For Senior Day, the home game when high school teams typically honor their senior players, the Roy baseball team lined up to greet its seniors before the Royals played Ogden.

Wyatt, a senior third baseman who wears No. 22, walked down the line with Jim, his father, and hugged every player and coach, saying a few words to everyone.

Senior Day, as Wyatt explained during a recent practice, was emotional for him. Many high school athletes dedicate countless hours to their sport until one day, they’re handed a vase of flowers, a card and then play on their home field with their friends for one of the final times in their life.

“All the emotions were coming through,” Wyatt said. “Part of me was angry because I feel like I had so much left in me, senior year and all that, and also sad because it was senior year. It felt cool to be out there, you’re hugging your teammates and everything.”

Patrick Carr, Standard-Examiner

Wyatt and Jim eventually made their way to home plate, stood together for a photograph and smiled.

It was just the two of them standing there. In another universe, two may have been three.

More than two years ago, Stefanie Kline, Wyatt’s mother, died by suicide. And it was then-15-year-old Wyatt who found her body.

The resulting grief and its effects nearly sent Wyatt down the proverbial wrong path last year and, though he’s turned things around to become a Roy baseball team captain, the struggle of grief and loss is present among his triumphs and trials in life and on the baseball field.

***

Stefanie Kline was well-known around the Roy High baseball program. She helped out at basically every team function, whether it was a team dinner or something else. Taysen Headley, a senior on the baseball team, said Stefanie was a loud, vocal supporter for every single player.

Patrick Carr, Standard-Examiner

“She was just a really bright light in my life. She was just my No. 1 supporter with everything,” Wyatt said. “Even with my sister with cheer, because she went (to Roy High) too, and (my mom) was like the main booster for cheer and all that. She would make signs for everything, for all the parades and all that. She was definitely a life-of-the-party type person. She was really bright.”

The day before Stefanie died, Wyatt said she told him that she loved him. It was a school night, but she said he could spend the night at a friend’s house if he wanted to, which he did.

Wyatt rode the bus home from school the next day. Stefanie didn’t respond when Wyatt knocked on her bedroom door and didn’t answer her phone. He broke the door down and found her inside.

“My whole body was just numb. I called 911 obviously, I was in shock, I didn’t know what to do or what happened. I was just kind of like thinking of myself, ‘Why me?’ and all this, especially with me at home, just home alone,” Wyatt recalled after a baseball practice in early April.

His father, Jim, is a long-haul trucker, and was in Knoxville, Tennessee, at the time. Wyatt called his father, who didn’t believe him at first until the police got on the phone.

Patrick Carr, Standard-Examiner

Wyatt’s older sister, Jamie, was working a night shift and her new cell phone hadn’t been activated yet, so Wyatt couldn’t reach her. Wyatt’s grandparents, who live nearby, were gone for the weekend.

There were police, crime scene investigators and a neighbor gathered around Wyatt’s home in Roy on that Friday afternoon in September 2020.

Wyatt felt alone in the immediate aftermath. His No. 1 fan was gone, and he was in a situation for which there was no guide.

“How would you deal with that being 15? I don’t know,” Jim Kline said.

***

Jim Kline is usually on the road between Sunday and Friday for his trucking job; he’s been able to attend some of Wyatt’s baseball games over the years, depending on what day of the week it is. When Stefanie died, Jim drove home from Tennessee and stayed for a couple weeks.

“(Jamie) was 21 at the time but she just took control of everything. She handled all the funeral arrangements, everything, just stepped up and took care of her brother. That’s gotta be tough when you’re 21,” Jim said.

He talked to Wyatt and Jamie about driving more locally instead of going across the country, but that would bring in less money and they’d likely have to move. Wyatt and Jamie didn’t want to leave the home and said they’d be alright.

Jim’s two weeks at home went by and he went back to work. Painful as it was, life moved on.

“It was really hard for us because (mom) was the main piece to, like, hold everything together,” Wyatt said.

