Maryland’s Brenda Frese stays positive as 4-year-old son battles leukemia

There’s a problem with little Tyler tonight, and Mommy is just about beside herself. Tyler just turned 4. He has leukemia — but this has nothing to do with that. Tyler is extroverted and lovey-dovey, a world-class hugger, a chatterbox. And until this very day, he loved the Maryland Terrapins, especially the women’s basketball team, unconditionally. He was red, black and yellow, through and through. Attended every game his illness allowed. Wouldn’t even think of wearing blue — because blue is Duke. And Duke, as everyone knows, is bad.

But Tyler met a new playmate the other day, and the other boy was a few years older — which meant he knew everything — and the older boy loved Duke. And so now, here is Tyler, standing in the middle of his family’s basement rec room in Laurel, wearing a Maryland T-shirt, surrounded by Terrapins memorabilia, declaring to all present that Duke is not only cool — but is also about to beat Maryland in this game of two-on-two basketball on the five-foot toy hoop set up in a corner of the room.

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Maryland’s Brenda Frese splits her time between coaching a top 10 women’s basketball team and caring for her son, who has leukemia.

“Maryland is losing this game right now!” he calls out, taunting his opponents — his mommy and his twin brother, Markus.

Mommy is Brenda Frese, Maryland’s head women’s basketball coach, and such talk — in her own house! — is an outrage, especially with a potentially season-defining game against Duke just a few days away.

“Who’s been putting these things in your head?” she says with a tone of motherly concern. When Tyler doesn’t answer, she decides she has to tickle it out of him, and suddenly they’re on the floor, giggling and rolling.

Moments later, when Tyler has taken the worst of an inadvertent head-bump with his brother – “Ouchie! It hurts so bad!” — he collapses into her arms on the couch, those arms being the most comforting place he has known during his fight against cancer, and she smothers him with kisses.

“Remember, Tyler,” she whispers to him, “part of sports is being tough.”

In these moments, nothing else matters to Frese, 41. Neither her day job nor her son’s dire diagnosis – acute lymphoblastic leukemia, discovered 17 months ago – can intrude. And if they invade her mind even for a moment, they are whisked away in the dust storm of chaos kicked up by twin 4-year-old tornadoes.

Here, at the end of another day in the life of Brenda Frese and her family — husband Mark Thomas, and their twin boys Markus and Tyler Thomas — everything, even Tyler’s sudden defection to the blue-clad enemy, feels perfect, really.

‘I need you to pull over’

She was in Indiana, on a recruiting trip. He was back home with the boys.

This was the arrangement they had agreed to from the start — Brenda keeping her high-profile, high-salaried job, with all its inherent pressures and travel commitments, and Mark ditching his career as a TV sports producer and reporter (they had met when he interviewed her as part of a season-long documentary called “Under the Shell”) to be a stay-at-home dad. Despite his creeping feelings of emasculation and her maternal guilt over being gone so much, by this point, two and a half years into their parenthood, they had settled into a nice rhythm.