CCU’s Owings keeps focus on baseball while receiving good news off the field

For all 53 of Coastal Carolina’s baseball games this spring, Connor Owings has been on the field and in the middle of the lineup for the Chanticleers, often playing the starring role in a resurgent season for the program.

The walk-off hit in an 11-inning victory over South Carolina, the two-homer game against rival Liberty, the four homers overall in that big three-game series, those are what Coastal Carolina fans will associate with the junior outfielder.

And yet the biggest moment for Owings these last few months had nothing at all to do with baseball.

It was the news he and his family received on April 1 when his mother Sherri was formally approved as a kidney donor for Owings, who was born with only one functioning kidney and will at some point require a transplant.

“That was a big relief because it had been stressing on her. It was a big relief for us so it’s exciting,” Owings said simply while discussing the matter last week.

As for the stress the situation has had on him, well, Owings mostly keeps those thoughts to himself.

Despite going for monthly bloodwork in Columbia to monitor his levels, despite taking strong enough medication to cause most of his hair to fall out while leaving only patches under his ballcap and despite dealing with anemia that tests his energy level, Owings doesn’t complain.

“Every time I ask him he tells me he feels great,” Chants coach Gary Gilmore said. “I feel like he’s being as honest as he can be. The two or three times I’ve taken him out whether we’ve been way up or way down, he’s not fought me yet, so that tells me a little bit that he probably appreciates [the rest].”

But he hasn’t missed a game while playing both second base and outfield for the Chants, and if anything, his hitting has only improved as the season has progressed.

Four of Owings’ career-high nine homers have come in the last six games and 19 of his team-leading 46 RBIs have come over the last 12 contests while bumping his batting average to .277. The Chants (35-18) will hope his bat can stay hot this week as they open Big South tournament play Tuesday morning in Boiling Springs, N.C., trying to win a conference championship and cement their spot in the NCAA regionals.

Again, though, the stakes have been far greater off the field for Owings.

He discussed his health situation at length last season, detailing how he didn’t learn until the summer of 2012 that his left kidney had never developed leaving the right one overtaxed after all these years. It wasn’t until he arrived on campus prior to his freshman year and suddenly became very sick prompting a trip to the hospital that doctors found his working kidney functioning at about 20 percent and diagnosed him with Focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, or FSGS secondary

He’s been on the National Kidney Registry’s transplant list since then and the family did get one call for a possible match a handful of months ago, but it wasn’t the right time. His doctors have told them the best thing for Owings is to keep his own kidney for as long as it’s still functioning at a strong enough level.

How long that will be, nobody knows for sure.

“I don’t think [the doctors] know,” said John Owings, Connor’s father. “He gets his bloodwork done every month and they’re just going to monitor his numbers. They’ve told us all along, ‘We’ll know before Connor does.’ The goal is for him to not be one day too late.”

Which is why it was all the more pressing that the family have a solution in place for whenever that day comes.

With his mother Sherri sharing the same blood type, she was their best chance at being approved as a match. It was an easy decision for her, she said, but it wasn’t that simple.

“As a mom, you’re going to do anything you can to help your children, and I just wanted to do everything I could to be physically ready to go through the process,” Sherri said. “They were evaluating everything about my health. I had to be physically fit and ready to go so that they could give me the go-ahead on anything. For the last year, John and I have been working out and getting healthy and doing everything we could to be ready for what we went through [with the tests]. …

“They’re not just going to take a kidney from somebody if they’re not healthy enough to do it.”

She and her husband changed their lifestyles, eating habits and exercise routines to increase their chances of being approved for a potential transplant. Sherri had to get her blood pressure down for it to work, and if she wasn’t a match, then John would be the next to go through the process.

For Sherri, that process culminated with two days of thorough testing at MUSC in late March … and then more waiting.

She finally got the call at work about a week later and promptly called Connor and John, starting the chain of phone calls to pass the good news through the family.

Again, relief is the word the family repeats time and again in talking about it all.

“It was just more stressful than I think we realized because we wanted the end result to be what it was and as we were going through it, it was, ‘Please let this work!’” Sherri said. “Because I really wanted to be able to do that for Connor and just take the unknown out of the picture. Connor has been on the transplant list at MUSC since he was diagnosed and we got one phone call [for a potential match in that time]. So we didn’t want to count on an outside donor.”

Said John: “That was a lot of stress off all of us.”

If that process has weighed on Owings this season, though, he won’t let on – not to his coaches or teammates, and really not even to his family.

“He’s been a cheerleader for me in basically saying, ‘You’ve worked so hard, no matter what happens it’s good,’” Sherri said. “So when I was able to call him and say that [I was approved], it was just like he was very … humbled that it all worked out and we’re good to go and thankful that we have a plan.”

Sherri and John will be the cheerleaders this week – as they often are – traveling to Gardner-Webb to watch Owings and the Chants in the conference tournament.

They were in Philadelphia over the weekend to watch Connor’s older brother Chris Owings play with the Arizona Diamondbacks. A week earlier, the Major League infielder had hit his second home run of the season on the same day that Connor broke out of a power slump with a deep homer of his own against Liberty, and he called his younger brother after the game to offer congratulations.

Baseball keeps the family plenty busy – and mentally occupied – this time of year, and while Owings is concise with his thoughts these days when talking about his health, he has plenty to say about what this season has meant to the veterans on the team after a rough 2014 campaign.

“The pressure was trying to return Coastal back to the program that we’ve been and want to be,” he said. “That’s something we sat down as juniors – Zach [Remillard], Mike [Morrison], [Tyler] Chadwick, myself and Brock [Hunter], all the guys that have been here for the three years – and said, ‘There’s a reason we came here. We came here to win and we didn’t come here just to enjoy ourselves.’ We really wanted to set the tone early this year and play to a higher standard and play to the Coastal Carolina standard of winning and I think we’ve done a good job of that this year.”

Owings’ role in that has been especially impressive considering everything else going on in his life, even if he doesn’t choose to think of it that way or cast a spotlight on his situation.

While they know the kidney transplant is an inevitable reality looming in the indeterminate future, his mother says it’s not a primary topic of conversation for the family these days – especially now that they have a solution in place.

“We need to always talk about certain things, but do we dwell on it? No, because that’s not what Connor’s wanted,” Sherri said. “He has a strong faith and [knows it’s something] he can’t control so he rolls with it and what happens is going to happen. I feel like we’ve kind of done the same thing and the day we get the news from the doctor that we need to do something we know what we’re going to do now.”

In the meanwhile, it’s still baseball season.

This story was originally published May 18, 2015 at 7:01 PM with the headline "CCU’s Owings keeps focus on baseball while receiving good news off the field."