The poignant reason Kansas family is hosting Wiffle Ball fundraiser for mental health
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- The Whitneys host a Wiffle Ball tournament to honor Ryan and support mental health.
- Proceeds fund Fight Club, a peer-based support group reducing stigma and isolation.
- The event promotes digital awareness, counseling access and strong community ties.
Ryan Whitney will always be remembered as a radiant and empathetic boy. He had this infectious energy and intervened with bullies and knew just how to console friends who were suffering, his parents will tell you. So much so that he even had a tendency to take on their pain as his own.
When he was getting his driver’s license, Ryan promptly said yes to becoming an organ donor. Because he always wanted to help people.
“That really kind of just sums up how he is,” his father, Matt, said.
Along with being an adored son to his father and mother, Tiffany, and brother to his siblings, Ashlyn and Jake.
And a passion for sports the family considered unmatched.
Baseball and football were his favorites. The Olathe South freshman hoped to play at least one of those in college. But maybe the sheer joy he took in sport was most embodied in Wiffle Ball — a game he’d play with Jake and neighbors for hours at a time.
The very image “takes you back,” Matt Whitney said. Meaning to the innocence of childhood. Back to setting up unique scenes and rules, and a couple kids playing suddenly turning into four or eight.
All of which is why on Monday, Sept. 1 — the day Ryan was born 16 years ago — the Whitneys are hosting The Ryan Whitney Memorial Wiffle Ball Tournament at Homefield Baseball Complex (1501 N. 90th St., KCK).
More than 50 youth teams of five players each were registered before still more had to be turned away from the overflowing event, first intended as a tribute to Ryan and a celebration of the sheer spirit of play. Accordingly, any debatable calls, Tiffany decided, will be decided by way of rock, paper, scissors.
The notion of this tournament came to Tiffany from reading the book “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.”
And it’s entwined with furthering the cause of mental health support and awareness in the name of Ryan, who died by suicide last December.
Because one of the best ways to honor Ryan, his parents believe, is to promote counseling and other vital resources for psychological well-being. And to work to destigmatize what it means to open up and seek support and guidance to help quell what the American Academy of Pediatrics calls a “major public health crisis:”
Suicide is the second-leading cause of death among people ages 10-24 in the United States, the AAP says, and rates have been rising for decades. At least part of that is related to the effects of social media on adolescents; in 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory on “the urgent public health issue.” And many of us have friends who’ve suffered from the associated devastation at any age.
So it’s not just OK to ask for help, Tiffany wants you to know.
It’s honorable.
And it needs to be understood as a sign of courage and strength, not weakness.
A poignant sense of purpose
That’s why the Whitneys support the idea of counseling as a mandatory class for adolescents — a notion that Tiffany hopes to promote by speaking for this article.
When she started counseling after Ryan’s death, she thought, “‘Gosh, everybody needs this.’” In her case, she’s also undergone Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), a psychotherapy treatment for trauma that has helped her to see him “lifting away as an angel.”
Making counseling and therapy a routine experience, she believes, would be beneficial in itself and prompt more adolescents to realize they could be aided by individual therapy.
Normalizing such coping mechanisms also is why the Wiffle Ball tournament will feature a booth for Screen Sanity, which works to encourage “digital health” for kids. Another will be for KidsTLC, which provides a variety of services for mental health challenges.
And it’s why all proceeds will go to Fight Club, a confidential, peer-oriented support group that they embrace and endorse for its face-to-face format and dynamics that give voice to each participant, uplift them and alleviate anxieties.
Jake, their youngest child, and some of Ryan’s friends regularly attend sessions of the branch of the program that she helped establish: Olathe South Boys Class of 2028 Fight Club.
The high school, they said, soon plans to launch separate boys and girls programs for each grade.
That effort has been part of Tiffany and Matt continuing their vital connection with Ryan’s friends, who brought her flowers on Mother’s Day and bought him fishing lures for Father’s Day — among many acts that have deeply moved them.
