MCCAMMON – There are caged animals less familiar with their confines than Dane Wissenbach in Marsh Valley’s gym. Watching the senior waltz around feels akin to tailing the President through the White House. It’s not even quite the aura of celebrity with Wissenbach, it’s that no one in the gym feels more important.

“It costs $0 to be kind. It costs 0$ to do something for someone else. It costs $0 to be a good person. It costs 0$ to spread happiness. $0 to give,” -- Dane Wissenbach on Instagram, June 7, 2020.

After a Marsh Valley basketball game in late January, the players wanted to have a pregame celebration for the coaches and wives of the coaches, so they grabbed flowers and goody bags to pass out. Wissenbach thought it was the perfect opportunity to present his highlight/hype film to the community.

“I often remind myself that today could be the last day I get. It’s not morbid to think that, it’s real life. There’s thousands of people who had plans for today but didn’t wake up. LIFE IS PRECIOUS,” -- Wissenbach, July 14, 2020.

Between school and physical therapy and being student council president, he carved out eight late-night hours to finish his video. He spent the weeks prior gathering all the footage with his new camera, then dubbed over the visuals with the local announcer calling the action and added music-video-like visual and special effects that he learned through YouTube tutorials.

“Just wanna say screw fitting in, screw being “normal.” Be you. You don’t have to be like everyone else. You don’t have to be in the box of what people think is “normal.” Be yourself, do what you love, you don’t have to be like anyone else,” -- Wissenbach, Aug. 26, 2020.

On the night of the premiere, Wissenbach leaned against the cinder-block wall with his camo backpack still on. He’s an approachable figure. His smile is everlasting. His stature is not intimidating. And he jitters like the Energizer bunny, always swiveling and jerking his eyes to new faces. A parent hastily walked up to Wissenbach, looking at the three pieces of white construction paper Dane taped up that day to act as a quasi-projector screen, then pointing at the actual projector. “Dane, who’s running this?” the guy said. “I am,” Dane responded.

“What I do know is that everything happens for a reason. Sometimes stuff happens and all we can do is trust that there’s a reason for it. Gods got a plan,” -- Wissenbach, Sept. 2, 2020.

Wissenbach grabbed his computer and hustled up to the second-story balcony that overlooks Marsh Valley’s basketball court. Some young kids, lurking near bright neon lights that turn the Eagles’ gym into a rave before the game, were playing with the lights, treating them like action figures. Wissenbach halted that. He put his computer in front of their faces and pointed out the cues — when to turn the lights on, where to move them, etc.

“There’s a lot of answers I don’t have, and a lot of things I don’t know. But one thing I do know is that I’m dang grateful. I’m at such a weird moment of life right now, but I love it,” -- Wissenbach, Dec. 15, 2020.

As the ceremony finished, Wissenbach ran over to his computer and dialed up the video. The lights cut off. The projector loaded Dane’s computer screen on the white paper. He hit play and scurried over to the Marsh Valley bench. Its opening was heavy: somber music, black and white pictures, all the scene-setting ripe for nostalgia. Then the video cut. The young kids flashed their bright lights. The music jumped a few centuries forward. The color returned. Warmup footage turned to game highlights. Wissenbach clenched his right fist, tilted his chin to the sky and released what sounded like a tribal yell.

“If you are young just remember that being alive is such a rad experience. Life can be anything you want it to be. In 10 years from now you could be in a totally different place with totally different people doing things you never even knew existed,” -- Wissenbach, Jan. 17, 2021.

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Wissenbach had just reeled in a touchdown that iced a win for Marsh Valley football over McCall-Donnelly, vaulting the Eagles to 2-0. His celebration lasted a few seconds before he was back on the field for kickoff coverage. Wissenbach isn’t a bruising force. He’s 5-foot-9 and 145 pounds if we’re being generous. But he can fly. His legs whip like propellers and his arms follow suit, cutting through the air like he’s trying to churn butter. It’s why some think his best sport is track, where the small sprinter finished 3rd at the 3A state championships as a sophomore and picked up some college interest.

