Tara Sullivan

Sports Columnist, @Record_Tara

WHIPPANY – The early spring breeze is rolling across the fields here at the Red Bulls training facility, where a full roster of professional soccer stars hop, skip and jump their way through a set of pre-practice warmup drills. The eyes of head coach Jesse Marsch are watchful, but not only on the players in his charge. He has a VIP on the field today, and he glances often toward the tiny, ponytailed girl holding down one end of the line, ever wary she’s OK,that she's still on task, still involved.

Nine-year-old Julia de Grandpre is getting it done just fine, a study in motion wrapped inside a navy Red Bulls jacket, matching shorts flapping in the wind as she makes her way from end line to end line, an occasional cartwheel interrupting her sprints.

Had this been only a week ago, Julia would have been wearing leggings rather than the dark blue pair of running shorts from Justice. This might seem an inconsequential distinction, but for Julia’s parents, Red Bulls general manager Marc de Grandpre and his wife, Kim, it is anything but. Julia used to love to wear leggings, matching them with whatever outfit the budding fashionista would choose for the day.

Then suddenly, she didn’t.

Welcome to the world of raising a child on the autism spectrum, where small moments can become major ones, where regular is a word best left for ordering coffee, where unpredictability is about the only predictable thing in your day.

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In this case, Julia’s aversion to the leggings is likely related to a sensory processing disorder, one of the various components of her diagnosis, which includes issues with fine motor skills, speech delays or auditory processing disorders. “Literally, a spectrum of things,” her father says. “That’s the challenge for families that have kids on the spectrum. You meet that one child that’s autistic, but there is no one the same. You can’t say, ‘Oh, they all have this.’”

It can be so difficult for families to say this at all, to let the world in on their private lives, to say "yes, our child has autism," and do so without ever knowing how a recipient of that admission will react to the news. But for Marc and Kim, this is a perfect time to make their journey public, to use the strength and depth of a month dedicated nationally to Autism Awareness to bring more attention to a diagnosis that affects so many families, to shine a light on the inspiration for events like an April 29 game at Red Bull Arena, when the team hosts Chicago on Autism Awareness Night. Small changes like turning the lights and sound down, or providing small, quiet areas to avoid kids feeling overwhelmed, can make attending a professional sporting event not only better for kids with autism, but in many cases, make it possible at all.

“For kids like Julia, who have unique gifts, it’s an opportunity to raise awareness for them,” Marc says. “They’re all unique and great in their own way. I always say every kid has a gift, and kids on the autism spectrum, we have to nourish it.”

The de Grandpre family lives by that creed. Marc, Kim and Julia’s older brother Tyler, a 12-year-old soccer-playing, basketball-loving combination of empathy and maturity beyond his years, are the center of her joyful world, feeding off the light and brightness she carries into into any situation, coping with the multiple questions she asks all day or the meltdowns she can suffer without warning. And they are lifted by so many others around them, like Kim’s extended family, the Beezers.

If you recognize the name, that makes sense, given Kim’s past life as one of the best girls basketball players ever to come out of Bergen County, the Pascack Valley to Boston College standout who still looks like she could win a game of one-on-one. They’re all available to help, her brother Jim and his wife Samantha, her sister Laurie Roche and her husband John, her parents Jim and Ronnie, who still live in River Vale.That’s what blood relations do.

But what Marc’s professional family has come to mean in this equation is even more heartwarming, a team of Red Bulls from the playing field to the front office embracing young Julia as one of their own. There’s goaltender Luis Robles stopping on his way to the practice field for a hug from Julia, answering her rapid-fire questions about where his own children are, kicking the ball back and forth as fellow team members stream out of the building. There’s midfielder Sacha Kljestan, wrapping his arm around Julia for a pre-practice team huddle, one she's been specifically invited to join. There’s Marsch, announcing Julia’s presence as if a Hollywood star had arrived, smiling as the announcement is greeted by rousing applause.

“They’re my friends,” Julia tells me later, reminded by her dad to look up, to make eye contact.

This is all so important. School days aren’t always so social for Julia, not for most children who operate in a more solitary world, who can get lost in the apps on their iPhones or build entire worlds with their Barbies. Julia plays sports through a challenger program, and takes a mainstream weekly class at Paragon Gymnastics, but peer-to-peer relationships are difficult. With the Red Bulls, she’s found that sort of interaction. She's found a second home.

So here she is, skipping along the edge of the warmup drills, wondering why she can’t stay out there all day, kicking the ball with her friends. “This is good, very good,” Marc says, watching from an adjacent field. “It’s so hard for every family with a child on the spectrum; people see the good moments and say, ‘Oh, they’re fine.’ They don’t see the stuff at home.”

No, they don't see the crashes, the fights at bedtime or the battles over food choices. They don't see Tyler cowering in one corner of the back seat of the car while his dad tries to settle Julia in the other. They don’t see the emotions inside either, the road to acceptance for a father that he might never walk his daughter down the aisle, the worry for parents who’ve had to set up contingencies for their daughter’s care should something happen to them, the need to have answers but the wisdom to know they’re not always there.

“In the beginning when you’re trying to understand what’s happened and figure out why, it can be really hard on you,” Marc says. “We’ve stopped looking back at ‘why’ and we’re looking forward. It’s tough when you can’t, we always have the mentality, Kim and I, that we can fix it. This one, there’s nothing to fix. You can do as much as you can.”

And you can love what you have. For the de Grandpres, that's the gift of Julia, the joy, the light, the energy she brings to them. That's the sort of awareness worth sharing.

Email: sullivan@northjersey.com