Minium: Ethan Sanchez has kicked well for ODU even as his father struggled with cancer

By Harry Minium

NORFOLK, Va. – The Sanchez family is deeply religious and when faced with adversity, believe that it’s God’s will. They roll with the punches, even if they are suffering deep pain.

Jose and Aly Sanchez immigrated to the United States from Mexico, separately, in search of a better life. Jose lived in Texas and was visiting his grandmother in Mexico when he met Aly. She was a high school student who lived in Georgia who was also visiting family.

He was so smitten with his future wife that after he returned to Texas, he eventually sold all his belongings, including his truck, to buy a bus ticket to Georgia. He called her from the bus station and convinced her to send his brother to pick him up.

Jose and Aly weren’t even dating at the time. But he was in love with her, and she quickly realized that she was in love with him.

They married two years later and celebrated their 32nd anniversary in June.

Neither went to college, but they worked hard and started small businesses. When their businesses went belly-up and they were faced with financial ruin, they picked up the pieces, found work and paid off their bills.

Doctors told them they could not have children, that having kids simply wasn’t medically possible. But they prayed and prayed and then had three sons – twins Johnathan and Nathaniel and Ethan, the youngest.

“God has been so good to us,” Jose said.

Three years ago, just when things were going so well, came the biggest blow of all. Jose was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a bone marrow cancer that is particularly aggressive and deadly.

He was 53 years old and had never been seriously sick. He’d never been to a hospital, but somehow was faced with the possibility of an early death.

He nearly died in 2022 – doctors later said they did not expect him to live -- but somehow survived.

Then, 10 months ago, on a cool evening in Statesboro, Georgia, came a night the family will never forget, a night when it seemed their prayers had been answered.

With his immune system weakened by many months of chemotherapy, Jose was released from isolation only days before the Old Dominion football team played at Georgia Southern, a short drive from their home in Dallas, Georgia.

With only seconds on the clock, Ethan Sanchez stepped on the field and kicked a 22-yard field goal that gave ODU a 20-17 walk-off victory.

They cried. They celebrated. They thanked God for his blessings.

Saturday night, when ODU hosts Virginia Tech at S.B. Ballard Stadium, Jose and Aly will be in the stands for the first time to see their son play a home game at ODU in nearly two years.

Jose simply had not been healthy enough to make the drive to Norfolk until now. But he's on the mend and the family plans to leave early Saturday for ODU.

“We’re so looking forward to this game,” Jose said.

Their family story is one of perseverance, of hope when all hope seemed lost, of a deep faithfulness that allowed them to accept pain and tragedy with grace.

Ethan was a soccer star as a young boy. Any why not? He’s Mexican-American and futbol is the national game in Mexico.

He began playing at age three and as a sophomore he played both for North Paulding High School team as well as a travel soccer team. He was a natural and seemed to love the game.

His parents drove him four times a week to practice an hour away from their home and then to weekend tournaments for his travel soccer.

As a youngster, he was featured on the front page of a national soccer publication. He had a strong leg and lighting speed.

“Ethan had such a passion for the game,” his mother said. “It was so exciting to watch him. Plenty of times he left skin on the turf. He went after every play with so much enthusiasm.

“I loved watching him play.”

But then in the early fall of his sophomore year, it had all become too much. He was tired of soccer. He was tired of the travel. He wanted to spend time with his family and friends.

He sat his parents down and told them he was done with soccer.

His parents were stunned. You must continue to play another sport, any sport, his mother told him.

“He had so much energy at the time that we knew if he didn’t play something, he would get in trouble,” she said.

 A few days later, he came home and said he wanted to play football. Aly was ecstatic. To her, and most of the world, football is soccer.

Ethan didn’t make it clear that he wanted to play American football.

When she realized he had tried out for the football team, she was devastated. She tried to convince him to return to the soccer field, but finally accepted his choice.

“He said to me, ‘Mom, you’ve always told me that no matter what I do, you will support me. I need your support.’”

He quickly fell in love with football, and even played in an all-star game in Hawaii, but in the summer after his junior year, he still had no college offers. He was invited to a camp at ODU by Special Teams Coach Kevin Smith.

“It was the very last camp we had,” Smith said. “We were looking for a placekicker. He came here by himself and went 10-for-10 in field goals and kicked five kickoffs out of the back of the end zone.”

Smith and Head Coach Ricky Rahne offered him a scholarship. Georgia then came calling – the Bulldogs asked him to walk-on without a scholarship, but with enough academic and need-based aid to pay his way through school.

But Ethan declined and came to ODU, where he enrolled early after graduating in December.  He figured that ODU was invested in him and Georgia wasn’t.

And he made a wise choice.

As a freshman in 2022, he made all 28 conversion kicks, 10 of 13 field goals and led the team in scoring with 58 points. Last season he was again perfect on 36 extra points, was 14 for 21 in field goals, with a career-long 49 yarder, and had 16 touchbacks.

He’s made both field goal attempts and 3 of 4 PATs in ODU’s first two games.

