North Scott's Eller balances athletics with parenthood

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By Eric Page | Saturday, May 10, 2008 6:59 PM CDT | () comments

Hallie Eller found out she was pregnant with her son, Jesse, during her sophomore year of high school. (John Schultz/ Quad-City Times) Buy this Photo

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North Scott senior Hallie Eller is a three-sport standout and an all-state …
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A finalist for the Quad-City Times Female Athlete of the Year Award, North Scott senior Hallie Eller is a three-sport standout and an all-state softball player on her way to Wartburg College in the fall. She also is the mother of an infant son.

Little Jesse is 18 months old now, so wide-eyed, so curious about the world around him. Every turn is a new adventure, every day a new experience.

He walks and runs, kicks and plays. He smiles and laughs and wonders. His first words are just an awkward tongue twist away.

And Mom, well, Mom is proud — amazed and humbled that she could create such a thing. She watches him with loving eyes and a smile that reflects a feeling only a mother can know.

They have come so far together, Mom and Jesse.

But one day, years from now, Little Jesse will just be Jesse, and he will get curious again and do the math. He will ask his mother how she did it, how she got pregnant at 16, became a mother at 17 and kept everything else in her life just as it was. How she maintained a job and her school work and her social life and a high school athletic career on par with the best in the area.

And Hallie Eller will sit down with her son and tell him her story.

Scared and alone

Eller knew she was pregnant by the time she confirmed it, sitting, scared beyond words, alone in a bathroom stall at Wal-Mart. Staring at the positive test she’d scanned through the self-checkout line so no suspecting eyes would see her, a million questions raced through her mind.

Why me? What are people going to think? How am I going to tell my parents? What am I going to do?

“I bawled,” said Eller, now an 18-year-old senior at North Scott High School.

“It was so hard. At the time, I just didn’t know what to do.”

It was March of her sophomore year when Eller learned she would be a mother, which on the calendar of a four-sport athlete in Iowa is the short layoff between the basketball and track seasons.

She cried a lot those first weeks, keeping the news from her parents, telling only a few of her closest friends.

The questions came again.

What are you going to do? Are you going to have it? Are you going to keep it? How are you going to tell your parents?

She was 16 and pregnant, confused and scared. She had no answers.

Eventually, she told her mother.

“That was it,” Shari Eller recalls telling her daughter. “Everything she had been working for was done.”

‘Sports are my life’

The youngest of Rick and Shari Eller’s four children, Hallie already was a well-established athlete at North Scott by the middle of her sophomore year. She was on the varsity volleyball and basketball teams and ran hurdles in track, but she was a special talent on the softball diamond, where she started as an eighth-grader and was a third-team all-state pick as a freshman.

But there is a stigma attached to teen pregnancy, a world that tells a young woman she no longer can do the things she used to do, that she’ll never achieve her dreams.

Eller didn’t want to hear it. Her life wasn’t over. She had too much left to do.

She ran track that spring and went out for softball as if nothing had changed. She’d yet to grasp the fact that she was going to be a mother, and sports kept her grounded, kept her happy, kept her sane. In that arena, she was always in control.

“Sports are my life,” Eller said. “It’s all my life revolved around. I couldn’t imagine not playing softball. That’s why I played when I was pregnant.”

So, she played and played well, telling no one outside her circle that she was expecting, not even her coach. But eventually, the rumor mill churned as it so often does and word circulated, and Eller’s secret no longer was safe. She came clean to her coach, Dennis Johnson, and they worked out a deal — she could take her at-bats but would give way to a courtesy runner on the base paths.

“So,” Eller said, “I just tried to stretch everything into a triple.”

Amazingly, she had the best season of her career that summer, batting .517 with 48 RBIs. She earned third-team all-state honors again despite being six months pregnant by the end of the season. She hadn’t gained a lot of weight, adding only 10 pounds through the entire pregnancy, and didn’t start to really show until the fall. But there were whispers in the stands, fingers pointed, people asking if that was the girl playing while carrying a child.

Eller just kept on swinging.

“I didn’t see any change in her level of play,” Johnson said. “The kid’s an incredible athlete. She can do things on the softball field and with a bat in her hands … I’m just glad I don’t have to pitch against her, let’s put it that way.”

Keeping her baby

Softball season was a welcome distraction for Eller. It kept her from confronting reality, from bracing herself for her future as a mother, from planning for the arrival of her child.

From the beginning, her parents made it clear they would be there for her, but that she was going to be held responsible for her actions. She continued working jobs at the local grocery store and cleaning at her parents' construction company on weekends to pay her medical bills, and, because Jesse’s father, Robert Richardson, was in and out of the picture, she went to birthing classes with a friend.

At her parents’ urging, she met several times with an adoption attorney and considered giving up the baby.

And she considered it. She really did, right up until the end.

But in the early-morning hours of Oct. 21, 2006, when she first set eyes on Jesse’s soft, brown skin and tiny features, she knew. She just knew her life would forever be about being that boy’s mother.