Wissenbach was the special teams safety valve. Basically, if the opposing kick returner broke through, it was Wissenbach’s job to catch him. He lined up on the right side. Marsh Valley assistant coach Jeff Belnap, who ran the Eagles’ special teams unit, kicked it left. The ball was only in the air for a few seconds before the whistle blew. Offsides on Marsh Valley.

Wissenbach ran over to the sideline. “Kick it to my side,” he told Belnap.

“As Dane does, Dane loves to be in there to make a play. His passion for football really jumped his senior year and he was playing so well,” Belnap said. “So I said, ‘Alright, we’ll kick it right.”

Wissenbach took off like he just heard the starting gun. He raced on the outside and planted to cut in. That’s when he dropped to the turf. Belnap’s mind fluttered back to homecoming 2019, when his son Corwin fell in the same manner, and his heart sank. He knew Wissenbach had just torn his ACL.

Belnap ran to Wissenbach. Crumpled on the field, the senior gritted his teeth to get a few words out. “I almost got him, coach,” he muttered. Wissenbach tried to walk around, tried to make himself believe it was all going to be alright. Belnap’s own son tried the same thing. He knew everything wasn’t alright.

A few weeks later, Belnap got the text he feared.

“It’s not good news, coach,” Wissenbach told him.

The Marsh Valley senior went in for surgery to repair his busted knee soon after. His football season was over. His senior year of basketball was surely gone. And barring a miracle, his track season wouldn’t happen either. In one swift plant of his cleat, Dane Wissenbach’s high school athletics career ended.

Which caused heads to spin when Wissenbach arrived at Marsh Valley’s practice hours after his surgery. And even more confusion when he stood on the sideline in his Marsh Valley jersey for the next game, hopping all around the sidelines on his crutches.

“There’s nowhere else I would rather be,” Wissenbach said. “I was either sit there and feel sorry for myself, or get involved.

“I wanted to put that passion into something else. So I was like, ‘Why not start making videos for my team?’”

Wissenbach pulled out his phone while he was on the sidelines in his crutches. He edited the clips on iMovie and released his first highlight video a few days later.

Wissenbach’s mom, Whitney, saw his first video. Her knowledge of videography is quite limited, but she heard the enthusiasm in her son’s voice as he described his new passion. He asked for a new camera, a pricey purchase that normally would have required more thought. But she knows her son. She knew his eyes grew when he played sports and how hard it would be to replace that devotion. So she splurged on a Sony A73 so her son had an outlet for his fire.

“He has an all-in type personality. Once he decides to do something, he never does it halfway,” Whitney said. “That’s why sports were so beneficial to him … It’s hard to slow him down. Once he has an interest, he gets obsessive about it.”

****

Hal Colburn is a veteran Idaho photographer who often takes flicks for IdahoSports.com, covering high school sports despite a prosthetic right leg that keeps him in a wheelchair. He was shooting state championship basketball games at the Ford Idaho Center last Saturday when Wissenbach walked over.

As Wissenbach and Colburn were talking, the experienced photographer told the youngster that the best place to take celebration photos was on the sideline across from the benches. So as the Marsh Valley basketball team celebrated its first state title since 1988 after beating McCall-Donnelly, Dane Wissenbach was on the sideline across from the benches with his Sony A73 in hand.

The scene felt cruel. The Eagles celebrated in euphoria and Wissenbach was off to the side.

Competitors are an interesting species, especially in high school when their brain is small and the big picture feels as present as retirement plans. They want to win, but they want to be the reason for winning. If Wissenbach checked out and felt some sort of animosity at the state title, it would be only human.

Not Wissenbach.

“It was a surreal moment for me, because that was the same team I tore my ACL against in football. It’s kind of an indescribable moment,” Wissenbach said. “Even though I wasn’t able to play, I knew I was a part of it because I chose to stay involved and help how I could. It felt as if I had just got done playing the game. It was awesome.”

He continued. “Early on, if I had chosen to sit on the sideline and feel bad for myself and not be involved, it would have hurt. I would have been pissed off. But you can’t be the victim. I chose not to."

So there he was, focusing his eyes into the screen of his camera, following the action as he always did. His team did their job. He still needed to do his. On Friday, he released the final product, a two-minute, 47-second short film that looks like the trailer for a Netflix docuseries. It’s been viewed over 3,200 times as of Saturday. In the years to follow, that number will spike. Players and parents will revert back to Dane’s work, feeling a need for nostalgia. They’ll think of him and probably even send a thank you text for keeping his hands steady after the final buzzer.

