USC QB Ryan Hilinski goes extra mile to help residents in tornado-torn SC county
There’s a certain restlessness within Ryan Hilinski.
The mother of the South Carolina quarterback, Kym, said perhaps this shutdown around the coronavirus could give him a chance to rest and take a break. But her son couldn’t rest. Not this week.
He couldn’t rest after storms and tornadoes hammered parts of South Carolina early Monday morning.
At his family home on Lake Murray, there wasn’t much affected. But as he started seeing the scale of the damage in other parts of the Midlands and the state, he couldn’t shake the images of homes destroyed and the stories of the losses of life.
So that’s how he came to make a one-day trip Wednesday to Varnville, South Carolina in Hampton County bearing supplies and offering help.
“I can’t just sit here,” Hilinski told The State. “I’ve got so much time to do stuff. I can’t just keep playing video games and watching movies or whatever I do during quarantine. I feel like I’ve just got to go do something.”
He was up early, caught a Zoom video conference with the rest of the Gamecocks quarterbacks and then hit the road with his girlfriend, Ashlyn Cromer, for the two-hour drive south.
Hilinski set out with a plan. He had reached out to some folks in Hampton County, which saw five deaths and an “enormous” amount of damage in the words of S.C. Gov. Henry McMaster. Hilinski was directed to a pair of local recreation centers, one in Varnville and another in Nixville, and found a list of things they needed for relief efforts.
And he started rounding it up.
“I looked for everything that I could spare that they mentioned to me,” Hilinski said. “I grabbed socks. I grabbed clothes from middle school and younger. I grabbed clothes from high school and older, whatever I could find. I got shoes. I grabbed all the tools that I needed, that I could find.”
He didn’t tell his parents initially, but did so eventually as he looked for things to donate. Hilinski reflected on the feeling when people in South Carolina helped his family, still uncertain after a cross-country move. He felt a need to emulate the folks who helped him.
He had never been to that part of the state. He didn’t have a highly developed plan — he just felt he had to get down there and do what he could.
First stop: a recreation center in the heart of Hampton County.
“I got everything out and unloaded it,” Ryan Hilinski said. “Gave it to the people, talked to people, took pictures, prayed with some people, delivered waters to cars, whatever we could do.”
As he was getting ready move on, a woman stopped, recognized him and asked if Nixville was next. It was. “Just follow me,” she told him.
The caravan worked across the South Carolina countryside and gave Hilinski a full sense of the damage wrought by the weather. There were 15 confirmed tornadoes across the state, the National Weather Service confirmed.
“I just couldn’t believe that something could do it,” Hilinski said.
He described branches, debris, a sense of chaos. He looked to one side of the road, wondering how something got there, and turned the other way to see wood, metal, cloths, a Connect Four game. What he quickly came to realize was that somebody’s home shattered and spilled out.
The stop at the Nixville rec center, which was inside a church, involved unloading and then a short trip to a local store to buy more to give.
“We talked to the people there,” Hilinski said. “He met us at the front, a man that helped us throughout the day. He led us to all the areas that were affected, all the areas that people needed help the most, that people needed to meet me or to say hi, whatever I could do to help them.
“I ended up lifting a couple pieces of wood with some people in the middle of everything.”
He said he found himself chatting with fans of college teams from all over — LSU, Georgia, Florida, Clemson — everyone with caps for their own teams, bringing him in and welcoming his help.
Ever the restless one, he dialed into a remote talk that his family’s foundation, Hilinski’s Hope, was doing with Wando High School students as he made the drive home late Wednesday afternoon.
This wasn’t the first helping trip Hilinski had made this week. After the storm, he put out a call on social media asking if anyone needed help. He went with his father to Gilbert to help move a fallen tree on a downed power line. Earlier this month, he also recorded an encouraging message for an Upstate man who was recently diagnosed with a form of leukemia. (Hilinski said his mother had alerted him to that situation.)
In a moment when tragedy tugged at his mind, a restless young man decided to just go do something. He gathered up what he could, departed his home for somewhere he’d never been.
He has plans to do it again. If he can, he’ll ferry donations to that part of the state on his next trip. Going to somewhere he’d only seen in pictures, he found something, a kind of resilience in the face of calamity.
“The people that I met today, they were amazing,” Hilinski said. “They were filled with hope, happiness. And if you’re looking at the images online, it’s different when you’re there. So if you have time on your hands and you have anything extra to spare, go down there. Whatever you can do.
“I felt it on my heart again today to get back down there because I just feel like I could do more. So if I have time in the near future, and this quarantine lasts any longer than it is, I might go back down there and bring a couple more people with me.”
