Sitting in the luxury bus, it felt good to kick back, relax, and enjoy the five-hour bus ride to Durham, N.H. After winning our first road game of the year, we were 4-3 overall, 3-1 in the conference, and sitting pretty.
I look behind me and saw the younger football players, genuinely excited at the way they had performed at Stony Brook, N.Y. They had been up to the challenge of going against a tough defense, a big offense, and a savvy special teams and shutting all of it down.
It was a special day for everyone on the UNH football team. Though we were the backups, the underclassman, the guys who filmed the game for the coaches, we were just as important as our counterparts on bus one. We were bus two; the depth, heart, and soul of the team.
And we were happy. And goofy. The freshman student manager sitting behind me kept telling me how happy he was just to be a part of the team. The senior student manager sitting next to him kept playfully telling him to shut up.
Another student manager was texting like mad, making drinking plans for when we got back at 1:30 a.m. Sunday morning. We knew it was a long trip back, that our weekend plans had already been ruined by the game. But we didn’t care. We loved it. We lived for it. A lot of people on that bus, myself included, didn’t do it for playing time or glory. It was to be part of something special.
As the bus chugged on from the stadium in Stony Brook on 495 West, the coaches put on the last half of the movie Ted. We had started watching the movie on the way to Stony Brook the day before, but now that the game was over and we were on our way back we were rewarded with the remainder of the film.
Normally I would listen to my iPod and fall asleep. I was an easy sleeper, being able to sleep anywhere at anytime. But I was sick of my music, and even though Ted wasn’t my favorite movie, I decided to watch it late that Saturday. Why not? Everyone else was. I should spend time with my team, the team I bleed it out with every Saturday.
But then it happened. There was a bang, almost like a gunshot, and the bus stopped moving. Not suddenly, but gradually. The lights, the AC, and the televisions on the bus all turned off. The bus rolled to a slow halt right on the side of the highway. Why had we stopped?
“We out of gas,” one player yelled from the back.
“Pit stop,” another player joked.
“Nah man, we already back in Durham,” someone else sarcastically remarked.
“Shut up guys,” offensive coordinator Ryan Carty exclaimed from the front.
The bus was at a standstill. No one was moving, no one dared to. Funny remarks in the back became ones of slight annoyance. The three coaches in the front looked worried, asking the driver what was going on.
Bus one had seen what had happened and stopped in front of us. Out came head coach Sean McDonnell to see what was going on. Like a military unit that respects its commanding officer, the entire team would be quiet anytime he came onto the bus. Minutes felt like hours. People at the front, including me, tried to listen in on the conversations being conducted.
“I have no idea what’s wrong with this fucking thing and I can’t get any god damn cell phone reception,” the bus driver said.
“How long,” McDonnell kept asking.
And then it happened. McDonnell came onto the bus for the final time. He told the coaches to grab their stuff and get on bus one. He told the directors of athletic communication directors, the guys who did the stats, to get on bus one. He even told the team radio play-by-play announcer to get on bus one. He started to walk out as Bobby Callahan, a regular of bus one and the assistant athletic director of football operations, came onto the dead bus with his stuff. McDonnell patted Bobby on the back, walked off the bus, and got back onto bus one. The man with so many inspirational words had just whisked off some staff and got back onto bus one. Why?
We knew why three minutes later. Bus one was getting out there, and going home. The coach with no fear, who always had something to say to his players, left his team, took who he prioritized as important, and left his backups on Long Island.
Players were not happy.
“It’s 95 for 60 during the game, but after it’s every fucking man for himself,” Casey DeAndrade, a defensive back for the team who actually got the start at Stony Brook, said.
“They’re coming back, right,” asked Brad Prasky, the teams starting punter.
“This just became the worst fucking trip of my life,” James Ventresca, a student manger, said.
Slowly but surely, anger started to come out from everyone. Callahan, my direct boss and the number two behind McDonnell, kept everyone calm. He was respected, and tried to make the adventure tolerable.
After sitting on the side of the highway for an hour, a tow truck was able to guide the bus, on the little juice it had left, to a plaza about 200 feet away, where a mechanic could come and diagnose the problem.
There, Bobby let us roam. Just about everyone went to Taco Bell, which was about to close, to get food. He let many of the players play tag outside due to pure boredom. He talked with many of the New-England born kids about baseball and the Red Sox’s play that night in Game 4 of the World Series.
“You know Arj, it could have been a lot worse,” Matt Donovan, the youngest of the student managers, said to me. “I had a lot of fun tonight.”
By 12:45 a.m., the bus was fixed. The buses radiator hose on the engine had burst and needed replacing. It took four hours, but the bus was moving again. Many players were happy, many had bounded during the four hours of waiting through Taco Bell, tag, and everything else.
But one underlying theme remained as the bus rolled back into Durham, N.H. at 5:30 a.m. on Sunday morning. Had MacDonnell lost his team? Had he cut right into the heart of his message of being a family by abandoning half of them on the highway in Long Island. I was interested to see how it would be addressed.
But it wasn’t. Not in practice, not on an individual basis, nothing. I got a hat thrown my way by him. Was that his way of saying sorry?
While the bus had broken down, the backups of bus number two had become closer. Just not closer with their bus one counterparts, or its captain.
I based the structure this off the Gettysburg article by Rubin, the one that we were handed out in class. I thought it had a cool structure of using few quotes and just describing the story in detail. For an event piece I read, I read one about the Red Sox, celebrating their World Series win. The article was written by Peter Abraham and it described, in detail, specific scenes from the final game, like when Lackey left the dugout, when Ortiz reached based, and so on. It had a great amount of detail for the event and it felt like you were really just out there.
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