Sports > December 6, 2007

By Jeff Merski | Opinion editor

It all started with a son-to-father phone call. For Director of Baseball Operations Fred Worth, it set in action a sequence of events that would bring a group from the university up to Washington, D.C., to visit a group of wounded soldiers at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

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Freshman pitcher Eli Robins stuffs a care package for the troops at Walter Reed. (Jeff Merski/Old Gold & Black)

Worth had received a phone call from his son, who lives in the Washington area and volunteers at Walter Reed one night a week. Worth’s son floated the idea of getting some student-athletes involved by coming up to visit the facility, and Worth posed the idea to the baseball team.

“Our team said unanimously that we’d love to do it,” redshirt senior pitcher Charlie Mellies said, one of five students that went on the trip.

The idea was brought to the Student Athletic Advisory Council and took off from there throughout the athletic department.

“Before we knew it, we had all the athletic teams wanting to do something and it expanded that way,” Worth said. Senior women’s tennis player Alex Hirsch was one student who really wanted to get involved with the project. “I e-mailed Charlie about it that night,” she said.

To make this trip a success, the student-athletes spent a lot of time and energy fundraising and putting together roughly 50 care packages that would be delivered to soldiers.

In addition to getting donations from companies around Winston-Salem and the southeastern United States, the group also participated in a fundraising drive at the Nov. 17 football game against N.C. State.

“We had little kids giving us quarters and pennies and people donating $5, $10, $20,” Mellies said. “One guy gave us a $100 bill. It was pretty cool to see the entire Wake Forest and Winston-Salem community pouring out for this cause.”

In addition, a group of athletes including roughly half of the baseball team came together Nov. 29 to assemble the care packages, which included T-shirts, sweatpants, hats, magazines and a thank-you letter signed by Worth, Athletics Director Ron Wellman and baseball Head Coach Rick Rembielak.

The group, comprising of Worth, Rembielak, Hirsch, Mellies, redshirt junior outfielder Weldon Woodall, junior pitcher Brad Kledzik, junior cheerleader Nicki Rembielak and Mike Piscetelli, ’05, from Sports Marketing departed Dec. 1 for Washington to deliver the packages to the wounded soldiers, as well as to meet with House Minority Leader Rep. John Boehner and Sen. Richard Burr, ’78, for tours of the White House and the Capitol building.

The Deacons became the first NCAA team to visit the medical center, according to Mellies. “We are the first NCAA team to go up there and thank them, which I think is pretty bad since the war has been going on three or four years now,” he said.

During the trip, the group members met with approximately 15 soldiers, spending an average of 10 minutes with each of them.

Members of the group gave similar reasons as to why they would devoted a weekend to going to Washington to meet with these soldiers.

“The overall idea was to do such a simple, small way of saying thank you,” Kledzik said.

“We were very fortunate to come to a university like Wake Forest where we play a game that we love and these are the men and women that sacrifice those opportunities to go and fight for our freedoms and give us the opportunities to play this game that we love,” Mellies said. “We want to communicate that we are very grateful.”

The group did not know what to expect when they visited Walter Reed. “I wasn’t sure who I was going to meet or what I was going to see,” Nicki Rembielak said.

However, they were surprised by what they encountered. “The reaction was unexpected,” Woodall said.

“I was expecting to go in there and see these guys really depressed.”

“You went in thinking you’d feel sorry for them and you didn’t, not at all,” Worth said. “Not even a little bit did you feel sorry for them. They made you feel really, really proud to not only be an American but a human being to have that resolve.”

When it came to delivering the care packages, “they were very happy and appreciative of us bringing gifts but every one of them told us, ‘Thank you for the gifts, but thank you even more for coming and talking to us. Thanks for coming to talk to us, just letting us see people our age that actually care and support what we’re doing’,” Mellies said.

Mellies said that the soldiers discussed their experiences in Iraq and wanted to know about the students, asking them questions about baseball, college athletics and girls.

However, “(the students were) stunned that the soldiers were thanking them,” Worth said. During their visit to Walter Reed, everyone from the university received a coin from a sergeant-major at the center that described the warrior ethos.

He said it meant a lot to the soldiers that we had people their age coming up there and acknowledging and recognizing the sacrifices they’ve made so he wanted to thank us,” Mellies said.

“We got some goosebumps when we got this,” Rick Rembielak said. “This isn’t given up freely to anybody.”

Worth and Rick Rembielak both said they hope that this trip would not be the last. “If the school lets us do this, I think it’s something we could do every year,” Rick Rembielak said.

“I would love to go again,” Nicki Rembielak said. “They were just excited we were there visiting.”

In the end, everyone agreed that the trip was a very moving experience.

“Powerful is a really good word to describe it,” Worth said. “You think there’s not enough in the boxes, but you take the box into the room and they just set the box aside, say ‘thank you’ and they want to talk. It wasn’t the gift that made them happy you were there, it was that you were there to talk to them.”

“What we did was nothing,” said Rick Rembielak. “You didn’t feel like you did enough going in there.”

“It really puts life into perspective,” Hirsch said. “It makes losing a tennis match, which normally I would be really upset about, not seem as important.”