Five years after Hurricane Katrina hit, some sports teams and communities are on the road to recovery, while others are stalled
NEW ORLEANS — They gathered for lunch last week, a handful of school, conference and college bowl officials who'd bonded into a support group of sorts since Hurricane Katrina tore so unimaginably through their city and their lives.
"I propose a toast," Sun Belt Conference commissioner Wright Waters said, rising to his feet in an upstairs, white table-clothed room in the Garden District's landmark Commander's Palace restaurant.
Darryl Williams, president of Friends of L.B. Landry, sits with boxes of trophies waiting on a display home in L.B. Landry High School. The second-oldest black high school in New Orleans, the Algiers neighborhood facility was rebuilt at a cost of $54 million and will field JV sports this season. Varsity sports will be added in 2011.
"To survivors, five years later."
Glasses clinked, the eight diners understanding that in that room — and across New Orleans' sports and recreation landscape — survival of one of the deadliest and costliest natural disasters in the nation's history has come in degrees.
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The Saints won a Super Bowl in February, and an entire region was famously uplifted. The Super Bowl is coming to town in another couple of years. Men's and women's basketball Final Fours, too. The Big Easy still can pull off the Big Event.
Tulane's college program has largely regained its footing since the hurricane blew ashore Aug. 29, 2005, announcing last month that it will return next fall to a full complement of 16 men's and women's teams. Still, there are conflicted athletes like Kat Alario, chased by the storm onto a bus to Jackson, Miss., just 2½ weeks into her freshman year, who saw teams folded and playing careers cut short.
"I mean, you can't compare it to anything that anybody else in the city who stayed here went through. I don't want to say, 'Oh, poor me,' " says Alario, a goalkeeper for the Green Wave's now-defunct women's soccer team.
Her voice catches. "But … it was a disaster for me, personally," she finishes, tears streaking her face.
coppied by http://www.usatoday.com/sports/2010-08-26-hurricane-katrina-new-orleans-tulane-colleges_N.htm
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