Last year, a member of the seventh-grade boys basketball team at Lincoln Middle School in Kenosha, Wisconsin, caught some people in the stands teasing Desiree Andrews, a cheerleader with Down syndrome.

He couldn’t take it. He refused to be a bystander to her bullying.

“One of the kids stepped up and said, ‘Don’t mess with her,’” Brandon Morris, Lincoln’s seventh-grade coach last year, told Kenosha News. “Then all of the guys got together to show her support.”

That support has carried over to this year’s eighth-grade squad, who has made Desiree a fixture of the team’s rituals. The starting five players give her fist-bumps and high-fives as they’re announced before games. The school’s gymnasium was renamed “D’s House” as a nod to Desiree.