Columbine team carries baggage of tragedy

Adam Candee

Friday, March 21, 2003 | 10:23 a.m.

Oh, what sweet potential for miscreant glory rests within that simple saltshaker, and Ryan White certainly notices this perfect opportunity.

The parking-lot game of "capture the flag" already thwarted by Sunset Station hotel security, and the novelty of playing guitar for tips in the casino worn off, the Columbine (Colo.) High baseball team sits more than a day into its time-killing efforts before a weekend of games against Las Vegas teams.

He and his teammates engaged in an after-dinner group interview around a ballroom table Wednesday night. White, a senior outfielder, leads the friendly, top-this verbal jousting that does not discriminate among targets.

"Everybody gets made fun of on this team," Columbine senior Brice Wells said. "You don't go a day without having something said to you."

Little does Ben Hackett know that he is a different kind of target for White, who has been stealthily emptying the salt below the table, all over the junior pitcher's pants and in his shoes for a good five minutes.

Score one for White when Hackett looks down, and the group bursts out in laughter.

"We know how to present ourselves," White joked. "Too bad there's not media day."

In essence, every day has been media day for the past four years at Columbine, whose name alone still evokes memories of the horrific April 1999 school shooting that left 13 people dead, and unnerved both the Littleton, Colo., community and the entire country.

This group of Columbine seniors was the first freshman class to enter school after the massacre. They remember being locked down in their eighth grade classrooms, watching the surreal day unfold on CNN with the rest of the world. Their formative years have been spent in a media fishbowl, and cameras and questions do not faze them.

"We don't really know the difference between a different kind of high school," Wells said. "When we walked in, that's what high school was to us. We didn't know anything different and we didn't know what is was like before or after."

Yet every calm word about their desire to leave April 20, 1999, in the past suggests they are 17-year-old boys from any high school in America, not "kids from Columbine."

"I don't know why everybody else hasn't put it behind them," Wells said. "I don't know why everybody else is still focused on it and still making a big deal."

A living memorial

These kids do it all. Senior catcher Tanner Rogers, a Georgia State baseball signee, also quarterbacked Columbine's 5A Colorado state championship football team. The Rebels' basketball team made a run through the playoffs with the help of senior outfielder Lorens Knudsen. Senior southpaw pitcher Chris Skalet recently rolled a 247 game, earning him the unofficial "best bowler at Columbine" label from his baseball kin.

The athletic talent at Columbine showed through Thursday against Las Vegas when the Rebels escaped with an 11-10 victory. Hackett sweated out the win and Skalet used a nasty fastball to work around a seventh-inning runner and earn a save in Columbine's first of four games over spring break.

"We're just out here to play ball," Columbine coach Chuck Gillman said. "We just want to play. We think we're a pretty good team this year."

The Rebels likely enjoyed a day on a fairly anonymous high school campus where they could just play ball. Though nearly four years have passed since the shootings, this group of Columbine students still walks through the halls of a living memorial.

Tourists regularly come on campus to gawk and take pictures. Tour buses drive by in summertime, as if to pay homage to the site. The unwelcome flow seems endless to the new generation of Columbine students.

"You just want to run down there and tell them everyone that was here left," Rogers said. "This school is very changed. It's just like, why do you guys have to keep pushing stuff?"

A philosophy professor from distant Villanova University approached Gillman this season while he tended to the field, wanting to know about the shootings. Gillman, the second-year coach who lives across the street from Columbine, did not know what to say.

"They all want to know what happened," Gillman said. "We don't know. It just happened. There's not a soul in that school that knows why it happened."

The players go through the same intrusive experiences, said senior outfielder Miguel Vicuna.

"Some people even come up to us during practice, saying where was this or where did that happen," Vicuna said. "It's like, man, I'm trying to practice. It's getting ridiculous sometimes."

Past is present

Still, the kids handle the inquiries as part of everyday life in Littleton, and Gillman feels they do so with grace and composure that emerged as a lesson from the tragedy.

"They have learned that you have to be respectful of everyone, " Gillman said.

In some ways, though, it seems respect among peers at Columbine is still earned in the same juvenile ways it is on many high school campuses. Though talk of bullying by jocks emerged as a possible factor in the shootings, Wells said that some typical hazing returned the next year.

"Nothing ever changed," Wells said. "Freshman year, we got thrown in water puddles -- wet snow leaves those nice cold puddles on the field. We all got thrown into those."

In fact, they still talk about returning the icy favor to this year's youngsters, which should be easy to do once the 7 feet of snow that fell in the Denver area this week begins to thaw.

The Rebels will worry about the snow later, though, as they face off with Desert Pines today, and Coronado and Basic Saturday.

For now, it's two more simple days of baseball and sunshine, where the neon of Las Vegas does something so wonderfully opposite its purpose, providing the Columbine players with comforting anonymity.

"We're past it," Wells said. "Why can't everybody else get past it?"