“I broke my wrist playing sports at school,” he said.
Chelsey, his mom, nodded and explained: “My husband said he just Charlie Browned it at recess. He was playing soccer and went to kick, caught the back of his foot and went down.
“For any parent, that’s not a phone call you want to get.”
Maddex held out his cast to show the signatures on it, including one from Officer Stephanie Bennington, the school resource officer at Stephen Bell Elementary.
Any nervousness Maddex had the other morning about the removal of his cast disappeared the moment he was approached by Chris Hart and her therapy dog, Dash.
“Would you like to meet Dash?” Chris asked.
Maddex, who has a collie mix named Lucy at home, didn’t hesitate and as he reached out, Dash — who was wearing a lime green Little Monster bandana around his neck for Halloween — leaned up and licked his cheek.
Chris, who still held onto Dash’s lease, said nothing, but her smile said plenty.
She’s best known around here as the longtime girls basketball coach and athletics director at Alter High School, her alma mater.
She was a standout, multi-sport athlete herself for the Knights in the late 1970s and especially shined in basketball, where she played for coach Theresa Check.
“She was a role model to all of us; she showed us how to be a strong female and also how to be successful,” said Chris, who went on to win All Ohio honors as a senior, averaging 15 points, eight assists and a whopping 10 steals a game.
She then played at Xavier and coached, first as an assistant on Check’s staff at Western Illinois University, and after that for seven years as the head coach at the College of Wooster.
Since returning to Alter in 1993, her girls basketball teams — which she now co-coaches with Kendal Peck — have compiled a 552-200 record, won five state championships and finished as state runners-up two other times.
She was voted Ohio Coach of the Year in 2002 and has been enshrined in Alter’s Hall of Fame.
As the Alter AD — a job she took over from Joe Petrocelli 22 years ago — she’s now in charge of 25 sports programs at the school.
Yet, even with such a full slate, she and Dash — a gray, 3-year-old rescue she believes is a mix of Weimaraner, lab and pitbull — make visits to the Children’s South Campus every two weeks to bolster the spirits of young patients and their families, as well as the people who work there.
They’ve also added their comforting presence at events involving aging veterans involved in the Honor Flights and Wounded Warriors from across the nation who came to Dayton for a camp. They’ve visited area nursing homes and Dash often has tagged along when Chris has gone to Alter.
“Having worked with kids all my life, I thought I’d enjoy doing something at Children’s,” she said. “From his nature, I kind of felt Dash would like that, too.”
Watching his tail-wagging, whine-of-joy interactions the other day with 9 ½-year-old Yasira Nimateelah, a fourth grader at LT Ball Intermediate School in Tipp City, and her 3-year-old sister, Yara, you could see Chris had been right.
Yasira was there for a follow-up appointment with her doctor, but when Dash arrived, she focused on him.
“All dogs love me,” she said.
She said they have a Siberian husky at home named Sky.
“I like the crazy dogs,” she said.
Dash, though was a model of decorum, a font of love.
Chris said his real name is Dashuri and it means love.
“We’ve seen dogs like this before at the dentist’s office,” said the girls’ mother, Anna Nimateelah. “They said they call them in anytime a patient has anxiety.
“It was very, actually, a cool experience. A visit can be stressful and the dogs distract you. They make you feel calm.”
Chris said she saw that happen on a previous visit when Dash helped a high school girl:
“She was here to have her blood drawn and she was petrified. She tried to do it once and pulled away and let her sister go.
“She finally got back up in the chair and she was petting Dash and I was talking to her and all of a sudden the tech said, ‘Do you realize? We’re done!’
“That was kind of neat. Dash can sense when someone can use some help.”
She said he has a real empathy about him.
She had seen that in him long before she ever envisioned the therapy training classes they would take before starting these hospital visits a year ago.
“This all came about just being around Dash,” she said. “I listened to him maybe. I just followed the voice.
“And I’m glad I did.”
‘It’s like he knew’
She got her first dog, Muffin, when she was in high school — “I remember pushing my parents real hard to get it,” she said — and she had another that they cared for when she was in college.
