Nov 20, 2015 5 min read

Those who coach youth sports might think they’ve handled every situation imaginable, but here’s one that escalated from ordinary to out of the ordinary.

A girl was interested in playing basketball. “Someone asked me if she could come play on our team,” Kelly Bryner recalled.

The girl not only joined the team, she also became the coach’s adopted daughter.

Bryner has coached girls basketball for the Brownson House off and on for the last 10 years. During the 2012 season, Tayla joined the team and became friends with Bryner’s daughter, Noelle, a classmate.

“Tayla and our daughter were exactly the same age, and they were in seventh grade,” Bryner recalled. “That’s how we met her.”

Kelly and her husband, Dean Bryner, became acquainted with Tayla, then 12, who spent a night at their house. Their impression of their guest?

“She was really, really, really quiet,” Kelly Bryner said during a phone interview.

A few days later, Tayla was in tears at basketball practice. Kelly Bryner asked what was wrong. Tayla mentioned she previously was in foster care. Bryner temporarily calmed Tayla, but a crisis was about to erupt.

Unlike an infant or a toddler, Tayla had language skills and technology at her disposal, and she was willing to employ both.

The next day, the Bryners found out from a Children and Youth Services caseworker that Tayla was trying to reach Noelle via text message.

The gist: “Could she come stay with us?” Kelly Bryner recalled.

The Washington couple never hesitated.

“I’m glad she felt comfortable enough to ask us,” Kelly Bryner said. “I was always raised that you’re supposed to help your neighbors and that it takes a village to raise a child. Somebody needed us, and it was partly our job to help them.”

Tayla arrived with the clothes on her back and not much else. She asked if she could stay for a little while. The “little while” was destined to become an even more momentous development.

“From day one, she always fit into our family. She completed us, in a sense,” Kelly Bryner said. “We took it one day at a time.”

And so began what one might call “retroactive foster parenting.”

Dee-Dee Blosnich-Gooden, assistant administrator of Washington County CYS, said this type of situation “doesn’t happen that often. Once we’re notified they are willing to provide care, we start the certification process.”

As a coach, Kelly Bryner already had clearances necessary for those who work with children, but there were sessions to attend to school the Bryners in foster parenting.

“I’m a nurse,” Kelly Bryner said matter-of-factly. “There’s always something to learn.”

Because the Bryner family is a large one, weekly sit-down family meetings are routine. Tayla may not have felt comfortable taking part in these group discussions, but her foster parents gave her a notebook and she’d write things down. The Bryners would write back to her.

She later became more talkative, discussing matters with her foster parents and, later, speaking up when she was among the Bryner siblings.

“And then, family meetings weren’t so scary to her,” Kelly Bryner recalled.

Their were six Bryner children living under the same roof when Tayla arrived. A daughter, Tiffany, who was away at college, had to obtain the same clearances as any other adult. When Noelle turned 14, she also had to do the same because Tayla was still a foster child.

The Bryners’ foster parenting of Tayla led to them legally parenting her.

Washington County Judge Katherine B. Emery finalized Tayla’s adoption in December 2014.

“We’ve learned so much through this whole process,” Kelly Bryner said. “Everybody deserves a chance.”

Of Tayla, she said, “She’s only enriched our lives. We’re proud to have her. She only makes our family better and complete.”

Several members of the Bryner family were hoping to attend Washington County CYS’s “Adoption Day” celebration Friday, marking 74 adoptions during the past year, besting a record of 68 set in 2009.

Tayla was one of three children in her birth family, but when she went to live with the Bryners in 2012, she joined a family of seven children ranging in age from 5 to 24.

Asked to describe what it’s like to start out in one family and then join another, Tayla said, “It’s hard, ’cause you have to adapt to all the new people, the new ways of doing things, new traditions. You have to adapt to everything.”

And Tayla has paved the way for a new foster child who is now part of the Bryner family, for whom eight, apparently, was not enough.