Why We Started

In the aftermath of a suicide, family, friends and communities respond in different ways. When Brittany died by suicide in March of 2016, her family and friends decided that no one else should experience such a profound and life-altering loss. Fight Like A Ninja was founded to keep Brittany’s light in this world doing the things she loved most, playing hockey and helping others.


Since then, Fight Like A Ninja has grown into so much more than a scholarship and a hockey tournament. We have grown into being able to offer support and partnerships with other non-profits to continue to pursue the lifesaving vision and mission to Start Conversations that so many have no idea they need to have.

We honor the life of Brittany "The Ninja" Corcoran.  She lived her life always helping others, so we are continuing to do that in her name.

Our Ninja Mama speaking in communities

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We are grateful to Midco Sports Magazine for helping us to share the Fight Like a Ninja Story and what this tournament means.  

Whitney: Hard lessons from teen's death

STU'S VIEWS
Stu Whitney, [email protected]Published 5:17 p.m. CT April 8, 2016 | Updated 9:54 p.m. CT April 8, 2016


The high school girls formed a circle and linked arms before letting loose with their chant. It was a “sportsman’s prayer” they adopted as members of the Sioux Falls Flyers hockey team, which seemed the most fitting way to end last week’s postseason banquet at the Prairie Center on the Avera campus.

While parents considered the moment’s meaning, ­­the girls’ voices filled the room as twilight crept through the surrounding glass walls.

“Dear Lord, in the battle that goes through life, I ask but a field that is fair,” the girls said in unison, “a chance that is equal with all in the strife – a courage to strive and to dare.”

The previous day they had attended the funeral of 17-year-old teammate Brittany Corcoran, an honor student and standout goalie from Tea who took her own life March 24 after a lengthy battle with depression.

Outside of her family and closest friends, the notion that Corcoran would want her life to end seemed unthinkable.

Suicide prevention a team effort

She was taking dual-credit classes, with plans to attend Bethel University in St. Paul, Minn., in the fall. She mentored younger athletes in hockey and softball and was friendly with players throughout the state.

She volunteered for the Humane Society and Bishop Dudley House, and many who knew her talked of her frequent smile. It is a testament to the ferocity of mental illness, though, that looks can be deceiving, with brightness on the outside masking darkness and self-doubt within.

“I don’t think Brittany ever truly saw herself the way the world saw her,” her mother, Angela Drake, said. “The fact that she herself wasn’t able to see how great she was is heartbreaking.”
The complex nature of teen depression and suicide has led to calls for more education on how to identify risk factors and determine treatment for what is viewed as a public health concern.

Suicide is the third-leading cause of death for people ages 10 to 24, resulting in about 4,600 deaths a year, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The number has tripled since 1960. South Dakota's suicide rate ranks ninth-highest in the United States across age groups and seventh for teens and young adults.

​Erasing the stigma of mental illness and emphasizing community-wide awareness of how to help identify and aid troubled teens is a major step in trying to reduce suicides.


South Dakota recently became the 17th state to adopt the Jason Flatt Act, which requires teachers and public school personnel to complete at least one hour of training on youth suicide prevention and awareness as part of their certification.

Avera Behavioral Health saw 20 percent growth in admission from 2012-15 at an inpatient program that treats children expressing suicidal thoughts. The facility has adopted an initiative known as Zero Suicide to bring assessment, screening and safety planning to the entire health system, as well as community partners.

“There’s never one reason behind suicide,” said Janet Kittams-Lalley, president of the Helpline Center in Sioux Falls that deals in suicide prevention and response. “There are a multitude of things that have happened to a person in their lifetime that brings them to that level of despair.

“Anything we can do to break down stigmas and raise awareness is encouraging, because every life is precious.”

For the family, friends and teammates of Brittany Corcoran, that message rings true. But so do feelings of pain and confusion.

If the field is to be fair, as the prayer suggests, how does someone so inspiring and powerful decide that the battle is not worth waging? And just how formidable was her foe?

“What people struggle with is that this was a kid who seemingly had everything going for her,” says Bryan Kouri, Sioux Falls Youth Hockey Association board president and family friend. “She had a team that loved her, a family that loved her, a statewide hockey community that surrounded her, and even with all that, you lose this girl.

“That’s how difficult a battle mental illness can be. You look around and say, despite all that, it still won.”

Ready to soar

Brittany Corcoran was an active child with a desire to succeed. Whether riding her bike or swimming or learning to tap dance, the girl approached each pastime as if it were a personal challenge waiting to be conquered, her mother said.

“The way her personality was, she had to do it perfectly,” said Angela Drake, a Huron native who moved to Sioux Falls with her husband, Joe, when Brittany was 6 months old. “She went at everything 100 percent.”