Each dog was a rescue, as was one she named Nike. So were two recent dogs: Shadow and Rawly.
When Rawly died of cancer a few years back, she said Shadow was grieving terribly:
“She really was. Whoa! She was in bad shape.
“I took Shadow with me to a rescue group in Northern Kentucky to find someone for her and planned to bring home a puppy, maybe two.
“They were at a foster home and when we got there, they kept saying, ‘We’re going to bring their mother out, too.’
“I kept thinking, ‘Why? I want a puppy!’
“But as soon as they brought the mom out, I understood. I think she’d been used as a bait dog. The vet thinks the same thing. She still has the scars. They’ll never go away. So taking her was a no-brainer.
“That day I brought Dash and his mom — I named her Aboki — home. And four or five months later I looked back on their website down there and saw there was one dog left.
“It was Dash’s brother. Nobody wanted him, so I went back. That’s how we got Sky.”
With Dash’s calm, loving nature — they’d already gone through several obedience classes — she thought he’d might be a good therapy dog, though she had no idea how to go about it.
Someone she knows from the gym she goes to directed her to a volunteer resource person, who sent her a list of agencies that could help get her dog certified.
She chose Dogtors, a training program run by a husband-and-wife team from Springfield. Their extensive 10-week course included all kinds of tests and observations of various scenarios.
Once Dash graduated, he and Chris began taking on various assignments before really settling in with the work at Children’s South, which Chris has found especially rewarding:
“A while back we visited with a little girl who was a cancer patient. She and her mom were really enjoying Dash.
“Later the mom told me, ‘We’ve been looking for a dog, but we have to be careful for obvious reasons.’
“While she was talking, Dash went over and lay right down next to the little girl and she quietly petted him.
“I was blown away! It’s like he knew. He understood she needed someone.”
‘Something positive always seems to happen’
Chris has had a rough 21 months.
The only sibling she grew up with — her younger brother, Philip ― died in February of last year and then her dad, Denny Hart, a longtime area educator, especially with the Dayton Public Schools, died just over four months ago.
Her mom Ann, also an educator, first suffered a debilitating fall and now is dealing with dementia. Although caregivers help, Chris, as the lone child, is responsible for her mom’s well-being.
Meanwhile, at school, the fall sports she oversees are still winding down and the winter sports have begun gearing up, so the athletics calendar is crammed.
Her basketball team began practice nine days ago and plays its first game Nov. 23.
“To be honest there are times where I just don’t think I can go to the hospital with Dash because I have all these things I need to do,” she admitted.
“But then I go and I’m always — always — glad I went. Something positive always seems to happen.”
While the visits help others, they often help her more.
“With everything I have going on — from the high intensity, high pressure job I have here at school to everything going on with my family — it gives me an hour where I can just kind of let all that go and not worry about it,” she said.
“For an hour I forget about everything else and just enjoy the moment there.
“It’s surprised me how much these visits relax me, too.”
A lot of the credit goes to Dash. He can soothe her just like he does everybody else.
As she took him around the hospital the other day, everyone gravitated to him. Three women who work in the pharmacy came out and made a fuss over him.
“He’s the highlight of our day,” said pharmacy technician, Emily Rudy, who had just gotten plenty of puppy kisses from Dash. “We’re always like, ‘The dog is here! The dog is here!’”
It was the same at the emergency department where Dash was soon surrounded by nurses and a health unit coordinator.
“We light up just as much as the patients do when we see him coming,” said Registered Nurse Emily Inman.
Three days ago — on Halloween morning — Chris was back at Alter and Dash was at home, though his influence was still evident.
As is the case each Halloween, the Alter students, teachers and administrators wear some semblance of a costume for the day’s classes.
Chris wore what looked like a full pajama suit. It was white and covered with black polka dots. She also wore a black tail, nose and ears.
“I went a little more overboard than a lot of the people did,” she said a bit sheepishly. “I got into it.”
She was dressed like a dog:
A dalmatian.
Just like before, she seemed to be listening to Dash.
She followed the voice.
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