“That’s when I really saw Hallie change,” said Ali Grolmus, Eller’s lifelong friend and birthing coach who was in the delivery room the night of Jesse’s birth. “Once Jesse was born, there was just no way. It just wasn’t going to happen. She couldn’t have given him up.”

It should be noted Jesse was born healthy and without complications — 6 pounds, 11 ounces and 19 inches long.

He was perfect, and Eller was in love. She finally got it. After months of disconnect and denial, she finally understood what every mother comes to know.

“You get that connection with your child that you can’t really explain,” Eller said. “If you ask any mom, they’d tell you. But it’s hard to describe. You get that connection, so strong. It was hard.

“I remember them putting him on my chest and holding him. Then, the next day I just … I just held him a lot. I didn’t want to put him down, because he was mine, my little boy.”

Focus on family

Eller’s athletic endeavors took a backseat once Jesse arrived. She sat out the volleyball, basketball and track seasons her junior year while figuring out how to manage her new life as a parent.

It tugged at her, though, not playing sports. She didn’t attend a single volleyball match or basketball game that year because she couldn’t bear to watch her teammates playing without her.

But she also was busy at home, learning about her son and learning about herself.

“It’s neat to watch him do new things,” Eller said. “He’ll do something, and then you’ll just sit there and wait for him to do the next thing.”

Of course, there were sleepless nights and dirty diapers and times Eller wondered what it would be like to just be a normal kid again. But there was no going back. Jesse was in her life for good.

She set up a network of friends, Grolmus and a handful of others who had been there from the beginning, and they have helped her a great deal along the way. They were there for her when she got home with the baby, and they’ve been there for her every day since.

Richardson, a 2006 North Scott grad, also was there the night of Jesse’s birth, and he has been involved in raising his son. He and Eller are no longer dating but have what she calls “a good parenting relationship.”

Eller has maintained a B average in school, continued to work both jobs and, with state assistance, has paid to have Jesse in daycare several days a week.

Last summer, she was back on the softball diamond, a mother of one.

Making plans

Eller batted .464 with seven home runs and 37 RBIs as a junior, and she was named first-team all-state.

Those numbers and accolades attracted a lot of attention from college coaches, though not as much as she might have received had she been able to take full advantage of the year in which most high school athletes send out their films and attend elite camps around the region.

There are some things mothers can’t afford to do. And there were some Division I coaches, Johnson said, who didn’t want to chance giving scholarship money to someone who would arrive on campus with so much baggage.

So, after finishing her high school softball career this summer, Eller will take her game — and her son — to Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa. The Knights are a perennial Division III power and just rolled to Iowa Intercollegiate Athletic Conference regular-season and tournament crowns.

It’s a huge time commitment, college athletics at any level, and Eller is hearing it all again, that she won’t be able to balance both of the loves in her life, that it’s time to give it up.

She’s still not listening.

Richardson, who lives in Davenport, said he is planning to move to Waverly, too. So, he’ll be there to help. And Eller already has made arrangements for daycare and off-campus housing. She said she thinks it actually will be easier than what she has done the past two years.

“I have no doubt in my mind that she’ll make it work,” Johnson said. “She’ll find the time or she’ll find a way to do it all.

“I just can’t say enough good things about her, because she could have just disappeared into the woodwork and never been heard from again. She chose not to do that.”

Honored and proud

When Eller got back on the volleyball and basketball courts this past year, Little Jesse was in the stands wearing a custom T-shirt made by Eller’s friends, which read, “North Scott groupies,” on the front and, “Eller, No. 10,” on the back.

“It was so cute,” Eller said. “During basketball season, he was just learning to clap his hands.”

Ten days ago, hundreds of people clapped their hands as Eller walked across the stage at Davenport North High School’s Holzworth Auditorium to be honored as one of 12 finalists for the Quad-City Times Female Athlete of the Year Award.

That night, those in attendance learned, in detail, of Eller’s athletic feats, but very few of them knew of her greatest achievement.

Little Jesse was at home with a sitter.

Eller didn’t win the award that night. She didn’t expect to. But she was so honored to be standing there among the best athletes in the area in spite of everything she has been through.

She was so proud of herself, because she did it — she beat the stigma.

Her story, cast in stone by others two years ago, is nowhere near its end.

She’s telling her story now, the story she one day will share with her son, because it has taught her so much about life and so much more about herself. And maybe it could do the same for someone else, some other teenage girl, sitting, scared beyond words, alone in a bathroom stall at Wal-Mart, staring at a plus sign that will change her life forever.

It doesn’t have to be the end.

That is where Hallie Eller’s story begins.

“I’m not trying to tell people to go out and do what I did, but it’s something that shows if you work hard and put your mind to it, you really can do anything,” Eller said. “It doesn’t make you a bad person. You just have to work a little harder.

“I wouldn’t change anything. I don’t know what I would do without Jesse now. He’s a part of my life. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Eric Page can be contacted at (563) 383-2277 or epage@qctimes.com.