After Tiffany asked the boys if they had any phone messages from Ryan, one of them recorded Ryan’s voice into a Build-A-Bear she presses the button on most every night.
Meanwhile, Tiffany, a physical therapist at Children’s Mercy, also has found a certain solace in advocacy.
While there are many times she feels hollow and as if she has to just “kind of be in this body,” she loves to talk about Ryan himself and finds poignant meaning in working to create more awareness of the need for (and how to get) more help.
The feeling runs so deep, in fact, that she has come in a certain way to see it as Ryan’s purpose in life.
So for Jake’s class she also has conducted a program for Screen Sanity — to which along with Fight Club and KidsTLC she was pointed by social worker Jamie Gordon, who is a family friend along with her husband, Alex, the former Royals great.
And she has spoken quite openly at Fight Club, including sharing parts of a letter Ryan left pleading with others not to do what he did and not to suffer in silence.
Even though his parents had been well-attuned to his mental health struggles after some observations in eighth grade …
Even though Ryan had been receiving therapy for depression for most of about a year, was on antidepressants and had gone through an intensive outpatient program …
He wrote, “Please talk to somebody and get help. … If I would have gotten help sooner, my life could have been different. I should have spoken up sooner.”
You’re not your ‘likes’
The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention stresses that there is no single cause for suicide. While it “most often occurs when stressors and health issues converge to create an experience of hopelessness and despair,” the AFSP’s central message is “there’s always hope” and it’s important to note that most people who actively manage their mental health conditions go on to engage in life.
The Whitneys know it’s complicated and wonder about so much.
He’d had a couple concussions. How might those have affected him? He suffered a torn ACL playing football in eighth grade and a fracture in his hip in ninth grade. Being sidelined from what he loved seemed to jar his sense of identity.
But maybe what they think about the most is the world of social media, brimming with falsehoods and gratuitous cruelty that feeds off itself. That compelled Ryan to write that several people hated him and that “this world’s too mean.”
When they would speak with Ryan about those sorts of things, Tiffany implored him to think about his true friends and what they think of him and what’s actually real.
And that’s one of the key messages she wanted to get across to Fight Club.
“‘You guys need to focus on your real identity, not your virtual identity,’” she remembered saying. “‘You’re not your likes, and you’re not your (social media) feeds.’”
To stop the stigma
Instead, Ryan’s the boy whose friends leave things for him on his headstone and whose death has galvanized a profound community outpouring.
So powerfully that Tiffany Whitney soon changed her mind after an immediate inclination to move away.
“It makes you realize how great people are,” said Matt, a software architect.
Thinking of all that and the Wiffle Ball tournament, he added, “You almost wish he could have seen this.”
Or have seen how friends and sister Ashlyn spoke about him during the funeral at LifeMission Church in Olathe.
“He never made me feel like i had to be anyone else when I was with him,” Ashyln said then, later adding, “When he was around, it was like the world made more sense. Like all the problems could be solved just by his laughter, his smile or his gentle way of making everything seem OK.”
One way or another, all the testimonials circled back to an abiding truth.
Ryan “always put others first,” his father said. “Almost to a fault.”
His eagerness to be an organ donor will be an enduring reflection of that. The Midwest Transplant Network told the family that Ryan’s generosity and courage touched the lives of numerous recipients across the country.
Two received bone graft transplants, described as helping relieve pain and restoring mobility for patients whose bones have been damaged or lost due to cancer, trauma, or disease.
Three other bone grafts are awaiting transplantation, a procedure that can be done up to five years after donation.
Four received cardiovascular tissue transplants that can replace valves and vessels in patients with congenital heart defects or heart disease.
His corneas also were donated, and his kidneys saved the lives of two men in their 60s in the Midwest.
That’s comforting to his parents, and it’s part of much to commemorate on Monday and beyond.
Including what Tiffany and Matt hope will be another part of Ryan’s legacy: to stop the stigma of asking for help.
If you are in crisis or think you may hurt yourself, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.
This story was originally published August 29, 2025 at 5:00 AM.