'Ugly, ugly cancer': Innovative Belvidere football coach and player fights new battle
BELVIDERE — Chuck Leonard began walking to Belvidere high school football games when he was 4 years old.
“I could probably tell you the starting lineup from the 1983 team that was the first to win conference,” he said.
At age 7, his dad bought him a Green Bay helmet for flag football and wrote then-Belvidere coach Vern Pottinger asking for stickers with the Belvidere logo.
“He took off the Green Bay ones and put the Bucs stickers on it,” Leonard recalled. “I thought I had a real Bucs helmet and was on Cloud 9. I almost got in a fight because one kid called it a Packers helmet. I was adamant that that was a Bucs helmet.
“From the time I was a kid, I always wanted to play there. That was a dream come true for every kid in town back then.”
Fighting for his life
Now Chuck Leonard’s dream is just to live.
One of the biggest names in Belvidere football history has nasopharyngeal carcinoma. Leonard started at tight end on Belvidere’s two state title teams in 1993 and 1994 and later returned to coach the Bucs to their last two playoff appearances. Now Leonard, 45, hasn’t eaten in six weeks, getting all his food through an IV tube. He was hospitalized for 20 days in May with a terrible headache.
Background:Chuck Leonard steps down as Belvidere Bucs football coach
“I had a tumor the size of a golf ball right behind my nose, and it was acting like a wedge, cracking my skull,” Leonard said.
He just finished 35 radiation treatments on his nose. Doctors will start three months of chemotherapy in August.
“They are hoping chemo will knock it all out, and I will be better in November,” said Leonard, who is on sick leave as a special ed teacher at Willowbrook Middle School in South Beloit.
The cancer is behind his nose, in his throat and in his lymph nodes. But he doesn’t think it is in his lungs.
“The doctor told me, ‘We see some spots on your lungs. If it’s in your lungs, we give you a year.’ That was really sobering,” Leonard said. “But they ran more tests, and those spots in the lung weren’t cancerous. They are not 100 percent positive it stayed out of the lungs, but if it has and it’s just in my nose and my throat and my lymph nodes, they gave me an 80 percent success rate.
“Those are good odds, but I wouldn’t like those odds if we were going somewhere and 80 out of 100 were coming back. It’s out of my hands. I can fight as hard as I can fight, but everything is in God’s hands.”
His friends and family have started a GoFundMe page and set up a Tough Chuck benefit day from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Aug. 20 at the Coach’s Corner in Belvidere. People from all over have been rallying behind him.
“I’ve heard from people I haven’t talked to in years,” Leonard said. “People I taught with 20 years ago, people I coached with 20 years ago, players I had 15 years ago have reached out. Two weeks ago, I passed out here at the house. They had to call the paramedics. One of the paramedics was one of my former players. I was half-in and half-out of it. I kept hearing, ‘Coach, coach.’ That brought me to.”
Community support
They all want to help him.
“Chuck has touched so many lives, through his coaching, through his teaching, and just who he is as a man,” said former Belvidere fullback Jim Creighton, who ran for 154 yards and three touchdowns in the Bucs’ 28-0 Class 4A state title victory over Morris in 1994. “He’s going to beat this. He still has a rough road ahead of him with the final chemo, but he will get through this battle with this ugly, ugly cancer.”
As a player, Leonard was a tight end on a team that rarely threw and was famous state-wide for running a no-huddle option attack. And even when the Bucs threw to Leonard, he usually didn’t score.
“It if was within 10 yards of him, Chuck was going to catch it,” said Creighton, Leonard’s best friend since they played junior tackle together at age 11. “But after the catch, Chuck wasn’t known for his speed. I appreciated that as a fullback. Chuck would get caught at the 3- or 4-yard line and Coach Pottinger would call the fullback dive. That set up a lot of my touchdowns.”
“He was the kind of player you would want every one of your kids to be,” said Pottinger, who coached Belvidere to both of its state titles. “He was a dedicated, hard-working kid and one of our leaders. His dad coached with us, too. They were 100 percent behind the program. It was all about football for them.”
Leonard still lives less than a mile from Belvidere’s Funderburg Stadium with his daughter, Paige, 20, and son Chuck, 15.
“If I teed it up, it would be about a par-9 to the stadium,” Leonard said.
He has never been far from Buc football. When the buses returned to town for a state-title celebration at the junior high his senior year in 1994, Leonard took a look around and knew he never wanted to leave.
“I sat in the stands by myself afterward and said one day I wanted to come back and coach here,” he said.
