programmaticly handling colspan

I have a datatable that I am populating from a call to the database.  I am also creating another table which will have header rows and extra columns that are meant to be blank when the report is printed.  I will create 3 header rows, and there will be 12 columns that are meant to be left blank.  I am having trouble handling colspan in the code.  Here is how I am creating one of the header rows:
rowHeader1.Item("Class") = "Belt" rowHeader1.Item("Student") = "" rowHeader1.Item("Age") = "" rowHeader1.Item("Duration") = "" rowHeader1.Item("O2a") = "Orange 2" rowHeader1.Item("O2b") = "" rowHeader1.Item("B1a") = "Blue 1" rowHeader1.Item("B1b") = "" rowHeader1.Item("B2a") = "Blue 2&quo ...