Brittany got involved with hockey after watching her younger sister, Brianna, on the ice.

Intrigued by the action, she started skating and hanging out at the rink. Before she knew it, she was wearing goalie equipment and learning the ropes from Flyers players and coaches.

“They put her first goalie pads on her, and she never took them off,” says Angela. “She was a natural.”

Smaller than most of her teammates, Brittany compensated with athletic instinct and hard work, quickly becoming one of South Dakota’s top goalies.

Her acrobatic saves and tenacity earned her the nickname “Ninja,” a moniker that would assume greater significance later.

“She had a ‘sixth sense’ that all the really good athletes have,” says Brian Wrightsman, Corcoran’s coach with the Flyers from 2009-15. “It was a sort of peripheral vision that you really can’t teach, and she set herself apart.”

Her sister Brianna, who most everyone calls “Butchie,” was pleased to see Brittany’s positive qualities shine through as she became an integral part of the youth hockey scene.

“She could get along with anyone,” the 15-year-old freshman at Tea Area High School said. “If she saw someone down, she would go over and try to cheer them up. She found a way to make everyone happy.”

Time of transition

When Brittany was in fifth grade, she and her sister moved to Tea with their mother. Joe and Angela had gone through a divorce and shared custody of the girls, who saw their father on weekends and Wednesday nights.

“It was obviously very tough on them,” said Angela, who works as general manager at a moving company in Sioux Falls. “Nothing about it was easy.”

Brittany and Butchie struggled to adjust with the changing family dynamic, coupled with a new school in a smaller community. The family has a history of mental illness, and Brittany encountered challenges she could no longer conquer.

Her increasing sensitivity made her vulnerable at school, where bullying took its toll. She sat with other tormented kids at lunch and tried to help them, but it only increased her isolation.

She started cutting, a form of self-injury used by teens struggling to cope with extreme emotional pressure or pain. Then came the first of many suicide attempts, leading to inpatient stays at Avera Behavioral Health.

Doctors and therapists made it clear to Brittany’s family that she had a disease that needed to be treated with counseling, medication and extreme care.

“She was never treated as if she was seeking attention,” her mother said. “It was also not treated like something she could simply ‘shake off,’ like just putting a smile on her face would make everything better.”

Still, there was a maternal instinct within Angela that made her want to reach out and fix her little girl with traditional tools of firmness and love.

“There are times you get frustrated and say, ‘You’ve got to knock this off,’” she recalled. “Especially with the cutting. But then I’d stop myself and say, ‘I’m here to take care of you.’ And I’d wash her wounds or take her for stitches.

“Your instinct is to say, ‘Why the hell do you keep doing this to yourself?’ But then you pull back and realize that she’s not doing it to hurt herself. She’s doing it because she hurts.”

When problems persisted in Tea, it was decided that Brittany would attend Roosevelt High School as a freshman in 2012, where she made the honor roll but encountered many of the same issues.

“She was looking for a perfect fit,” says Angela. “She wanted to try Roosevelt, but that went worse for her. It’s brutal, because this is your kid, the light of your world, and she’s in pain.”
By the end of the first semester, Brittany was back in the hospital for continued instances of self-harm. The notes she left for her family grew darker and more foreboding.

Even so, there were many people she encountered regularly who had no idea of the challenges she faced.

“You don’t see a lot of what’s going on inside a person,” says Kouri. “It’s not like a (visible) illness where you feel you can provide a source of strength. It’s internal. People do a great job of hiding how much they’re hurting, and Brittany did a better job of it than a lot of people realized.”


Finding 'Ninja' spirit

Hockey provided a haven. Even when feelings of doubt and despair threatened to overwhelm her, Brittany summoned energy for the rink.

Carson Haase was a year younger than Corcoran when she joined the Flyers in 2010, entering a program of mostly high school juniors and seniors. Rather than shut out the newcomer, Brittany embraced her.

“We were best buds from the start,” said Haase, now a junior at Brandon Valley. “She was always fun to be around.”

Despite her diminutive stature, the 5-foot-2, 110-pound Brittany loomed large. As she became more established in the program, she took on a mentoring role, tying the skates of younger players and helping out as a volunteer coach.

When Carol McKee started her Hockey605 website and became acquainted with Corcoran, she was impressed enough to make her a student correspondent, providing analysis and doing on-air interviews at the state boys varsity tournament.

“One of the first interviews she did, the boy came up to her moments later and asked for her phone number,” McKee recalled of Brittany. “She was one of those people that when you visited with her, she made you feel you were the most important person in the world.”

