Crash shatters hoop dreams for one North Van twin sister

On the evening of Jan. 2, 2010, a van occupied by the five members of a North Vancouver family collided with another vehicle at a downtown Vancouver intersection. Everyone survived, but ever since, the crash has become a crossroads in the lives of twin sisters Robyn and Jensyn Aulin-Haynes, both at the time budding basketball stars.

They were born two minutes apart on Jan. 10, 1996, not identical, but in their clockwork hearts, blessed with a shared gift each still refers to as twin telepathy.

“You could see everyone’s anxiety because we would make the weirdest passes to nowhere,” Jensyn Aulin-Haynes, the younger of the two, says of her earliest days on the court with her twin Robyn.

“But then the other one would just show up and it would work out perfectly. Our twin telepathy always worked the best in basketball.”

To this day, soulful DNA has kept that telepathy intact, but everything else that transpired on a night when their family van – which also carried mom Cindy, dad Paul and older sister Alexsandra – was T-boned at the intersection of Cordova and Dunleavy streets in Vancouver has served to change their lives forever.

These days, Grade 11 Robyn, at six-foot-one in sneakers and three millimetres taller than her twin, has become one of the most dominant forwards in all of B.C. girls high-school basketball as a member of the Argyle Secondary Pipers, displaying the drive and skill that talent evaluators throughout B.C. feel will carry her to a long and successful career at the university level.

Jensyn, every bit her twin’s equal throughout the seven years the pair played together before that fateful night, has never picked up a basketball since.

Seated in the vehicle’s middle row next to Robyn that evening, opposite the driver’s side of the van which absorbed the impact, Jensyn was thrown into her side window.

Now, three years later, she endures constant pain, debilitating headaches and frightening levels of memory loss.

Jensyn, in fact, has no memory of the crash. Everything she has heard about it has been recounted to her by her family.

“If Jensyn had been able to keep going, the sky would have been the limit for her, just like it is for Robyn,” says Argyle coach Anthony Fortu-naso, who currently coaches Robyn and was coaching both of the twins as eighth-graders when the crash occurred just weeks into their first season of high-school basketball.

Yet what has emerged from the aftermath of the wreckage, beyond the physical and emotional pain that remains, is a story of two sisters who bravely endure, each a ballast to the other’s daily storms.

TWIN ANCHORS

Shots made. Shots missed. OK, who got the rebound?

That was Claire’s assist. Another three-pointer for Chelsea.

The easiest thing for Jensyn to do would have been never to set foot in another high-school gymnasium. After all, why would she want to watch the one thing she wanted most but could no longer have?

“Well, I have a twin sister and this is her life, and I am not going to miss out on her life, even though I lost a part of mine,” Jensyn begins when asked why she has taken on the role of team manager for Robyn’s Argyle team, showing up as often as she can to collect all of the stats, fill all of the water bottles and make sure everyone has a ride to and from the games.

The Aulin-Haynes twins had always shared a love of basketball.

They started playing in Grade 2 in their local Steve Nash youth league, and from Grade 4 on honed their game in the high-performance environment of the North Shore-based 3D Basketball Academy.

“Dedication, determination and discipline, that’s what the three Ds stand for,” Jensyn explains as she describes the steps she took to pre-pare for a high-school career that would begin in late November of 2009, but would last only a few weeks and include just a handful of games.

“I came into high school with one thought: Education and basketball,” she continues. “I spent my lunch hours in the library studying so that after school I could do dry-land training. I wanted basketball and school. Those were the two things that were important to me.”

However, the extent of her injuries, including concussion issues, force her to take each day as it comes.

Robyn also suffered numerous injuries in the accident and to this day plays with pain. Yet there is no balm that can fully numb the feeling of her raw separation on the court from Jensyn, a separation she has had to endure in order to pursue a dream the two once shared of being the best high-school and university players they could become.

“I do feel guilty,” continues Robyn, who is contemplating a future in law. “If there was an extra practice, I might say, ‘I don’t feel like going.’ But Jens would push me. ‘We’ve got to go. We want to be the best.’ I think she was better than me. She had a better shot, she could read the game very well, and she was fast. I know she would have been better than me, even now.”

Adds Thomas Staron, a coach at rival Handsworth who coached both girls for years at 3D Basketball: “If (Jensyn) had played, I think next season she would have been their point guard. She would have been this amazing six-foot-tall point guard. If she were able to play, she would definitely have been the best player in the province at her age.”

STANDING TALL

Jensyn starts each day by waking up to terrible headaches and vomiting. And on a lot of days, that’s just the start of it.

Her right shoulder has dropped three inches since the crash, nerve damage has robbed her of the full ability to determine hot from cold in one hand and she has all manner of issues with her back.

And that has been on top of the concussion issue.

“A piece of my brain has turned black,” she says. “So my brain has had to retrain itself how to work without that spot.”

Flickering lights or the tapping of a pencil can be overwhelming at times. She has had to miss school for extended periods of time.

“I haven’t taken an exam yet and I am in Grade 11,” says Jensyn, who credits Argyle counsellor Shawn White for helping her persevere.

Adds Fortunaso of Robyn: “If she could replace her spot with Jensyn, I would put money on it that she would do it in a second. But she just soldiers on, just like her sister.”

What it’s all added up to for the sisters is a daily series of will-testing adventures, like the times Jensyn’s memory loss has prevented her from recognizing her close friends.

“They would come up to her and give her a big hug and she’d be overwhelmed,” Robyn explains. “There have been some awkward moments. I had to show her pictures on Facebook of people she was friends with. I would tell her stories about them and the stuff that we did with them.”

To which Jensyn adds: “There have been a lot of tears. I used to be very, very independent. I never needed to lean on anyone. But now I am very dependent on Robyn when it comes to anything social.”

But that’s what sisters are for.

“I have never told her this,” Robyn explains, apologizing for her tears, “but I play for her.”

Chances are, Jensyn already knows. Twin telepathy can be a lot like magic, and that is something they will always share.