Lynden’s Biggest Win: The Charlie Ayres Story

BY MAKAYLA SPARKS – For Whatcom Preps

Last Friday night, Lynden senior football captain Charlie Ayres stepped in to fill the role of quarterback in one of the Lions’ toughest games this season. Three weeks earlier, doctors were telling him his athletic career was probably over.

Lynden was set to play Archbishop Murphy on Friday, October 6th and all went according to plan until the game concluded. As Ayres, also a member of the Lynden basketball program, began to celebrate the win and take photos with his family, he started to notice something was off.

“I started to feel hazy and couldn’t get my heart rate to slow down,” Ayres explained.

As the team headed into the locker room, starting quarterback Brant Heppner saw Ayres sitting with his head down and upon going to check on him, realized that he wasn’t ok, saying, “He was trying to drink water, but he was just spitting it out.”

Along with being unable to drink, Ayres was struggling to control his breathing. As the situation grew worse, Heppner and his teammate Zach Welch took Ayres outside to get some fresh air. Heppner then went to find head coach Blake VanDalen.

“Brant Heppner came around the corner and said something’s wrong with Charlie,” Coach VanDalen remembered.

Ayres said he was fully aware of what was happening as the events started to unfold. “It was a shocking feeling. I wasn’t passed out, I just couldn’t get my body under control.”

After sending his brother to get the Lynden trainer, Duane Korthuis, VanDalen attempted to calm Ayres down. When Korthuis took over caring for Ayres, VanDalen stepped aside to call Ayres’ parents.

“I walked back over and that was when Korthuis said you need to call 911, it’s not going well,” VanDalen said.

Korthuis was concerned that Ayres needed oxygen and they didn’t have any at the faculty.

The situation increasingly grew more serious and as the aid car pulled into the stadium, VanDalen said that was when it got really scary. “I turned back to Charlie and that was when his head dropped. We picked his head back up, he wasn’t opening his eyes anymore, and I couldn’t tell he was breathing.”

In a sigh of relief for everyone involved at that point, the paramedics were able to get Ayres oxygen and he was able to open his eyes and hold his head up again. When Ayres arrived at the hospital his heart was resting at 140 beats per minute and he was kept in the hospital for the weekend with doctors worried about irregularities in his heart.

During that time, Ayres received news no athlete ever wants to hear. “They basically told me that you probably aren’t going to be able to play football or possibly basketball ever again.”

The next week, Ayres still attended football practices, serving as an assistant coach for the offense. Meanwhile, he was pushing for a second opinion. His family decided to schedule an appointment with the Seattle Seahawks trainer, a doctor at the University of Washington.

“It was just like, hopefully, this works, and hopefully, I’m okay to play,” Ayres noted about the appointment.

That hope came to fruition when the UW doctor cleared Ayres to return to action.

“It felt like a weight was lifted off my shoulders,” Ayres said.

When Ayres learned he would be able to return to practice that afternoon, he didn’t tell anyone until he ran down the hill to the Lynden practice field with his pads and full uniform on. Heppner knew it was going to be good news when he saw Ayres coming down the hill.

“During a water break, coach brought the team in to announce he had been cleared and the whole team just exploded in cheers,” said Heppner.

“They were honestly more happy than I was,” Ayres said about his teammates and how grateful he is for the brotherhood of Lynden football. “There’s truly nothing like it.”

For Coach VanDalen, the whole experience was a roller coaster of emotions that couldn’t have ended any better.

“When his eyes rolled back, that was the darkest moment of my 27 years of coaching. When he called me (to say he was cleared), those goosebumps were pure joy. We care about winning and losing but to me, we won the championship the day Charlie said ‘I get to play football again’.”