For the 2012-13 season, Brittany returned from her period of hospitalization in time for the state hockey tournament, leading the Flyers to their first varsity title since 2008 with a 4-1 victory over Mitchell in the championship game.

Her regular season was interrupted the following year when she was admitted to long-term adolescent care at the Human Services Center in Yankton, a stint that lasted three months. By this point, her “Ninja” nickname had become a rallying cry for those who knew the battle being waged to keep her alive.

Angela distributed purple ninja stickers that the Flyers wore proudly on their helmets and shared on their hockey travels.

“We left a ninja sticker in every single ice rink across the state,” says Haase, a defenseman who served as alternate captain with Corcoran this past season. “Her nickname described her as a really good goalie, but it had a deeper meaning as well. It meant she had gone through struggles and really had to fight to get back to where she was and continue to play hockey. She had to fight internally every day.”

Before Brittany left for Yankton, Coach Wrightsman handed her a hockey puck and told her, “When you’re ready to come back, bring that to me.”

Two weeks before the 2014 state tournament began in Watertown, Brittany returned to Sioux Falls and attended Flyers practice, handing Wrightsman the puck. On one side she had painted, “I am ready.” The other side read simply: “Ninja returns.”

Sioux Falls entered the tournament with a 9-12 record and was the fifth seed in the tournament. After barely escaping Huron in the first round, the Flyers upset top-seeded Brookings 4-3 in the semifinals, rallying from an early 3-1 deficit as Corcoran stopped 36 shots.

“She was scared to death before that game because she thought if we lost it would be her fault,” says Wrightsman. “But once Brookings took that lead, she totally shut the door.”

In the championship game, using borrowed straps on her goalie pads, Brittany turned away 28 of 31 shots as Sioux Falls edged host Watertown for an unlikely state title that, for a while, lifted the fog of fear and uncertainty.

“Everybody in my family thought it was really cool,” says Butchie, who cheered loudly from the stands. “We got to see the happy person again.”

Darkness sets in

Normalcy is not part of the equation with a damaged child. It might have been tempting for others to suggest that Brittany was “better” or “looking great” or “turning the corner,” but her family knew that most triumphs were temporary and vigilance remained vital.

“Depression looked different on Brittany,” says her mother. “With some people, when you look at them or talk to them, you can tell they’re having a tough time. With Britt, you couldn’t tell. People thought I was crazy when I would reach out and need to have her spend the night somewhere because I would be gone. They’d say, ‘She’s 16, can’t she stay on her own?’ And the answer was ‘no.’”

Back in school at Tea, Corcoran managed to maintain a high grade-point average while pursuing volunteering opportunities and excelling as a catcher in softball.

Her mother believes these efforts to maintain an outer shell of achievement were part of Brittany’s desire to suffer in silence.

“It was her way of masking it to the world,” says Angela. “If she looked good and talked well and did all these things, no one would know and no one would bother her about how she really felt. They would just think she was OK. That’s how hard she fought for no one to know.”

On Aug. 22 of last summer, the charade came crashing down. Brittany drove off in her green 1997 Pontiac Grand Am and set off warning signs in her household that she was not coming back.

“She disappeared, and I knew within an hour that she was gone,” says Angela. “She had not been doing well. I pulled up her bank account and saw that she had bought some pills at Hy-Vee. I went there, and they used security cameras to help determine what she had bought. I contacted police shortly thereafter, and they ran with it.”

The Tea Police Department had been to the house for an earlier suicide attempt and recognized the urgency.

Pretty soon, Brittany’s picture was displayed prominently on Sioux Falls media outlets next to the words, “Missing teen.” She was wearing black yoga pants and a gray T-shirt, the public was told. Her license plates read: 4NINJA.

“A lot of people thought I was just a crazy mom who couldn’t find my kid for an hour and freaked out,” said Angela, who searched with family friends for her daughter. “Some of the (social media) comments were brutal. I just stopped reading them.”

Brittany, meanwhile, had parked her car in a wooded area, taken the pills and holed up in a bathroom at the McCart Fields softball complex, not far from the Denny Sanford Premier Center.

When a Parks and Recreation worker found her there at 10 p.m., he kicked her out but didn’t realize she was in trouble.

“She walked around down there for a while until she finally found her car, which was hidden in the trees,” Angela said. “She was getting sick and spent the night in her car. The next morning she has no idea how she drove back. She had just enough gas to get home.”

Fighting for life

That night led to another hospitalization and intense psychiatric care. Brittany’s doctors at Avera decided to try TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation), a relatively new treatment for depression that uses magnetic fields to stimulate nerve cells in the brain.

After several weeks in the hospital, she started taking classes at the University Center, with the goal of attending college in the fall.

