Blish turned personal loss into a positive for MTHS

Don't you have to be older and wiser before you can truly appreciate living one day at a time? Not if you've been forced to grow up like 17- year-old Stephen Blish.

A senior captain for Monroe Township High School's basketball team, Blish has faced enough heartache to last a lifetime. He first lost his older brother D.J. to a cerebral hemorrhage in January 2008. Then in November, three weeks before the season began, his close friend and teammate Ryan Walp died after a long battle with cancer.

How would you react if you were hit with those kinds of tragedies and had to set the example for a team desperately looking for leadership? The answer to that question describes the heart and soul of Stephen Blish.

"I know it's hard to understand this," he said, "but I tried to turn everything into a positive. What I took away from losing D.J. and Ryan was that you have to seize every moment in a positive way."

What Blish managed as a basketball player was to help lead the Falcons to a 20-7

record including a team-leading 15.7 point-per-game average. While Monroe didn't capture the White Division title, it did knock off winner Colonia in the Greater Middlesex Conference Tournament and made it to the semi-finals before bowing to Piscataway in a close game.

JEFF GRANIT staff Monroe's Stephen Blish (c) during a game against Cardinal McCarrick on Feb. 4 at Monroe High School. Yet for all his team accomplished this season, what Stephen Blish will take away most are the close relationships he forged with his coach and teammates, ties which will never be broken even though they will go their separate ways when Blish graduates this spring.

"After all that happened," Blish said, "it took my coach (Bob Turco) and my parents to help me realize the best thing I could do was focus on how D.J. and Ryan conducted their lives and emulate them. I was close to my brother and after every game, he would be the first one to come up and tell me how well I played. It was tough at first to be talking to someone one day and him not being there the next.

"We knew Ryan was sick," Blish continued, "so it wasn't as much of a shock when he passed away. Nevertheless, we all felt a lot of emptiness with him not around. But we also learned the best way we could celebrate his life was to conduct ourselves the same way Ryan did when he was with us. And that's what I've tried to do."

"Because Steve was a senior captain," said his coach, Bob Turco, "the players looked up to him. And that had a lot to do with our success this season."

Stephen Blish could have gotten down on his fortune as a basketball player early on in his high school career. Following a freshman season when he saw limited action, he suffered a broken leg in a summer league game, an injury that forced him to undergo surgery during which two pins were inserted in his foot.

The injury effectively shut down Blish as far as getting prepared for his sophomore year, but a few weeks into the season he surprised his coach by announcing himself ready to play.

Blish played hard and worked harder during the off-season and, as a junior, became one of the team's main go-to players, averaging 13 points a contest. He maintained his average despite his brother's death midway through the campaign. Then, like a one-two punch in the stomach, Blish experienced the loss of his brother and friend.

"I don't know how you bounce back from something like that," Turco said, "but Steve not only got through everything but emerged as a better player. And that has made this past year all the more rewarding because the team has overcome a lot of adversity."

"We practiced extremely hard and tried to make ourselves as good as we could get," Blish said. "When we hurt, we just thought of what Ryan went through and that just motivated us more."

While Blish has concluded his Monroe career, he is not through playing basketball. Division III colleges, Wilkes in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and Widener, in Chester, Pa., are both interested in Blish. He is likely to make a decision as to which school he plays for in the next few months.

"I played football and baseball when I first started high school," he said, "but there's nothing like basketball. I love the sport."

Blish also has high words of praise for how his coach has impacted him and helped him during the times he was down on what had happened.

"He told me that once you become negative," said Blish, "you lose. I decided I wasn't going to let that happen."