“It’s putting some school pride back in Marsh Valley -- and it has been missing for a long time,” Belnap said.

Marsh Valley coach Kent Howell expected the speedy Wissenbach to be the team’s starting point guard this season. In summer ball, he blew past defenders like they were traffic cones but, more importantly, he was a leader. Always motivating. Always uplifting.

When Wissenbach tore his ACL, Howell knew he lost one of his best players. He was afraid that his most important locker-room presence was gone, too. Two weeks after the injury, Howell asked his senior what his thoughts were about basketball season.

“What do you mean?” Wissenbach asked. “I’ll be there. I’ll be at everything. Order me the spirit pack.”

“A lot of coaches, we’ll get kids in the huddle and they say what they’re saying. Most of the time that’s how it works,” Howell said. “Not with him. You never get a say with him in the huddle. He does stuff like that. He’s always picking guys up. Non-stop, if someone misses a shot or is showing bad body language, he picks them up. All the little things that a coach can't get through to a kid but a good friend can, he’s there and does … You’re just glad he’s there.”

So is everyone at Marsh Valley.

Howell’s wife, Roxanne, is the student council advisor at the small high school in McCammon. Her job has become a million times easier since Wissenbach became student body president.

“Dane is one in a million,” Roxanne said. “He has so much ambition and he just cares so much about people.”

His mom calls it a change-the-world personality. When he was young, she noted, it wasn’t always to change the world for the better. The maturation process has shifted that. It’s odd to call what he’s done “accomplishments,” because he doesn’t see it like that. Perhaps what Wissenbach does is better identified as acts of kindness. And there are a lot of them.

He started a Christmas service project three years ago. Through social media, he set up a link where people could make donations. Right before Christmas, he’d take a bunch of his buddies to the store and pick up toys and essentials for needy families or clothes for the homeless. He asks around the community if anyone knows a family in need. Last year, Wissenbach collected so many donations that even after giving out gas cards and winter coats and whatever else, he still had cash left over.

So he held onto it until mid-February. With a few friends, he walked into Costco with a couple hundred bucks and walked out with a couple hundred roses. On Valentine’s Day last year, every girl and every female employee at Marsh Valley received a rose.

“Who does that? Who thinks of doing something so every girl feels special?” Belnap said. “That’s just part of him.”

Last summer, after COVID shut down in-person schooling across the country, parents across the country felt helpless. Graduations and proms and all those special moments faded for their seniors.

Wissenbach reached out to the local family that owns a soda shop in nearby Inkom called, “The Place.” They allowed him to use their establishment for a night. He hired a DJ, catered food and spread the word. On a warm night in May, Marsh Valley was one of the only schools in the country to have a prom. All because of Dane Wissenbach.

“It was huge for those kids. It was just a morale booster,” Roxanne Howell said. “He started it and he followed through with it and finished it. It was 100% on Dane.”

****

At a basketball game against rival Snake River last year, the Panthers’ student section shouted “Tik Tok. Tik Tok,” as Dane Wissenbach missed a free throw. They thought it was so funny that one kid quoted the video on Twitter with the caption, “God didn’t guide that shot in.” At the same game, the Snake River students brought signs with messages pointed at Wissenbach, including something about him buying roses for girls. Knowing who Dane was, Snake River's student body president sent him a message post-game to apologize.

“Naturally, for high school kids, when someone is trying to do something positive, sometimes kids don’t handle that very well,” Belnap said. “The thing about Dane is he doesn’t let anyone influence him. He knows what he wants to do. He knows what’s right and wrong. Just because it may not look cool to a certain crowd, he doesn’t care.”

Some in high school think only comedy plays well on social media. Wissenbach proved positivity generates just as many clicks. It’s his style of filmmaking, too, that led him to gigs making promotional videos for the gym Hansen Athletics and now with Idaho State football, which has granted him access to produce highlight and hype films for their social media channels.

