Cardinal Newman players pay it forward after Tubbs fire

Only someone who has been there knows the perfect thing to say, the right support to offer.

When the Camp fire destroyed the town of Paradise last year, Cardinal Newman High School students, parents and staff members understood all too well what it felt like to lose everything you had. Just a year prior, the Tubbs fire had burned 20 classrooms, the school library and offices, and burned many families’ homes as well.

In November last year, Newman students and athletes knew instinctively that they had to help Butte County fire victims - and what would make them feel just a little better during one of the worst moments of their lives.

“Sport can provide hope,” said Newman’s dean of student life, Graham Rutherford. “It doesn’t always turn out perfectly, but you can feel good about the sense of effort. … Your team can provide a center for the community.”

Newman students got creative to pay it forward to their Paradise counterparts.

At a Newman football game, students handed out green Support Paradise ribbons and collected cash donations for Paradise High School. Students wrote letters to the community offering support and advice for residents of the Gold Rush-era town in the Sierra foothills east of Chico.

In just a few days, the ribbon donations and gift card drive raised about $6,000 to help Paradise families.

“It was a way we could show our love and compassion for them,” said Becky Scrivanich of Newman’s parent association, who helped lead the effort.

“Cardinal Newman was embraced by so many people immediately after the (Tubbs) fire,” she said. “St. Ignatius in San Francisco immediately put together packages for our teachers. So many gifts were given to our students whose homes were burned.

“We had that immediate gut reaction that we have to do something for these kids.”

Rutherford still wears a ribbon on his jacket.

And the football team has memorialized their fire-affected seasons - 2017 and 2018 - with signs atop the football field’s stands marking the unusual seasons.

The 2017 banner reads “Tested by fire; unbroken and undivided.”

Last season’s marker, along with the team’s record, reads “Remember Paradise: Fate Intervened.”

Team members chose the saying, which combines the nod to Paradise and the way the Cardinals’ season ended. The team ended its playoff run on a coin flip used as a tiebreaker because fire and smoke delayed so many games late in the season.

Offering Paradise support even when their own football season was cut short unexpectedly, and unsatisfactorily, became a life lesson for Newman students, for whom service to others is a significant part of their high school education.

“It made them able to apply their education in a very active way,” Rutherford said.

Other organizations have stepped up to help other fire-ravaged communities after the firestorms of 2017, including the Mark West Little League, which was hit hard by loss in 2017 and by 2018 was ready to help others. When the Carr fire struck parts of Shasta and Trinity counties in August 2018, the Mark West ballplayers and parents arranged an equipment drive for youth baseball players affected by that firestorm, returning the favor that had been paid to them when so many of their families lost their homes and the baseball equipment that was in them.

When fires have struck other communities the way they did in Sonoma County and beyond in 2017, the painful memories have returned - but so has the impulse to act, and to help.

Scrivanich said the fires brought up emotions for those who suffered loss and those who didn’t, bringing clarity to some of the feelings people had been living with for the past two years.

“Santa Rosa had to learn that they needed to stop and give themselves the chance to just breathe,” she said. “Then, Santa Rosa and Cardinal Newman had a year to realize how important it is to learn that accepting help is just as important as giving.

“Then, when this happened, we were so ready to give.”

For months, Cardinal Newman posted a thank-you letter from Paradise schools near the main copy machine in the administration building. It was a daily reminder of the sense of community the schools shared through the fires.

Rutherford said some of the best advice he was able to convey to Paradise residents was a lesson he and the Newman campus learned while recovering from the Tubbs damage.

Coming from a community that lived through the fire, the sentiment carries the weight of sincerity and experience: “This is not going to beat them, and this loss does not define them.”

You can reach Staff Writer Lori A. Carter at 707-521-5470 or lori.carter@pressdemocrat.com.