WHITEHALL — Whitehall's girls basketball program commemorated 50 winners of the Gerrie & Carl Beausang Female Athlete of the Year award Saturday during its alumni game, inviting all the previous winners of the award back to the school for a celebration.
About half the winners did in fact return; coach Brian Milliron said the program was able to get in touch with nearly all of the 50 winners.
While it wasn't planned, there was some serendipity in Whitehall Middle School being the event's location. The middle school gym was once the varsity gym, where many of the past Beausang award winnners played their games.
(The high school was scheduled to host, but a water main break Friday resulted in the move to the middle school.)
The first winner, Deb Zylstra, Class of 1977, was one of those to return. (Though 2026 will only mark 49 years of the award, the 1982 award was split between Pam Sheesley and Gail Burch, so there have been 50 winners.) Zylstra is described as a dynamic athlete in her day, who was unable to show the full extent of her abilities because there were only two girls sports when she was in school - basketball and gymnastics. She said during the event that she would've loved to play volleyball had it been available.
However, so good an athlete was Zylstra that she, along with twin brother Rob, played on the Whitehall boys tennis team. Girls tennis actually became available to her as a junior, but as the sport overlapped with her favorite sport, basketball, at the time, she chose to stay with the boys team.
"(Coach) Dick Morley would have open gym in the summer for the guys, so I'd just go with my twin brother," Zylstra said. "That obviously helped, that I was playing with the guys...It was such a big part of our life as a group. I don't know what it would have been like without it. They didn't even start girls basketball until I was a freshman. It's a good thing they did."
Some of the award winners played in the game, such as Laura (Kueny) Smith, Trisha Norwood, Abby Seeger, Hannah (Loucks) Mahoney, Jenna (Pesch) Pider, and many more, including, of course, assistant coach Emily MacArthur. With some unusual scoring rules that included between-quarter minigames that added points to the winning team's score, the alumni ended up coming away with a 68-67 win.
MacArthur, who at times played for the current team and the alumni team in the game, was surprised to learn some of the award winners were people she already knew from living in Whitehall; obviously several of them have changed their last names since then.
"Obviously on the actual award, a lot of the women have their maiden names on it, so to see the women come back, I was able to put together who a lot of the women are," MacArthur said. "All these people who, I don't know their maiden names, I didn't realize that they were women in this community that I know who were also winners of the award. It's cool for our girls to see all these people who dedicated their life to Whitehall sports and now they're doing successful things in the world.
"That's what this whole event is about. Coach (Dave) Goodrich in softball, when I was in high school, would say tradition doesn't graduate. All the values that Whitehall basketball has, doing all these events that are above ourselves."
The event was spearheaded by current Whitehall program members Peyton Schultz, a player, and Mayson Milliron, who manages for the team; her dad is Brian, the head coach. Schultz marveled at being able to reconnect with people like Onnyka Dempsey and Ashley TenBrink, who she grew up idolizing.
"We grew up with all these people," Schultz said. "It's cool seeing them coming back to it. That's why I play sports, is from watching them when I was younger."
