OCEAN CITY — Beloved teacher and coach Mikenzie (Custer) Helphenstine succumbed to cancer May 4, 2022, but her “’Til You Can’t” spirit has been thriving since. On Tuesday morning, her spirit was alive in the Ocean City High School gymnasium.
The district packed all of its students into the gym for 45 minutes of fun and games in honor of “Coach M” and Breast Cancer Awareness Month in a “Pink Hair Pep Rally,” but that underscored a serious message about “crushing” cancer delivered by former St. Joseph’s University basketball coach Phil Martelli.
Coco Lefkowitz and Stephanie Gaitley led the students in games as they interjected uplifting comments including how “everyone can help.”
Coach M was a longtime teacher at Ocean City Primary School and a coach. She had been a standout athlete at OCHS who took those skills to the college fields. She fought cancer for years, becoming a symbol of resilience for the larger community.
Mikenzie’s mother, Jane Custer, organized the event and asked Lefkowitz and Gaitley to lead it. Custer’s other daughter, Tiffany Park, was emotional as she watched the students gathering in the gym.
“This means the world to me. It means that her memory is still here. Her message is still here. It means the world to my whole family,” Park said. “We feel her every day. We see her, her picture, the (memorial) benches that are at the schools, all the way to the kids who have graduated. Now we even see it with the little kids. My kids are playing sports and their friends are wearing the ’Til You Can’t’ shirts and they’re hearing the message.
“They get to learn about what my sister passed down from year after year and what she meant to all of these kids,” Park added.
“She started here as an athlete playing field hockey and basketball, and then when she came back to teach here, she was lucky enough to really just kind of dive into coaching, and she got into field hockey and coaching basketball. And then as lacrosse kind of came up, she was like, ‘yeah, I want to learn this sport, too.’ So she picked it up and she was coaching lacrosse,” Park said. “She really took to these three sports and to these young kids and she just really wanted these young girls to love sports as much as she did.”
In honor of Coach M, there are annual pink hair fundraisers that have raised thousands of dollars for the Cancer Support Community at Gilda’s Club in Linwood, a non-profit.
After students and teachers got the students laughing by participating in games from basketball shooting to musical chairs, the gym went quiet as Martelli took center court.
“I saw everybody that was engaged and it was great to hear the noise and the enthusiasm. Well, let’s call this what it is. We’re not here to beat cancer,” Martelli said. “That’s not what this is about. This is about crushing cancer. And we’re going to crush it with each one of you.”
Martelli said that may not come to pass in his lifetime or even in his children’s lifetime, “but I know this — it’s going to happen in my grandchildren’s lifetime. It’s gonna happen because of all of you. So I don’t want to bring this down, but I want you to be real aware.”
He then asked any students or teachers who were battling cancer to stand. Then he asked about siblings, parents and grandparents and then about community members the students may know who are battling cancer.
By the time he was finished, nearly the entire student body was standing.
For those still seated, he told them to remember how blessed they are and to commit to helping those who stood to show them they are not alone.
Then he talked about meeting Alex Scott, the little girl battling cancer who started Alex’s Lemonade Stand to raise money for cancer in 2000 when she was 4 years old. Martelli said he was there for her first lemonade stand. In the years since, those lemonade stands have raised millions of dollars in the fight against cancer.
When he pulled up to her house in a driving rain and went inside, he walked into a living room with a little girl on the couch.
“Not to be morbid. She knew she was dying from cancer. She had looked at her parents and said, ‘I don’t want another child to have to go through this. I’m going to cure cancer selling lemonade a cup at a time.’ I was at Alex Scott’s first lemonade stand. Today, the leading fundraiser in the world is Alex’s Lemonade,” he said, and it started with a little girl.
“Alex Scott’s in this room right now,” he told the rapt audience. “I don’t know you. I haven’t met you, but somebody in this room is going to change the world. That’s how powerful you are. That’s how powerful you are,” he said.
Martelli noted he came down because of the invitation of Lefkowitz and Gaitley, but also because he is “selfish.”
“I want to meet the next Alex Scott. You’re here. That’s the power that you have. You have the power to make a difference. Most especially you have this power to crush cancer,” he told the students.
“Don’t give in, don’t give up and we’re going to follow your lead,” he said. “We’re going to crush cancer because of each and every one of you.”
– STORY and PHOTOS by DAVID NAHAN/Sentinel staff