All the while, he’s been distracted by the crisis going on back home in Dallas.

“It was so much tougher on Ethan than it has been on the twins,” Aly said. “They went to a local college (Kennesaw State).

“Ethan was in Norfolk, a long way from home.

“We are an affectionate family. We all say ‘I love you’ when we say goodbye. We hug when we see each other. We kiss each other goodbye.

“The twins were here and could hug their father. Ethan didn’t have that.”

Smith said “it was obviously very hard on him. It was something he had to work through, and it was very difficult.

“I was proud of him for how he was able to cope and still get home when he could and be there when he could, but also not neglect his responsibilities as a student and an athlete.

“I’m so proud of how he balanced all of that.”

Ethan is proud of his parents as well.

“My parents, they’ve always taken care of me,” he said. “They are always sacrificing, always looking out for their children.

“And they’ve done well for themselves. They’ve lived the American dream. They came here from Mexico with very little and they’ve grown it into a lot. They’ve worked so hard.”

Jose works for a medical supply company and Aly is the administrative assistant for a power company.

The twins have already graduated from college. Johnathan is a mechanical engineer. Nathaniel is a computer engineer. Both have good jobs working for major firms.

Ethan has always wanted to be a pediatrician. “When he went to the doctor as a child, he always said he wanted to be a kids doctor,” Aly said.

He is a biomedical sciences major at ODU.

“I want to study in the medical field and help people who go through diseases,” he said. “Cancer is so very common and it’s an awful disease.

“But sometimes there are miracles.”

Doctors said it was something of a miracle that Jose lived to see New Year’s Day in 2023.

He had been through months of chemotherapy both to suppress his immune system and to reduce his cancer so that he could get a bone marrow transplant.

He was on his way to an Atlanta hospital to get a bone marrow transplant when the oncologist called to say go home. In the week that he was off chemo, tests showed his cancer had returned en masse.

It was bitterly disappointing news. “We knew things were bad,” Aly said. “We purposely did not ask how long they thought he might live.”

That proved to be a good thing. A doctor later told them she had not expected Jose to survive more than three weeks.

He continued his regimen of chemo, which is basically poison that kills lots of healthy cells along with the cancer. And he survived.

Eventually, his cancer stabilized, and after more months of chemo, he got his life-saving bone marrow transplant in July of 2023. In his case, it was essentially a blood transfusion from a donor whose genetics matched his closely enough.

Eventually, he began to get better. He’s returned to work and is living something of a normal life.

He’s still on chemo and likely will be on some kind of meds the rest of his life. This type of cancer is rarely cured, but you can live many years with it if you get the right treatment.

He had been through 100 days of isolating at home when doctors told him that it would be OK for him to travel to Georgia Southern on November 18, 2023.

The night before the game, Ethan’s parents came by the hotel where the Monarchs were staying. They had not seen their son in five months.

“When he saw us, he started crying,” Jose said. “The first thing I did when I saw him was to thank God.

“It was so good to see my little baby.”

The next night, as the game ebbed and flowed, Jose said it never occurred to him that he would see his son win the game. Not until the final seconds.

Ethan is convinced that it was preordained that he would kick the game-winning field goal.

Perhaps so, but it only happened because of a quick decision from quarterback Grant Wilson.

Wilson found himself wide open to score a touchdown with about 40 seconds left. remembered being told not to leave seconds on the timeclock and slid down to the turf at the 3 yard-line.

After ODU ran down the clock, Georgia Southern called a timeout to try and freeze Sanchez. Smith approached him and said, “Are you ready to make the game winner?”

“Coach,” he replied, “it’s already written that I’m hitting this game winner.”

Jose stood in the stands, praying that his son make it. Aly, meanwhile, couldn’t stand the tension. She went underneath the stadium and hid in the women’s restroom.

“I didn’t realize that even there, I could hear the crowd,” she said. “When he made it, I was shaking and crying.

“I was mad at myself for missing the kick.

“After the game, he gave us the tightest hug he had ever given us. We did not see him through the whole season and that was very tough for us.

“The hug was so tight that it hurt my ribs.”

Jose said he lives vicariously through his sons. Johnathan works for an oil company in North Dakota while Nathaniel works for a major engineering firm in Atlanta.

Meanwhile, Ethan is playing college football and, he hopes, on his way to becoming a doctor.

“We’ve had some hard times,” Jose said. “I never went to college. To see my kids go to college and graduate, I’ve told them that I’m so happy for you and I live through you.”

Aly said that her three sons were courageous when their father was at his sickest point.

“We tried not to give too much information to the kids,” she said. “We didn’t want them to worry too much.

“They all wanted to drop out of school and come help us.

“As I Mom, I was proud to hear they were willing to do that. But I told them, no, stay in school. No matter what, what told them, God is with us.

“We prayed that the Lord’s will be done, no matter what it is.”

That's a formula that seems to be working for the Sanchez family.

Minium is ODU’s senior executive writer. Contact him at hminium@odu.edu or follow him on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram