Metea Valley's Titiner keeps expanding fundraising efforts

Elise Titiner has no problem with commitment.

"When I find something that I like, I like to stick with that," the Metea Valley senior said.

A softball player, over the last eight years she's spent her springs and summers honing her pitching abilities.

A bassoon player since the fifth grade, she's played in Metea Valley's Wind Ensemble since sophomore year.

Also since her sophomore year, Titiner has benefitted the Smashing Walnuts Foundation, which targets pediatric brain cancer. The "walnut" was a tumor that in 2013 killed a 10-year-old Virginia girl, Gabriella Miller, who had relatives attending the Titiner family's synagogue, Congregation Etz Chaim in Lombard.

Elise Titiner grabbed on to that cause and remained steadfast.

In this space we've "previewed" each of her prior fundraisers surrounding softball games between Metea Valley and Waubonsie Valley. From soliciting pledges per strikeouts by Mustangs pitchers to selling T-shirts and baked goods to the game-day chuck-a-duck contest to outright donations, Titiner's inspiration has generated about $10,000 toward the foundation, said her father, Steven.

(A local organization, Community Foundation of the Fox River Valley, accepts donations to the Smashing Walnuts Foundation.)

She even received a Spirit of Sportsmanship Award at the Daily Herald's Prep Sports Excellence Awards in 2014.

"Elise has taken over complete responsibility for the cancer event," said Metea Valley softball coach Kris Kalivas, the former Waubonsie coach whose ties to both programs make the venture a natural. "She has communicated with Waubonsie Valley, all of the coaches in our program, as well as the athletes in our program. Each year she has tried to make the event bigger and better."

This year's fundraiser is on April 20. In addition to the softball teams, the Metea and Waubonsie girls soccer teams are playing after the softball game and have planned their own fundraising strategies.

"I'm hoping it'll just bring more attention to the whole thing and reach a bigger audience, so I'm really excited about that," Titiner said.

Perhaps the most uplifting facet of her journey is still in the making.

Shelving softball after the spring, this summer Titiner will be an intern at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, conducting research on Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG), the clinical name for the tumor that felled Gabriella Miller.

"At this point I'm hoping to make it my career," Titiner said. "I want to do research in college and later."

She will attend the University of Michigan and aims to earn a master's degree in four years, then go to medical school - though the emotional strain of working as a physician rather than as a researcher "may be too much for me," she said.

"It's going to be a lot of work, but I'm hoping to make it happen," Titiner said of her lofty goals.

Once armed with passion she's hard to deter. Results on display April 20 - and in a promising future.

"I really hope that people can see what I'm doing and (that) it grabs one person's attention and makes them see something in the world or take action," Titiner said. "So many people don't, and it's so important."

All for one

The sixth annual DuPage Valley Conference ALS Challenge to raise funds and awareness on Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), this Friday and Saturday at Schaumburg Boomers Stadium, could be a poignant affair.

Wheaton Warrenville South graduate and baseball coach Tim Brylka started the fundraiser, and also helped establish a charitable summer golf outing, after the 2009 ALS diagnosis of his Tigers and Millikin University baseball and football teammate, Brian Schnurstein.

Shortly after last year's outing - which added to the more than $25,000 it has donated to the ALS Association Greater Chicago Chapter - Schnurstein passed away on May 19, 2015.

"I'm sure it's going to get to me when it gets closer to the day," Brylka said earlier this week. "It'll be tough not having him there. But when we set out doing this, ALS is unbeaten so we had an idea this day would come. The fight is never-ending. Brian's not here, but other people are going to be in the same boat."

And thus this year's event will raise funds for the ALS Association as well as for the Brian Schnurstein Foundation, set up by Brian's older brother, Ray. Initial plans for the Schnurstein Foundation, Brylka said, include financial aid for Brian and Lindsay Schnurstein's daughter, Kylie, a possible scholarship, and help to families suffering from ALS.

Lake Park and St. Charles North, whose coach, Todd Genke, wanted to be involved, start hacking at 7:30 p.m. Friday in Schaumburg. Four DVC games are on tap Saturday starting at 11 a.m. Raffles, a silent auction (lots of golf outings to plush courses) and games devised by Brylka's marketing class will liven things up and hopefully rake in cash.

"There'll be a lot of baseball and hopefully some fun prizes for people to get involved with," said Brylka, who will have his entire program volunteer at the May 14 Walk to Defeat ALS at Cantigny Park in Wheaton.

Like Brylka, Naperville North athletic director Bob Quinn - who coached both Brylka and Schnurstein in the late 1990s when Quinn was WW South's baseball coach - is impressed that all DVC programs, including newcomers Waubonsie Valley, Neuqua Valley and Metea Valley, have enthusiastically aided the DVC Challenge.

Quinn also is impressed with Brylka and his mates who supported Schnurstein.

"This is exactly what we want our kids to do, see them taking care of each other," Quinn said. "I see it with teachers and coaches, and with Brian's illness and death I saw it with his classmates."

Standing on his head

If the game has a net, a goalkeeper occasionally requires an octopus-like effort to defend it.

Metea Valley boys water polo goalie Riley Byrne certainly defended it in an 8-7 win over St. Charles North on April 5. Byrne mounted the second-best save total in IHSA boys history.

His 22 saves tied him with Oak Park's Scott Dunlavey, in a 2004 game, behind Rob O'Brien's 28 stops for Stevenson in 2013.

Mustangs coach Andrew Peterman said that with Metea defenders Cam Gidlow and Matt Flanders cutting off angles in front of Byrne, porous defense "was not the case."

"Out of 22 (stops) there were a handful with him against another player where he had to make outstanding saves, but there was nothing getting by him that night," said Peterman, a 1994 Naperville Central graduate and a product of that outstanding polo program.

A junior who goes about 6-foot-1 and 185 pounds, Byrne backed up Metea's starting keepers the last two years as the junior varsity goalie. He got the varsity nod this season.

"He's a very intelligent player so he reads the field really well, directs the defense and he's got strong legs under him so he can move side to side in the goal really well," Peterman said.

The coach said Byrne's highest saves total before the St. Charles North game had been "low teens," 12 or 13. He's proven he can stop a shelling, but doesn't necessarily need to keep proving it.

"There's something to be said with not getting that many, too," Peterman said. "It shows his skills, but we don't want it to happen every time."

doberhelman@dailyherald.com

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