Meet Avon Grove football player Gavin Picard, who’s more than a teen battling against cancer

Gavin Picard felt normal. The Avon Grove High School junior was in the midst of a pivotal football season. He was coming off a summer of seven-on-seven workouts and started to attend a few showcases at nearby colleges.

He wanted to extend his playing career to the next level, and the journey was just getting started. Picard, who played receiver, tight end, and safety, had the grades, being near the top of his class, and the drive. Now it was time to prove his abilities on the field.

But in just one day that all changed.

Picard woke up on a Tuesday morning in October with a sore throat. His little brother, Graham, had the flu and had come down with a fever the night before, so Gavin stayed home from school and rested.

After his mother, Beth, spoke with Gavin that morning, she caught a glimpse of the side of his neck, almost as if the sun was hitting it directly, and noticed a large lump. Beth, who has been a pediatric nurse for 20 years, thought it could be a swollen lymph node. But there was something inside of her that didn’t sit right.

“I kind of had a gut feeling from that point on,” Beth Picard said. “I definitely had a bad feeling about it, but I also was trying to calm myself down. I went straight to the emergency room and went to see his pediatrician.”

The nurse felt around his neck and found lumps in other areas, expressing a concern that it could be cancer. In that moment, Gavin and his mother thought, “No chance.” Even when they called Todd Picard, Gavin’s father, to relay what the nurse said, he thought the two were joking.

They then went to Nemours Children’s Hospital in Wilmington, where Beth has worked for 15 years. Gavin underwent several tests, and after an hour passed, an emergency room attendant came in. Beth said, “I thought you were done?” But she could tell by the look in the nurse’s eyes that she was about to tell them life-altering news.

“She sat down, put her hand on my bed, and instantly my mom knew,” Gavin said. “She was already in tears. I was probably shocked. I don’t even know what I was feeling. … I don’t think we got a lot of sleep that night.”

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Gavin was diagnosed with stage 3 Hodgkin lymphoma, which is treatable and often curable. The doctors were surprised he was playing football days earlier, since the cancer was substantial but luckily had not spread to other organs.

He did not know much about his cancer nor the operation that went into the treatment. The first question, though, that Gavin asked the doctors was: “Will I be able to play football?”

“I learned pretty early on that if everything went to plan, I would have six months of chemo and then I just have to train pretty hard to get back into shape,” Gavin said. “Close to shape as I can, but I would be able to play and that was something that I was able to look forward to.”

The last six months have been a whirlwind of emotions for the Picard family. His story has received national attention as well. In October, NBC Nightly News shared a moment at the end of the final game of Avon Grove’s football season against Coatesville as the two schools, who are rivals, came together to recognize Gavin’s fight against cancer.

After six months of chemotherapy, Gavin officially finished his treatment in March. He’s waiting for the results of a PET scan and he has remained positive. He’s hoping to return to football for his senior year, but nonetheless, he wants to regain a normal life.

Gavin stayed at the hospital for two nights after his diagnosis. He had surgery to remove the lump on his neck. After a week went by, he started his chemotherapy treatment, or what Gavin referred to as “a week of hell.”

He was on a 15-day cycle, which included 12 treatments altogether. Every other Tuesday, he would go to the hospital with his mother, who took time off from work to take care of him.

At first, Gavin carried a load of anger and frustration. He couldn’t finish out the football season with his teammates; he wasn’t able to go to school, and he had to be in isolation most of the time due to the treatment.

It was difficult, Gavin said, to come to terms with the situation as well as accepting it.

“You’re basically just laying in bed; you don’t want to move,” he said. “But after a while, I learned it was good to try to move. You have no motivation to do anything, but eventually, it was good to get outside and push yourself a little bit — mentally at least.

“I learned to just stop trying to get mad at things that are out of my control. I was really mad at that I was going to be sick every other week. There’s nothing I can do to control that — I had to do this to get better. Once I stopped getting angry [about] the things I can’t control, that really helped my mindset.”

Before Gavin was diagnosed with cancer, he was seeing a sports psychologist to help calm his nerves. He kept talking with the same therapist during his treatment, but instead of searching for calmness, he needed to let out anger.

The Picard family as a whole has tried to cope with their anger in different ways. They’ll break down, cry, scream, write, or sit alone in silence. The hardest part was getting through January and February. That was when his parents felt as if they were losing who their son was as a person.

“Just the toll it takes,” Todd Picard said. “You go through all the emotions, and you do it several times throughout the process.”

“It was harder and harder to watch him get sicker and sicker,” Beth added.

But as the calendar turned to March, the Picard family started to see a light at the end of tunnel. Gavin was nearing the end of his treatment. While they knew more testing needed to be done in May, the Picards remained positive and wanted to do something special.

The community rallied behind them. On the day Gavin came home from his final treatment, family, friends, and teammates made signs that were displayed around the front lawn, congratulating him.

It started to sink in that maybe Gavin could have his old life back as a teenager.

“It’s just made me realize that there’s a lot bigger things going on,” Gavin said about his perspective of life. “It’s kind of like a cliché, but there’s a lot more important things than the little things I was worrying about. ... I know in the grand scheme of things they don’t matter.”

Gavin started playing football in the third grade. He grew up watching Penn State football, and instantly fell in love with the game. However, he felt like a baby giraffe on the field, being taller than most of his teammates while he didn’t quite fit into his body yet.

Now standing at 6-foot-3, Gavin wondered about playing in college. He shifted his focus toward the game last summer.

“Those doors were opening,” Avon Grove football coach Joe Coffey said. “From the beginning, I knew that he wanted to be great because of what we saw from him. His effort on everything, the attention to detail, wanting to bring people up that were around him. He wanted us to be successful as a football program.”

While battling cancer, football never left Picard’s mind.

At the end of the season, Gavin was named a cocaptain for his senior year. The team would hold offseason workouts three times a week, and despite how he felt, Gavin would go as many times he could. He wanted to stay in the loop and it was important to be around the team.

Besides his teammates and coach helping take a load off his mind, Gavin had a conversation with Devon Still, a former NFL defensive end who’s a Camden native and Penn State graduate. Still’s daughter, Leah, is a cancer survivor, who battled neuroblastoma at age 4. Beth Picard was one of the nurses who took care of Still’s daughter.

“I had a life before this, I have stuff that I’m doing now — It’s not the only thing that makes me.”

The conversation took a different direction than Gavin expected; they didn’t talk about cancer or how he felt — they talked about life. He told Still that when this is all over, he does not want to be known as “the kid that beat cancer.”

“When I walked into class, you could tell people look at you and they don’t know what to say,” Gavin said. “Everyone knows that you have cancer and what you’re going through, but a lot of times, you don’t want to talk about it.

“I don’t want to forget about what happened; it’s obviously a part of me now. But it’s not the only thing that I have to offer to talk about. I had a life before this, I have stuff that I’m doing now. It’s not the only thing that makes me.”

While Gavin wants to get back to doing teenager things, he also has thought about using his voice down the road to inspire others who are going through a similar situation. And he hopes in some capacity, football can play a part in that.

“He might not have the same conventional route that other kids take, but we also told him that maybe this is how you get to play in college,” Todd said. “Maybe somebody sees your ability to fight, persevere, grit, and that that’s the kind of person they want on their team.”