As Teen Helps Team Win State Basketball Crown, Fire Eats Her Home

SPRINGVILLE, IA — Kelly Kirchmann was a big winner Saturday, and not just because she and her Springville Orioles teammates won a third consecutive crown in the small schools division of Iowa's girls’ state high school basketball tournament. As the final buzzer sounded on the Orioles’ big win, fire was chewing down her family’s home — a loss for sure, but one that gave residents of her small eastern Iowa town of 1,100 a chance to show how winners act in the face of adversity.

Though top-seeded in the tournament’s 1A division, the Orioles faced a tough Newell-Fonda team in the finals and weren’t expected to win. They came back from a 14-point deficit to win the game, 60-49, but the thrill of victory was short-lived for Kirchmann and her entire team.

As the team celebrated in the locker room after the game, the sophomore’s coach broke the terrible news that her family’s home had burned.

“I just broke down,” she told KCRG-TV. “I was having such a great day and we were in the locker room partying and my coach came up to me and told me.”

A welcome-home pep rally in Springville Sunday turned into a show of community-wide support and call for donations to help the family. It’s what small towns in Iowa do when their own are hurting, residents said, and the Kirchmanns already have a place to live for the next six months, and the first month’s rent has been paid.

“That's what this town does — it gets them back together and brings them back up,” Sally Deeb, who owns Sally’s On Broadway, a restaurant in Springville where Kelly works as a server, told KCRG.

Dee Wagaman, mom of one of the players on the team, echoed that.

“The second we heard it wasn’t even a thought. It was ‘We’re family. What are we going to do to take care of our family?’ ” Wagaman told KGAN-TV.

The players shifted the focus of the pep rally from their three-peat — an enviable accomplishment in highly competitive girls' basketball in Iowa — to Kirchmann and her family.

“Every hug I gave them they're like, ‘Did you get something done? Are you doing something?’ ” Wagman told KGAN. “They weren't focused on themselves at all. It was ‘What are we doing for Kelly?’ ”

There’s nothing left of the Kirchmann home but rubble and ashes, the Cedar Rapids Gazette reported. By the time firefighters arrived at the home about 3:20 p.m. Saturday, the home was completely engulfed in flames. Homeowners Mark and Christina Kirchmann were grilling at the time, and an ember may have started the fire, but the cause remains under investigation, the Linn County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release.

Mark Kirchmann was taken to a Cedar Rapids hospital for non-life threatening injuries, the release said.

The Springville Orioles lived their motto — “Play hard, do what we do, and love each other” — Deeb told KGAN. Food and clothing donations are pouring into her restaurant and Springville High School, and an account to help the family has been set up at a local bank.

“People are crawling out of the woodwork wanting to help and that’s just so amazing,” she said.

Kirchmann is basking in the glow of the win, but more so in the support of the town of 1,100 in eastern Iowa.

“It's just amazing because I have a whole community there standing right behind me ready to help at anytime,” she told KGAN.

Photo via Shutterstock