Newsday - November 21, 2004

Still a presence in the game

Caryn Eve Murray

November 21, 2004

The day this summer that the slab was poured as a base for new bleachers at what would become the Craig J. Grumet Memorial Field, Grumet's Wheatley School soccer teammates etched their initials and numbers there. This was after Marc Grumet had carefully inscribed his son's name, followed by his number: 7.

"He wanted the team members to do that," Bernie Hintz, the varsity soccer coach, said of Marc Grumet. "He wanted to have something locked forever in cement from that day."

Craig Grumet's name is also on the new wireless scoreboard; the number 7 is painted on the playing field, and this past season his photo graced T-shirts his teammates wore beneath their game jerseys.

Grumet, who began as a starter on the varsity team in ninth grade, would have played his final season as a senior this year, had the 17-year-old with shoulder-length hair and big smile not been killed in an auto accident in May.

Soccer season went forward this autumn without him on the team, and his number was retired by the school, but Grumet's presence has remained a part of the action: More than $100,000 in fund-raising immediately after his death helped renovate the Old Westbury athletic field in his memory - in a project his family, school administrators and teammates saw through to completion.

"The team and parents and staff members all helped," said Richard Simon, principal. "They put together the new bleachers and did a lot of other things, which was nice. It was a community-building kind of experience."

And now, even with the regular soccer season over, there is still one more big game to be played for the athlete they knew as Craigy.

Some soccer pros are coming out - Renato Cila, Jordan Cila and Shep Messing, a Wheatley graduate and school hall of famer - and the action on the field Nov. 27, beginning at 1p.m., will be called SuperStar Saturday, a Craig J. Grumet Memorial Fund Celebration. It will raise money for college scholarships and for a scholarship to Camp Pontiac, the sleepaway camp Grumet attended for nine years and called his second home.

Marc Grumet is comforted by the fact that the things his son loved are at the heart of the day's activities, and that, just as important, others like his son will be the beneficiaries.

And in this he finds his own son's final winning score.

"It is horrible enough that I have lost Craig," he said, "but his friends in our community were family. And if the friends he grew up with, well, if I didn't see them now and participate in their lives, I would have lost them, too."