She returned to the Flyers and played well, despite missing the last five games with a knee injury. The veteran goalie impressed Chelsey Coffee, who had taken the reins from Wrightsman as coach.

“She found a way to be everything to every kid,” says Coffee. “She was there for the younger kids’ games, and she went to extra practices not only for the girls but the boys. She was out there tying skates, giving words of encouragement, really helping to make the program what it is.”

The final game of the regular season Feb. 21 was Senior Night, and Brittany was the only senior. Rather than accept the spotlight, she had shirts made for her teammates that read ‘I Played With a Ninja’ and wrote a personal letter to each player.

As part of the festivities at the Scheels IcePlex, Haase gave a speech about what her friend meant to her.

“Brittany taught me a lot about hockey,” she told the gathering. “But what she might not know is what she taught me without even thinking about it. Brittany taught me that being strong comes from the courage within yourself, and that hard work and determination do not go unnoticed.”

A little more than a month later, Brittany took her sister to school and was supposed to change clothes, attend classes and then meet her mom at work, where she was helping out.

When she didn’t show up, Angela feared for the worst. Brittany had cleared her room of clutter two weeks earlier, disposing of journals, drawings and poems, an effort her mother attributed to spring cleaning. Now she wondered.

“I had a bad feeling,” Angela said. “So I sent someone to go check on her.”

Her intuition was correct. Brittany was found dead at home, leaving a note that Angela described as "very angry about being alive."

She masked her pain until the end, sending a text to friends that morning with motivational messages she shared with others but struggled to embrace herself.

"This world tries to mold you into who you 'should' be, but the only thing you should be is who you want to be," the message read. "Be confident in who you are and the abilities you have! When you hold your true self back, you are only cheating yourself."

To strive and dare

Experts agree that the aftermath of teen suicide is nearly as complex and consequential as the events that precede it.

As surviving family members and friends grapple with conflicting feelings of rejection, guilt, shame and anger, sorting through those emotions with grief counseling can be vital.

The Helpline Center, South Dakota’s only accredited suicide prevention and after-care organization, offers “postvention” procedures to promote the healthy recovery of those most closely affected.

“Addressing and treating grief that loved ones feel is very important,” said Kittams-Lalley, who has 25 years of experience in the field. “We want to make sure they get the help they need.”

It was not something attributable to a single factor and it was not something that could simply be fixed. That’s what made it so daunting.

For Angela and her family, that means coming to grips with the depths of Brittany’s mental illness and acknowledging the serious nature of her long-term struggle.

“She didn’t want to live to see 16, and we fought like hell to get her there,” says Angela. “She didn’t want to live to see 18, and we fought like hell on that. We just didn’t get there.”

For a while, support from the hockey community and uplifting words at Brittany’s funeral made it possible for her family to postpone the reality that life would go on without her.

“In the days after it happened, I was numb,” Angela said. “But then it gets harder. I mean, she worked with me, and I now I walk in there and see her desk with everything on it. People still call and ask for her.”Butchie is back in school, but she and Angela are staying with family members while looking for a new place to live. They packed up Brittany’s room at their old place this week but have no intention of calling that home.

“I just can’t stay there,” says Angela.

The pain in her voice hammers home the notion that there’s nothing to romanticize about teen suicide. For all the light that Brittany showed on the outside, her inner torment reveals a frightening aspect of human frailty. She had a strong support system, years of professional counseling, a future filled with opportunity, and still she saw no hope.

News of her death shocked people such as McKee, the Hockey605 owner who saw such promise in her young correspondent.

“Her death hit me like nothing has ever hit me before,” said McKee, who has experience in suicide prevention and wants to help raise awareness. “You’re talking about a beautiful, vivacious young woman who is now gone. It ripped my heart out.”

Brittany’s 18th birthday would have been March 29. On that day, several of her friends joined Angela and Butchie at a park in Tea, where they released balloons into the sky and ate purple ninja turtle cupcakes.

Earlier, Butchie had written lyrics to the tune of “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?” from the Disney movie “Frozen,” planning to perform it at her sister’s graduation party.

Instead, she unveiled it at Brittany’s wake, warning well-wishers on Easter Sunday not to expect much from her singing voice.

“We used to share a room, and now you’re moving away,” went the words. “And I wish you would stay.”

Hockey players from across South Dakota came to the funeral, inspiring Angela to start a scholarship fund in Brittany’s name to be awarded annually to a female player who best exemplifies the qualities that made her special.

Her teammates served as honorary pallbearers and gathered for their team banquet the following night, many wearing ninja-themed shirts.
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By the time they linked arms for their chant, seeking the courage to “strive and dare,” it was natural for them to look inward, confident strength would still be there.

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