Life at Belvidere
By the time Leonard came back, the days of Pottinger leading the Bucs to the playoffs 10 straight years were long gone. The town had split into two high schools. Belvidere North quickly became the larger of the two. And the more successful. The Bucs began to struggle in many sports.
They were a .500 football team, going 22-26 in the five previous years, by the time Leonard took over in 2013. They remained a .500 team in his four seasons, going 19-19 and making their final two playoff berths.
But that is far more impressive than it looks. Not only are the Bucs 9-51 since Leonard left, but when he was there, the Bucs might have been the most entertaining .500 team in NIC-10 annals. In 2016, the Bucs became the only team in history to lead the conference in scoring and not make the playoffs, averaging 33.4 points. They averaged 28.5 points in his four seasons.
And they did things no one had ever done before. Or since.
Converted tight end Garrett Hyser threw for 1,699 yards with 18 touchdowns vs. only five interceptions Leonard's first year. Colton Bahling, who played receiver as a junior, then became the first league quarterback with 3,000 total yards in a season, passing for 2,101 yards and running for 924 more. In Leonard’s final year, Austin Revolinski threw for 2,383 yards, ran for 935 and had a combined 36 touchdowns — in only nine games.
That same year, Phil Kolk set the conference record for receiving yards (1,181) and touchdowns (18) and Will Morris broke the mark for most catches (82).
Leonard, an all-conference tight end on a state title team, now coached a team that didn’t even use a tight end, lining up four wide receivers. Like Don Coryell coaching Terry Metcalf and Jim Hart with the St. Louis Cardinals and Dan Fouts and Kellen Winslow with the San Diego Chargers, Leonard changed his league even without winning a title by getting the most out of his offense.
“We knew we had to do a lot more with less,” Leonard said. “It was all about putting kids in a position where they can be successful. Find out what they can do. Ask not what they can do in your system but what your system can do for them.”
In 2013, the Bucs beat crosstown rival Belvidere North, a school that has made the playoffs seven of the last eight years. In 2015, they swept the other three traditional powers, Boylan, Hononegah and Harlem, and went 5-0 in games decided by seven points or fewer. In 2016, they missed the playoffs at 4-5, in part, because Morris was ejected on a controversial call the game before and missed the season-finale 49-20 loss to East.
In 2014, the Bucs started 1-4.
“The next week, the scouting reports I passed out to the kids, instead of Week 6, they said Playoffs Week 1. We knew we had to win every game to keep going,” Leonard said.
They did in an explosion of points: 43 against Guilford, 54 vs. Freeport, 46 against East. Then came a 55-41 win over Boylan to vault the Bucs into the playoffs.
“That’s a game I will never forget,” Leonard said. “I refer to it as the Colton Bahling game.”
Bahling passed for 264 yards in that game. He ran for 222 more. He caught a touchdown pass. And he intercepted University of Minnesota recruit Demry Croft to clinch the win.
'I loved every second at Belvidere'
That may be Leonard’s fondest moment as a coach. But all his memories at Belvidere are fond ones.
“I know they have been down the last few years,” Leonard said, “but to a lot of people in town, that helmet still means a lot, that logo still means a lot. It’s something special. It’s a gift to be able to play Buc football. Our kids bought into that.
“That was my dream job. I loved every second of it at Belvidere.”
He still loves being a Buc. You can almost see the stadium lights from his backyard. He sits at home now, with a blanket wrapped around his legs, sitting in a recliner watching fishing shows on TV.
“I get pretty cold, I’m so thin now,” said Leonard, who has lost 50 pounds in the last few months, shrinking from 210 to 160. “It’s a little embarrassing, not having energy to do much but sit here and read and watch TV.
“But I don’t really get down. I do stress sometimes that if something happens to me, what about my son? But that’s all in God’s hands. All I can do is fight as hard as I can and go from there.
“I keep saying, ‘When I come out on the other side.’ God willing, that will be in November. If not, it’s like I’ve always said to the kids, all you can do is give it your best shot. If we get good news in November, that’s what we’re praying for.
“If not, then we fight on.”
Matt Trowbridge is a Rockford Register Star sports reporter. Email him at mtrowbridge@rrstar.com and follow him on Twitter at @MattTrowbridge. Sign up for the Rockford High School newsletter at rrstar.com. Matt has covered sports for the Register Star for more than 30 years after previously working for papers in North Dakota, Delaware, Vermont and Iowa City. He grew up on a farm in northwest Minnesota with six brothers and a sister. His four daughters all graduated from Rockford Public Schools.
This article originally appeared on Rockford Register Star: Former Belvidere football star, coach battling cancer