This plays into what other kids find wrong with Dane. He’s successful. And in a world where views and likes are the most valuable currency to teenagers, Dane is John Rockefeller. You start to understand how jealousy forms because of that.

Yet Wissenbach persists. Not because of the views or the likes but because of the response, the positive feedback from people who see an uplifting message or the progress he details about his ACL recovery and can take some inspiration from him.

“The hope is that just sharing my story helps other people,” Wissenbach said. “That’s what I try to do through social media. What's cool about it is, while sharing my journey, there have been at least three or four people who texted me and said, ‘Hey, I just found out I tore my ACL,’ and they’ve been asking me about it.

“Ever since I grew up, I loved motivational videos and content. Any time we’ve had a motivational speaker or something come to our school, I’ve always just loved it and resonated with it. I’m always like, ‘That’s so cool. I want to do that someday.’”

****

Kent Howell sent his two sons to a Point Guard College basketball camp at Weber State a few years ago. When he went to pick his boys up after a few days, they had all the parents sit in while directors handed out various awards.

The camp is more about leadership than basketball. The goal is to teach kids lessons through the game. As the camp’s presenters started to speak, Kent turned to his wife. “I bet Dane ate this up,” he said.

“Sure enough, there they are calling Dane out by name,” Kent continued. “There he is sitting there, and they called him up and gave him some award for being one of the best leaders at the camp. I looked at my wife and was like, ‘There he goes.’”

Ty Pearson can’t say enough good things about PGC. The Highland head coach has been a basketball instructor at various camps for the last four years but attended numerous coaching clinics and other events put on by PGC. At one camp a few years back, he was Wissenbach’s coach. They were probably together a week and Pearson talks about him like a son.

“I was just drawn to him,” Pearson said. "He was just the life of the camp. Just had amazing energy and was a great teammate. He had a phenomenal approach to the game … He’s one of those 1%-type individuals, to be honest with you.”

It’s so easy to list off everything Wissenbach has done, every life he’s touched. Everyone at Marsh Valley speaks of him like Mother Teresa, which is great. It just doesn’t always translate to a scale behind a small town in Eastern Idaho. Every small town seemingly has a few people they’d like to nominate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Wissenbach, the PGC camper, is the evidence that he’s special. Not on a Marsh Valley level or an Idaho level, but a national level.

Chad Songy is a PGC Director who involves himself with various other leadership organizations. Some years, he works with 2,000 different young people across the country and continues to mentor hundreds of them.

But then there’s Wissenbach.

“Dane is probably like one of my top five favorite students,” Songy said. “He has a rare combination of a maturity beyond his years and an understanding of acquiring life wisdom while also still being able to relate really well and influence people his age. Which, to me, is the sign of a really special leader.”

Wissenbach has attended at least a half-dozen PGC camps and worked at another. He fell in love with the opportunity to surround himself with successful influences, like-minded individuals who wanted to spread inspirational messages like they were gospel. As he started going to more camps, he brought along a notebook, jotting down anything that made his head perk up. It was at least 60 pages “of gold,” he said. Just quotes and messages and inspiration.

Problem was, he lost it a few months ago. Even talking about it now tears him up. Yet, even if the messages don’t come back to him word-for-word, the general ideas aren’t ever leaving him. Like this one Songy shares with his campers.

“Negative circumstances are just an opportunity to show off your championship approach. Negative circumstances -- oh, the floor is slippery. Oh, the ball is flat. Oh, these refs are unfair,” Songy said. “All these negative circumstances are an opportunity for the opponent to be distracted by it and you to have a mental edge or for you to show off how special of a person and leader you are.”

That brings Songy to what his night three lecture is at every camp. He tells all his campers to imagine they have a season-ending injury next season. Then he tells them to decide in that moment how they’re going to react.

Wissenbach did not think on night three of whatever camp he went to that he was going to start making videos. But he decided on that night that he wouldn’t let an injury define him, that he would become stronger because of it. And so when he planted his foot and fell to the ground, the next few months weren’t reactive.

“When something is taken away it’s like, boom, it’s an opportunity for him to show off his approach," Songy said. "His championship approach was, ‘OK, this is this other thing I’m making a positive impact on people’s lives with. I can't impact in the same way now, so I’m going to shift to this other way to impact.’”