Chris Cappelmann wasn’t looking for anything sentimental when he started digging through his old festival gear. He was just looking for team gift ideas before this year’s Handball Futures Festival, where he coaches the East team. What he found instead was a small button, decades old, tucked away from his own playing days at the Olympic Sports Festival.
He couldn’t quite place how he’d come to have it. But he’d held onto it all these years anyway, one of those quiet keepsakes that outlasts the memory of its origin.
Looking at the old button, Chris had an idea: turn it into a sticker and give it to his players before the Festival began. Bonnie Harris took his idea and helped redesign the button, pulling the design from the original pin and modifying it to read “HFF 2026.” Chris then had a batch printed, a small nod to a tradition he’d once been part of.
During the Festival, Chris started handing the stickers out. One found its way to Olympian Melinda Rhoades.
She looked down at it and stopped. “That’s my handwriting,” she said. “I made these.” She was the one who had drawn the ball.
The story unspooled from there. Back in 1985, at the Olympic Festival in Baton Rouge, Melinda had been coaching and wanted to bring her team a gift. So she made the buttons herself, by hand. Chris, it turned out, had been playing on the national team that year, on the East team, at that very festival. Somewhere along the way, one of Melinda’s hand-made buttons had ended up in his hands, and stayed there for forty years.
Neither of them had put it together until that moment. Chris had unknowingly recreated Melinda’s own design and handed it right back to her, decades later, at another festival, on another East team.
It was, by every account, an amazing feeling. The kind of coincidence that makes the years collapse a little, past and present standing shoulder to shoulder on the bleachers. The spirit of the Festival, carried forward on a pin and a sticker and one recognizable drawing of a ball, had come roaring back.
Chris Cappelmann, Melinda Rhoades, and that sticker, forty-one years in the making.
