Tulane sports fight for survival in post-Katrina wave

NEW ORLEANS -- You want to know strength? Sit down, put your feet up. They talk a lot about it here at Tulane.

The strength of getting through Katrina with your sanity, and family, intact.

The strength -- financial, psychological and physical -- it took to field teams last fall and scatter them all over the country while the campus was shut down.

Chris Scelfo gets to coach Tulane in a home game for the first time in nearly two years. (Getty Images)

The strength it took not to scream after standing in the middle of the flooded athletic complex, which was surrounded by a flooded practice field.

You want to know strength? Chris Scelfo can't help you. Not in a brief, revealing moment this week in a Tulane football conference room. The 42-year-old Green Wave coach cracked a little.

And you wanted to hug him for it.

The man ought to have a statue erected in his honor in Jackson Square, but we all have our breaking point. This was Scelfo's, as yet another reporter asked him this week about Katrina, the cross-country odyssey, the life-changing events.

"I'm looking forward to the day that we're not having this conversation," he said. "Where you don't hear about FEMA, you don't hear about Katrina, you don't hear about rebuilding, where every positive step is good."

That's the problem as Tulane prepares to play its first home game in 22 months Saturday against SMU. They can talk about using Tulane athletics as a beacon of hope for the city. They can talk about eventually bringing back the eight sports that had to be dropped last year because of budget constraints.

But no one can tell you definitively that this program that once played in a Rose Bowl is going to be around long term. That's because last year it played 11 games in 11 weeks in 11 cities. Its existence was ignominious, humiliating, and unbearable. That was because of Katrina.

And to get over her is going to take a long, long time.

Look into the eyes that looked into the eyes. Tulane athletic director Rick Dickson had to deliver the message in December to team members of those eight sports that were being axed.

One of them was the girlfriend of quarterback Lester Ricard. Linda McEachrane had been an Olympic swimmer for her native Trinidad and Tobago.

One of them was Dickson's son Doug, a decathlete.

"I can remember the kids' faces, seeing tears and lips quivering," Dickson said. "Doug being told by his old man he was being shut down."

Look out over the city as Capt. Don Davidson, an Orleans Parish deputy sheriff, boils it down for you. The 46-year-old native is one of the few in his Orleans East neighborhood who is rebuilding.

The mortgage is paid off, but all that bought him was a shell of a house. The neighborhood is virtually vacant. Electricians have tried to gouge him. He will move back eventually, but to what? More than 40 percent of the city's pre-Katrina inhabitants (480,000) are gone. There is no guarantee they will return.

So to put faith in Tulane football? That's all it is, faith.

"The type of money we make playing (at) Mississippi State, Auburn and LSU, will finance the athletic programs ..." Ricard said. "Us getting to a bowl game and generate some type of money."

The senior transfer from LSU has never played in a bowl game. Tulane has been in two in the past 18 years.

Bowls are as scarce as hospital beds.

Doctors and dentists have been reluctant to move back to the area, creating a lack of infrastructure.

"A simple thing like a Winn-Dixie (supermarket) isn't there, so people don't move back in," Davidson said. "And stores say, 'We'll come back when people come back.' It's a Catch-22."

Look out in St. Bernard Parish to Holy Cross High School, founded in 1879 by the same order of priests who founded Notre Dame. The alma mater of Tulane tight end Jerome Landry is basically missing its soul. The roof is ripped, rendering the structure uninhabitable. Classes are conducted in modular trailers. The school is in the process of abandoning the old campus and re-establishing somewhere else in the city.

Across the street from Holy Cross are more hollowed-out homes. A familiar code is spray painted on them, as well as hundreds of thousands across the region. It lists the date they were inspected by emergency workers, the state the workers were from and the number of dead.

Remember those images of workers desperately dropping sandbags into the breached 17th Street Canal?

"Like dropping pennies in a five-gallon bucket of water," Davidson said.

Consider that Katrina didn't discriminate. In Eastover, a gated community that featured two golf courses, the $5 million estate of rap entrepreneur Brian "Baby" Williams is gutted. Flood waters damaged the beautiful structure.

Poll Will Tulane make a bowl game? 74% No: Their season ends in November   26% Yes: They can win five more games   Total Votes: 965

Looters, no doubt, got the rest.

Near Lake Pontchartrain, sailboats and shrimpers still remain on streets and parking lots, washed up from the surge. And always, the trailers. Students at Southern University and the University of New Orleans live and attend class in them.

They're the lucky ones.

"We used to frown upon people in trailers," Davidson said. "Now they're the (bomb). Trailer trash? Nah."

Maybe it was best that Scelfo's players missed all this initially. The shock was delayed, at least. On short notice last year as Katrina was about to hit, they bussed to Jackson, Miss., with little more than the clothes on their backs.

