PULLMAN – On the day of his suicide, Washington State quarterback Tyler Hilinski went on a run and did so “enthusiastically,” according to coach Mike Leach. That morning, Hilinski had also sent a text message to teammates to coordinate a throwing session.
But the quarterback never made it there and Pullman Police arrived at Hilinski’s apartment later that afternoon to find him dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, with a rifle and suicide note resting next to the 21-year-old.
Leach, the sixth-year WSU coach, spent countless hours with Hilinski during the football season – some of them on the sideline at Cougars football games, some inside the quarterbacks meeting room and plenty more at team practices in Pullman.
The coach knew someone who was “steady” – someone who “would lift up others that were down.” Not unlike every one of his Cougars teammates – and every WSU undergrad who he shared a learning space with, for that matter – Hilinski experieced “some ups and downs as a college student,” Leach said Saturday on a conference call with reporters, “but nothing that was able to stand out or that you’d recognize as a problem....
