Meet the Griz: Tyler Adair
8/6/2011 12:00:00 AM | Soccer
Aug. 6, 2011
This is the story of two guys. Actually it's the story of Tyler Adair, a freshman midfielder on the Montana soccer team, told through two guys. It's a way of seeing Adair as everything she is, both ordinary and extraordinary.
First the ordinary.
All you had to say was his first name: Gerald. That was enough. No last name necessary.
A freshman at Rancho Bernardo High in San Diego, Tyler and her friends knew of the senior. Star quarterback of the football team, devilishly handsome, the cool kid in school.
"My friends were obsessed with him," Adair remembers. Enough that one of her friends once kept a plastic spoon Gerald ate with as a momento of a near encounter.
"I wasn't at the level they were, but I definitely knew who he was. He was the stud on campus. He wouldn't have known who I was."
If Adair keeps up the level of play she's shown in her first week of practice, a lot of people in Missoula and within the Griz student-athlete fraterinity will know who she is.
Maybe even Gerald, who happens to be Gerald Kemp, a junior quarterback on the Griz football team.
Now the extraordinary.
Adair first met Gabe when they were high school freshmen. Through shared classes -- including a project in English class as juniors when Gabe first gave a glimpse of his troubled home life -- Adair learned more.
The obstacles Gabe overcame made him -- in Adair's eyes -- a perfect candidate to be a Bronco Ambassador, a position in the school she happened to be interviewing for.
"The people in the program office told me they didn't think it would work because they told me Gabe didn't even have a place to live," Adair recalls.
Instead of shrugging it off and going on with her own life, she decided to do something about it.
"I was shocked, because that's just wrong. I always pictured everyone at our school having a house and a family to go home to," Adair says.
She went home and explained to her mom the situation. That led to her mom talking with people at Rancho Bernardo High familiar with Gabe's situation, which led to the family making the decision to open their house to Gabe as a place to call home.
"He started coming over for a day at a time, then a week at a time, then he pretty much moved in for good," Adair says.
"He's a good person with a heart of gold, and now I consider him my brother."
A selfless decision made by a junior in high school with her own heart of gold. A life -- likely lives -- changed for the better.
Meet the family:
Tyler is the daughter of Don and Lanee (ryhmes with Renae) Adair. Don is in the construction business, Lanee is a stay-at-home mom who is a model and actress on the side.
Tyler's younger brother, Ivy (The Most Interesting Boy in the World), will be a junior at Rancho Bernardo High this fall. Her younger sister, Makenna, will be starting her freshman year at RB.
Tyler's other brother, Gabe, graduated from Rancho Bernardo in the spring and is a freshman football player at Palomar College. He still lives with the Adairs.