Katrina, then still a Category 2, followed them to Mississippi. The power went out. It wasn't until they were at a rest stop between Jackson and Dallas that they saw the first images of New Orleans. Eighty percent of it was under water.

Players literally watched their neighborhoods go under. Cell phones didn't work. Hearts sank. Then they asked them to play football, but how?

After Tulane canceled classes, football carried the banner for the entire school. Its plight -- and games -- was televised. The team eventually relocated to Louisiana Tech, where the player dorms were deplorable. The rats were "a good eight to 10 inches" long, according to one assistant.

It was kind of a voyeur-like existence as reporters and camera crews prodded and poked them. The won-loss record was tertiary.

Scelfo estimated he slept a total of nine hours during one nine-day period. One of those naps came outside an SMU cafeteria. While his players ate inside, he spread out on the ground and spontaneously snoozed.

Punter Chris Beckman missed the final two games of the season when he was accidentally shot in the stomach during a hunting trip with friends. A large-caliber bullet ricocheted and lodged in his abdomen.

"We've been through the worst," Landry said. "You can't compare that (season) to anything."

When they returned, the campus was empty. The Garden District that surrounds it stayed largely above the water but their practice field was under 3½ feet of it. The damaged baseball stadium eventually became a staging area for rebuilding efforts.

"The only thing I can compare it to is Sept. 11," said sports information staffer Richie Weaver, a native of St. Bernard Parish. "It got to the point where I couldn't watch it. I got sick to my stomach. It reminded you of what might have been."

What might have been was a veteran football team that could have, should have gone to a bowl game.

Pre-Katrina.

"The stars were aligned for us last year," Scelfo said. "We had a really good football team."

Instead, distracted, dead tired, emotionally spent, the Green Wave lost their final eight, finishing 2-9.

School president Scott Cowen decided to open the campus in January. Understandably, enrollment dropped. Still, that move might eventually save the football program. The easy thing in the Big Easy would have been to go dark, like the rest of the city. But Cowen saw sports as a salvation, a living, breathing brand name for a withered university.

With the one remaining recruiting weekend, Scelfo was at least able to show his recruits the worst, and hope for the best.

"We didn't hide a thing from them," he said. "We showed them everything that we could. That carried a lot of weight."

There was no offseason program. Players had to find themselves before they found the weight room. The athletic staff has been cut in half from 107 to 54 to help make ends meet. The signs weren't good to begin with. Football barely made it through a 2003 budgetary review by the trustees.

The idea now is not to rely on university subsidies or dip too deeply into endowment money to balance the budget. The NCAA has granted a five-year waiver to Tulane, in order to restore those cut sports and to get back to NCAA minimum sports sponsorship standards.

Tulane students had a lot more to worry about than classes a year ago. (Getty Images)

There are four years left on the waiver and the clock is ticking.

Last week, one of the department's biggest benefactors, Jim Wilson, died at age 71.

The last season the team played at the Superdome (2004), Tulane was 84th in attendance, averaging slightly less than 23,000 per game. School officials would kill for that number on Saturday.

Through all of it, only four players transferred. Most of them were freshman. A free Tulane education ($42,000 annual tuition) is not be taken lightly, no matter what the condition of sports.

In a way, Katrina did what maybe the school couldn't. The damage it caused forced the school to fast-track new practice fields, a locker room, weight room, equipment room and training room.

"If you ask me," Ricard said, "the campus actually looks better than it did before."

The new $7.5 million baseball stadium will host the Conference USA Tournament next spring. Tulane will be the host for first- and second-round NCAA Tournament games in March at New Orleans Arena.

"I know all the coaches made a pact to stick around and see this through," Scelfo said. "It was the right thing to do for the longevity of this team. Let's get back on our feet and give the kids a chance."

Monday night marked a huge celebration at the Superdome. The Saints were back. It was a small validation of the recovery of the area, complete with glitz, U2, Green Day and a victory.

"People with no money, no place to live, but they've got season tickets to the Superdome," Ricard said. "It kind of tells you the affect Katrina had on the city. They want life back the way it used to be."

But the NFL franchise has 55,000 season tickets. The small private university in town has a fifth of that.

Is it fair to compare the two -- or even use sports as a catalyst to rebuild from such a catastrophe? Would the Green Wave be missed? After their journey last year was chronicled nationally, how could they not be?

They want life the way it used to be. They deserve that chance and, for now, no more questions. Strength is character. Saturday is for celebrating.

It is also Scelfo's 43rd birthday.

Give the guy a break.

"I can see why coach feels that way," said Billy Harrison, a defensive end from Pensacola, Fla. "That was a hard time for all of us. I really never considered New Orleans home until after the hurricane. I was grateful. It was nice to be home."