons. The match was christened “The Pink Game” but it was much more than just an annual October tradition for Elder and Julian.

They’ve both had serious illnesses twice, Elder beating breast cancer two times - 13 years apart - and Julian flooring Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, then breast cancer in the last couple of years.

“There in a stretch of three or four years, we’ve had it around here a lot,” said Julian. “These kids have been extremely resilient and positive to us.”

Elder has coached at Rock Hill since 1990. She and Julian have known each other for 35 years, since college, but it wasn’t until 2004 that they began coaching together. That was the first time Elder was diagnosed with breast cancer, right before the volleyball season started. Julian was refereeing but put that aside to help Elder coach Rock Hill’s team while fighting the illness. Before the big rivalry game against Northwestern that year, Elder’s players painted a bearcat paw on her bald dome.

Nearly 10 years passed before Elder or Julian had to grapple with cancer, or death, or wigs or keeping the cool fall air off a bald head. Julian’s turn to fight came in 2013 when she was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. She remembers clearly her first trip to Charlotte for chemotherapy.

“The first time is such a cultural shock,” Julian said.

“The chemo nurses, they’re angels,” added Elder. “Could you imagine doing that job every day?”

Julian finally finished her chemo treatments in 2013. At her next doctor’s appointment she learned she had breast cancer.

“Life is not always gonna be good to you,” she said.

After a short-lived flit with the wig, Julian ditched her fake hair. She rocked baldness fully. She didn’t paint a paw on her head like Elder, but they wore white ballcaps with pink bearcat paws on the side.

The pair would carpool to their Charlotte oncologist together, Elder attending her follow-up appointments then sitting with her friend while Julian was hooked to the chemo drip slowly plying her body with the poison necessary to kill the cancer.

It was again Julian’s turn to comfort and console this year when Elder was diagnosed with breast cancer in January for the second time. It was not a recurrence, but rather a new instance. Elder had a mastectomy in March, fortunate that the cancer was detected early enough and had not spread in her body.

“I was just getting a little bit cocky about it because I had gotten to the point where I didn’t have to have a diagnostic mammogram, just a regular screening,” said Elder, who was 13 years in remission.

The team lifted its coach.

Elder didn’t fix a meal for three months as JV coach Brigette McSheehan organized a sign-up sheet for the players’ parents to take turns feeding their stricken coach.

Paper cut-outs shaped like volleyballs inscribed with encouraging messages or Bible verses were taped on the cabinets in Elder’s small office in the back of the Rock Hill High main gymnasium and greeted her when she returned in May.

Volleyball - the game, the team - was vital for Julian and Elder during their multiple treatments and recoveries.

“It’s not fun to be around someone that’s sick but kids don’t care. They don’t care about that kind of stuff, they’re gonna love you no matter what,” Julian said. “To me that was the biggest kind of energy behind you to get through it.”

There are so many lessons to take from Elder and Julian’s experience that make Tuesday’s Pink Game emblematic of more than four sets of volleyball or donated money. Look at the smiles on Elder and Julian’s face; they represent the importance of friendship, of perseverance and that how you respond is just as important as what you’re going through.

“It gives you a different perspective,” Elder said as the Bearcats JV warmed up on the court. “We want to win tonight, don’t get me wrong. I’m as competitive as anybody. But right now, we’re just thankful for our team, to get to compete, to still be working, to still be alive, to still be having fun with those kids. Hopefully, we’ll be doing it a long time.”

This story was originally published October 4, 2017 at 11:26 AM with the headline "The Pink Game is more than just volleyball and an oversized check for Rock Hill High cancer survivors."