Survivor Stories
They have shown an extraordinary level of resiliency, an ability to overcome personal adversity and a desire to provide comfort and charity.
As a group, the softball players from Viewpoint High in Calabasas are primarily children of privilege, but they are bound by experiences that play no favorites.
Over the last two years, cancer has affected three of the team’s eight seniors. Those three remain heavily involved in charity work, as does another senior teammate.
“We’re so close, not only because we’re bonded by softball and love to play,” senior Kourtney Carlberg said, “but we’ve had these experiences.”
Carlberg’s brother, Kevin, was diagnosed with brain cancer two years ago and given only months to live. But two months ago, she and Kevin, the lead singer for the band Pseudopod, raised $6,000 for the UCLA neurosurgery program by running in the Los Angeles Marathon.
When she took up the cause four months earlier, she had never run more than three miles. Carlberg, who will attend UC Santa Barbara, wasn’t a cross-country runner; she was an outfielder. At Mile 18, when Kevin hit the wall and Kourtney’s legs “felt like they hated me” as she helped him along, her will pushed them through.
First baseman Megan Gold couldn’t place a value on the blanket that third baseman Robyn Strumpf made for her during their sophomore year. That friendship quilt accompanied every sickening, energy-sapping session of chemotherapy as Gold and doctors battled a volleyball-sized malignancy on her ovary.
Gold, who will attend Boston University in the fall, still sleeps under the blanket, and she has grown closer to Carlberg, whose experience with her brother months earlier had prepared her to comfort her teammate.
And certainly, no value could be placed on a teddy bear that Gold kept with her in the hospital, and which she gave to Meryl Staley, a classmate who wasn’t on the team, two months ago. Staley died on April 27, less than two months after she was diagnosed with leukemia.
Megan, a senior, and Meryl, a junior, had met only once, at Meryl’s request, on the fourth floor of Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, the same floor on which Megan stayed.
“We talked about the hospital, a lot about the hair issue, of course,” Megan recounted. “She had questions about schooling and how I finished my work and how I finished out the year. We mostly talked about how it would be when she was through with it.
“I was happy that my experience was something I could use to help her understand what’s in store for her, but also, very selfishly, I was happy to have someone to talk to who understood what I went through.”
Fear gripped Harvard-bound catcher Hayley Bock in September, when her mother, Karlyn, learned she had breast cancer. Hayley turned to her teammates for advice. Her mother’s last chemotherapy treatment was on March 9 and she is currently cancer-free.
“I have this team of incredible kids,” said Viewpoint Coach Pam Oseransky, whose team, which has never gone past the quarterfinals in Southern Section playoffs, is 15-5 and will play a second-round game on Tuesday.
“They all amaze me at what they’ve done at such a young age. They’re just the sweetest group of girls.”
Strumpf, who will attend USC, began a charity called “Project Books and Blankies,” --when she was 12. It has become a nonprofit organization that has raised more than $115,000 in grants and donations, donated more than 17,000 books internationally, and warmed the shoulders of countless disadvantaged children curled up with a book under a quilt either made by Strumpf or gathered by her.
“Not everyone has someone at home to help them with their reading skills,” said Strumpf, who struggled with reading but eventually learned at 9 while curled in a blanket on the lap of a family member, and who has volunteered thousands of hours promoting literacy. “Helping them find the joy of reading is the least I can do.”
Amanda Weidman, an outfielder headed to Columbia, is the West Coast representative for the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy. She has spoken in Washington on the subject the last three years and is also on a teen panel for the California Board of Education.
Carlberg, whose father died five years before she enrolled at Viewpoint as a sophomore, had attended public school in Connecticut and had an image of rich kids with money.
“I was surprised to see how many students wanted to be involved in their community,” she said. “I don’t think they’re doing it just because they can, but because they want to.”
Carlberg collected jewelry and more than 300 prom dresses to be distributed to less fortunate teens in the San Fernando Valley through Meet Each Need with Dignity, or MEND.
Gold gathered more than 200 videotapes to begin a film library at Children’s Hospital, a need she discovered during her 31 nights there.
Bock has raised money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation -- her older sister, Meredith, 23, has diabetes -- and volunteers her time with developmentally delayed peers in Thousand Oaks.
This peer-tutoring time is spent assembling puzzles, playing, walking and reading.
“It’s taught me that every achievement is worth celebrating, even small achievements,” Bock said. “And it’s taught me not to take anything for granted.”