At first, Wyatt frequently stayed over with friends because he couldn’t stand to be in his house. Eventually, he became comfortable enough to stay at home again.

But Wyatt, then a sophomore at Roy High, started skipping class and hanging out in friends’ cars in the parking lot and, eventually, his own truck where he’d watch TV. His grade point average, normally around 3.5, tanked. School therapists pushed to talk to him when he first came back to school, but he wasn’t interested.

“I just needed my mind off of stuff. I felt like I couldn’t really do school at that time and everybody was just pushing me to keep it normal and all that stuff; it was just really hard to me,” he said.

Monty Vorwaller, Roy’s head baseball coach, regularly monitors his players’ grades and attendance. He saw Wyatt’s absences stacking up, spoke to him about it and left it there.

The absences continued in Wyatt’s junior year. When Vorwaller asked him why he wasn’t in class, Wyatt lied.

“Junior year he was like, ‘Why should I keep you on the team? You’ve just been lying to me left and right,’ and honestly, I couldn’t answer the question,” Wyatt said.

So Vorwaller put Wyatt on a “tracker program” where a student has to get a teacher’s signature verifying he or she was in class, on time for class and what homework there was.

It was part of an ultimatum: get it together, or you’re done with the team.

Baseball means so much to Wyatt. It is, and has been, his main coping mechanism, his escape, his place to keep his mind off things.

The choice was easy, however hard it was to follow through.

“The main reason I kept with baseball is because I knew that’s what my mom would have wanted, because I know she used to love going to games. She would never miss a game,” he said. “I felt like baseball is still kind of one of the things I still have relationship-wise with her, even though she’s gone.”

Another part of the ultimatum was Wyatt had to “roll the dice,” which is a discipline mechanism on the baseball team where each number on a six-sided die corresponds with a long physical exercise.

He rolled the number that corresponded with him carrying an unwieldy pitching dummy on his shoulders and running “star” patterns on the baseball field: from the third-base dugout to center field, to the first-base dugout, to the left-field foul pole, to the right-field foul pole and back to the third-base dugout.

“That whole time I was running, I was like, ‘I’m never going to do this again, this sucks,'” Wyatt said.

He started going to class again, doing homework, and completing makeup work to get back on track in math class. His grades got better. He said his cumulative GPA is again around 3.5 and he has the credits to graduate later this month.

“After coach, like, finally told me that I needed to fix it and everything, it took me to realize that no matter how hard it is, the world’s still gonna keep moving. It really sucks, it’s not fair, but you gotta figure it out,” Wyatt said.

When Jeff Messerly was introduced as a new assistant coach to the team last year in a meeting in the weight room, he talked about leadership and self-accountability.

Wyatt suddenly felt the urge to confess to the team why he had to run “stars” and asked Messerly if he could say something. He told the team about how he was skipping class, why he was skipping class and that he had lied to Vorwaller about it.

Reaction among players was mixed. Headley said a few of the players were hurt by it, but they also quickly understood it and the confession earned Wyatt some respect. This year, Wyatt was voted to the team’s leadership council by the players.

“The thing about him, which has been really awesome and he’s become a leader because of this, (is) he accepted the responsibility for making the mistakes he made and he manned up to them,” Vorwaller said. “Lot of kids these days, when they make a mistake, they want to blame somebody else and he took full responsibility for it.”

***

This baseball season has been up and down for everyone thanks to the wet weather. Wyatt Kline has had a similar experience.

On what he called “definitely a bad day” on April 8, he got yanked out of the game at Fremont High after just two innings.

Wyatt, who was visibly unhappy, and Vorwaller talked near the dugout afterward about being a good example to the team as a captain, then worked things out later in the day.

Sometimes, Wyatt’s bad days and Vorwaller’s standards for team captains don’t mix well, but Wyatt repeatedly mentioned how grateful he was for what Vorwaller has done for him.

