Lebanon
Willeman sprinted to his right after the snap and rose onto the tips of his toes in an attempt to lob a screen pass over the charging Staiger. A split-second after the lanky sophomore released the ball, the Marauder linebacker hit him at full speed, wrapping his arms around the signal-caller’s torso and flipping him backwards.
The pair, weighing more than a combined 300 pounds, tipped like an unbalanced seesaw in midair, then crashed to earth upon the back of Willeman’s helmet. The force with which the Lebanon player was driven into the grass rivaled the impact seen in major college or NFL games.
“I started to get up and then went back down,” said Willeman, recalling that a nearby game official urged him not to move. “I realized I wasn’t going anywhere, and I knew it was kind of bad. I kind of blacked out, and then I was dizzy.”
Willeman suffered a concussion, a deep cut below his bottom lip and a cracked bone in the back of his neck. By the next week, his neck and chin were immobilized 24 hours a day in a brace with a tray on which his jaw rested. There was real concern the three-sport athlete might never again compete.
“We needed to be positive with him while he was trying to come back,” Lebanon boys basketball coach Kieth Matte said. “We always talked about ‘when,’ not ‘if.’ But in reality, it was always ‘if.’ ”
Which is what made it notable when Willeman, only recently cleared by a pediatric neurosurgeon, entered the Raiders’ first hoops game last month — and immediately took a charge. With a Kennett High player driving toward the basket, the kid wearing Lebanon No. 5 established defensive position and willingly let his opponent run over him in order to draw a foul and earn Lebanon the ball.
“First play back,” Matte marveled. “It was kind of inspiring and kind of crazy. This is a chaos sport, and you’re never sure when guys are going to wind up on the floor. I have to admit that when Jon does it, I hold my breath.”
As does everyone who knows Willeman’s story. He’s the youngest of four children of Don, a local pastor, and Dori, a former teacher now with a religious organization connected to Dartmouth. Sisters Megan and Kate won a field hockey state title at Lebanon High. Jake, a Raider senior, is part of the cross country, track and Nordic skiing teams who left football after a compound leg fracture during a junior high season.
Dori Willeman said Jon swam and rode a bike at age 3 and was playing youth sports as soon as possible. He’s a baseball shortstop and a basketball guard and, after playing running back on the Raiders freshman football team, he was switched to quarterback and handed the varsity reins.
“When I told my parents, they were kind of confused about why I was the QB,” the 5-foot-11, 145-pound Willeman said. “They were scared, because I was smaller than everyone, but I was just nervous about things like missing plays and dropping the snap. I was scared if I messed up in a game that the older players would yell at me.”
Willeman completed 21 of 33 passes for 184 yards and three touchdowns during Lebanon’s first two games and connected on his first five tosses against Hanover, in what began as a tight battle. After the Staiger hit, however, and a hamstring injury that hampered Raiders running back Matt Eylander, the Marauders prevailed, 41-6.
Willeman departed at halftime to get stitches at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, where it was also confirmed that he had suffered a severe concussion. But he said his neck wasn’t hurting at that point, though it ached increasingly in the days that followed. Trying to casually throw a football became excruciating and, four days after the Hanover game, he returned to the hospital for X-rays.
Only three hours later, while watching a Lebanon soccer game, Willeman received a text from his father, who told him upon picking him up in the car that he had a broken neck.
“I kept saying ‘You’re lying,’ ” Willeman said. “We went back to the hospital, and a neck specialist gave me the brace. I slept and showered in it for a month and the pads under it would get stinky, so we had a second set we could change out.”
Said longtime Lebanon football coach Chris Childs: “I was shocked, because we’d never had a neck injury like that. To have him out for the season stunk for us, because he’d come so far and was maturing so much.”
Out of embarrassment, Willeman didn’t go to school the first full day he had the brace. But he screwed up his courage and also overcame his inability to sleep for more than a few hours at a time, which left him exhausted.
“I looked funny, but I just joked about it with other people,” said Willeman, who lost 15 pounds during his enforced layoff from competition and working out. “I didn’t do much schoolwork or take tests for the first two weeks because I couldn’t look down.”
Dori Willeman credits school staff members, including the nurse, certified athletic trainer and learning specialists, for monitoring her son closely, urging him to get follow-up treatment and making his return to classes fairly smooth. He received a standing desk and some texts in audiobook form, but his participation in a driver’s education class had to stop, and he missed a friend’s birthday party that was held at an amusement park.
“We were committed to following the advice of his doctors, and the idea of him sitting out another season was hard for him to stomach,” Dori Willeman said. “Once your kid gets hurt, your tendency is to be more protective, but … there was no medical reason to have him sit out basketball season, and that would have been a decision made out of fear. I don’t want him or us to live that way”
Willeman was voted a 2018 football co-captain after the team’s season ended last fall. That impressed Childs, who’s glad to see his signal-caller back in the weight room with his players and doing well on the basketball court, where he’s competed in each of Lebanon’s 10 games thus far and is averaging 17 minutes and 7.1 points per game.
“We want to be sure there are no lingering problems for him, but he looks good out there,” Childs said.
The all-important vote, however, belongs to mom, and Dori Willeman is exercising her right to wait-and-see when considering a return to football.
“That’s not a decision that we are interested in making yet,” Dori Willeman said. “Let him have a season of just being active. One season at a time.”
Tris Wykes can be reached at twykes@vnews.com or 603-727-3227.