In the 16 games since the bad day at Fremont, Wyatt is batting .426 with 25 RBIs, 13 runs scored, four triples, three doubles and one home run. He had a 12-game hitting streak at one point and the Royals are 10-11 with four regular-season games left.

“Everybody has their good and bad days. I’m just glad I’ve had more good than bad this year,” he said.

On a freezing April 18 afternoon against West High, Wyatt hit a walk-off single to complete a four-run seventh inning in an 11-10 win for Roy.

That final at-bat against West was Kline’s first chance at a walk-off hit that he remembers in 15 years of playing baseball.

“It just felt different. I don’t know if my mom was there or something, I was mainly just thinking of her, picturing her watching the game or whatever, and just kind of really calmed down, took a deep breath,” Wyatt said. “And I just smoked one down the right-field line. It was the best feeling.”

His plan after high school is to enroll in the welding program at Ogden-Weber Technical College, but recently he’s discussed college baseball with Vorwaller as well.

Jim Kline said he hopes Wyatt will at least try to make college baseball happen so he won’t have regrets about it later, and praised the many people — Jamie Kline and the Roy coaching staff, among others — who have helped Wyatt get to the point where college baseball’s even being considered.

***

Roy’s baseball team went to Stefanie Kline’s funeral the week after she died. Wyatt was still in shock at that time, and he appreciated his team’s support.

“After that, I was just kind of telling them to just keep it normal, I don’t really want everybody around me asking me if I’m good or whatever because obviously, I’m not,” Wyatt said.

But baseball was a major coping mechanism — that, and building out a first-generation Dodge Cummins pickup truck. Baseball is the place where he can put his head down and focus.

The first fall baseball game Wyatt played after the funeral, he asked the team to dedicate it to his mother. Everyone wore purple tape — purple was her favorite color — and Wyatt recalls the team won the game by a lot. Last season, Roy’s baseball caps had a purple “SK” embroidered on the side.

To this day, Wyatt wears a dark gray cremation necklace with some of Stefanie’s ashes inside and an emerald, her birthstone, on the outside.

During lunch on April 26, the day Roy hosted Kearns, Wyatt found himself staring at the necklace.

“Today was pretty rough. Most days it just kind of gets put back in your brain and you don’t really think much of it, and then there’s other days that are different,” he said after the game that day.

Vorwaller recalled a day more than a decade ago while he was still working as a Weber County Sheriff’s deputy, a day he witnessed a woman die by suicide on the North Ogden Divide. The memory still haunts Vorwaller, which led him to wonder about Wyatt, how anyone would deal with what Wyatt’s gone through, and whether it’s something anyone ever gets over.

More than 2 1/2 years later with countless days of school, baseball games and practices behind him, Wyatt’s grief manifests itself in different ways at unexpected times. But he can still find a way to smile about his mother, too.

“I’ll literally just go to the grocery store and see someone walking with their mom, it’ll kind of set me off,” Wyatt said. “I just wish she could see me now, if she’s proud of me or whatever, but I don’t know. I hope she is.”

Connect with reporter Patrick Carr via email at pcarr@standard.net, Twitter @patrickcarr_ and Instagram @standardexaminersports.

NEED HELP?

Those thinking of harming themselves have several resources available:

Weber Human Services emergency or crisis services, 801-625-3700.

Davis Behavioral Health 24-Hour Crisis Response Line, 801-773-7060

National Suicide Prevention Hotline, 1-800-273-8255

SafeUT Crisis Chat and Tip Line, 833-372-3388

National Alliance on Mental Illness Utah, 801-323-9900

Family Counseling Service of Northern Utah, 801-399-1600

Intermountain McKay-Dee Hospital Behavioral Health, 801-387-5600

Davis Hospital: Behavioral Health Unit and Emergency Room, 801-807-1000

Lakeview Hospital: Behavioral Health Unit and Emergency Room, 801-299-2200

Live Hannah’s Hope: Empowering Youth, livehannahshope.org