A Bus Crash And Other Things
April 11, 2018 at 4:33 p.m.
By Roger Grossman-
You don’t have to live in Canada or love hockey to understand the magnitude of the bus crash that killed 15 players, coaches and support staff members of a hockey team in a small town in Saskatchewan Friday afternoon.
Humboldt is a town of less than 6,000 people. For perspective, the combination of Syracuse, Milford and North Webster adds up to about 6,000 during the winter months. It’s a farming village established in the 1870s. The people there, as we have come to learn over the last few days, are very close.
One of their passions (outside of farming) is that they are home to a junior hockey team called the Broncos. That team was on their way to a playoff game Friday night when the bus was hit by a semi-tractor trailer.
The pictures of the accident are horrific.
There were 29 people on board that bus, including the team’s radio announcer.
Hockey is a different kind of sport than the other major sports. For 3 hours, two guys can beat on each other, intentionally run into each other, knock each other around for the purpose of gaining an advantage in a game. But when that game is over, those same two human beings are banded together as part of the family of hockey. Hockey is a community, and its population is built for the long haul.
So when news of the crash and the lives lost began to filter out of the great northwest, hockey circled the wagons.
At arenas around North America, the sounds of skates on ice and pucks against plexiglass were replaced by moments of silence interrupted only by the sounds of sobbing in memory of those who perished on that bus.
My wife and I went to the Komets game Saturday, and I was taken by the stillness of the players on the ice. If you watch hockey players during a national anthem, for example, they never stand still. They are perpetual motion – nervous twitching, sliding of their skates back and forth, rocking from side to side.
But not for those 15 seconds.
Whether they wore an NHL sweater, an AHL sweater or an ECHL sweater, they got it. Many of them rode those charter buses on cold and snowy winter afternoons and late nights to and from junior hockey league games in hopes they would someday reach the pinnacle of their profession. They ate boxed meals on those buses provided by local restaurants and friends of the team. They played in front of hundreds, not thousands.
They remember it … all of it.
They also know it could just as easily have been them on that bus.
If you are a parent of a high school or college athlete around here, I would imagine you have (in your worst nightmares) seen your child get on a team bus and feared they might not make it back home again. Thank God, we have not experienced that sort of tragedy here. The Griffith people, not known for their compassion or soft-heartedness, know what is like. The bus carrying their basketball team to the boys semistate in Lafayette in 2015 was clipped by a distracted driver on I-65 and crashed. There were no fatalities, but the physical and mental wounds were obvious.
God, please continue to shed your grace on us.
Speaking of the Komets, I was reminded Saturday night of just what a great value minor league sports are.
My wife and I had tickets right behind the net the Ks shot at twice. We had a great time. The minor league baseball season is underway, and I think my son Oliver and I may sneak over to Fort Wayne to watch a TinCaps game this summer. Minor league sporting events are a great experience for a reasonable financial investment. Parking is closer to the venue for a lot less cash, your seats are closer to the action, and you drive less than an hour to get there.
You have to feel for high school and college athletic departments around the area as the weather continues to pitch a virtual shutout of spring sporting events. I know what you’re thinking: “That’s what they get paid the big bucks for.” If that’s you, that’s totally unfair. These people work really hard to set schedules around spring break, prom and everything else going on. So to see all of that work wiped out because Mother Nature can’t get her act together is very discouraging to them.
Some Cubs fans have lost their minds. It appears that a certain segment of Cubs Nation is ready to make massive changes, including in the manager’s office, because the Cubs are barely above .500 through the first two weeks of the season.
Listen, the Cubs spent the first nine games on the road. They have had trouble driving in runners in scoring position, but their starting pitching has been pretty good and the revamped bullpen is rated the best in baseball so far.
Here is the key: THE SEASON IS LESS THAN TWO WEEKS OLD! Cubs fans rightfully understand that the window to win in baseball tends to close quickly and this glorious time in franchise history won’t last forever. But to demand managerial changes, trades or outright releases at this point is just unnecessary. Yankee fans can demand to win the World Series every year simply because they are the Yankees. We’re the Cubs … we should be better than that.
Stay warm everyone!
You don’t have to live in Canada or love hockey to understand the magnitude of the bus crash that killed 15 players, coaches and support staff members of a hockey team in a small town in Saskatchewan Friday afternoon.
Humboldt is a town of less than 6,000 people. For perspective, the combination of Syracuse, Milford and North Webster adds up to about 6,000 during the winter months. It’s a farming village established in the 1870s. The people there, as we have come to learn over the last few days, are very close.
One of their passions (outside of farming) is that they are home to a junior hockey team called the Broncos. That team was on their way to a playoff game Friday night when the bus was hit by a semi-tractor trailer.
The pictures of the accident are horrific.
There were 29 people on board that bus, including the team’s radio announcer.
Hockey is a different kind of sport than the other major sports. For 3 hours, two guys can beat on each other, intentionally run into each other, knock each other around for the purpose of gaining an advantage in a game. But when that game is over, those same two human beings are banded together as part of the family of hockey. Hockey is a community, and its population is built for the long haul.
So when news of the crash and the lives lost began to filter out of the great northwest, hockey circled the wagons.
At arenas around North America, the sounds of skates on ice and pucks against plexiglass were replaced by moments of silence interrupted only by the sounds of sobbing in memory of those who perished on that bus.
My wife and I went to the Komets game Saturday, and I was taken by the stillness of the players on the ice. If you watch hockey players during a national anthem, for example, they never stand still. They are perpetual motion – nervous twitching, sliding of their skates back and forth, rocking from side to side.
But not for those 15 seconds.
Whether they wore an NHL sweater, an AHL sweater or an ECHL sweater, they got it. Many of them rode those charter buses on cold and snowy winter afternoons and late nights to and from junior hockey league games in hopes they would someday reach the pinnacle of their profession. They ate boxed meals on those buses provided by local restaurants and friends of the team. They played in front of hundreds, not thousands.
They remember it … all of it.
They also know it could just as easily have been them on that bus.
If you are a parent of a high school or college athlete around here, I would imagine you have (in your worst nightmares) seen your child get on a team bus and feared they might not make it back home again. Thank God, we have not experienced that sort of tragedy here. The Griffith people, not known for their compassion or soft-heartedness, know what is like. The bus carrying their basketball team to the boys semistate in Lafayette in 2015 was clipped by a distracted driver on I-65 and crashed. There were no fatalities, but the physical and mental wounds were obvious.
God, please continue to shed your grace on us.
Speaking of the Komets, I was reminded Saturday night of just what a great value minor league sports are.
My wife and I had tickets right behind the net the Ks shot at twice. We had a great time. The minor league baseball season is underway, and I think my son Oliver and I may sneak over to Fort Wayne to watch a TinCaps game this summer. Minor league sporting events are a great experience for a reasonable financial investment. Parking is closer to the venue for a lot less cash, your seats are closer to the action, and you drive less than an hour to get there.
You have to feel for high school and college athletic departments around the area as the weather continues to pitch a virtual shutout of spring sporting events. I know what you’re thinking: “That’s what they get paid the big bucks for.” If that’s you, that’s totally unfair. These people work really hard to set schedules around spring break, prom and everything else going on. So to see all of that work wiped out because Mother Nature can’t get her act together is very discouraging to them.
Some Cubs fans have lost their minds. It appears that a certain segment of Cubs Nation is ready to make massive changes, including in the manager’s office, because the Cubs are barely above .500 through the first two weeks of the season.
Listen, the Cubs spent the first nine games on the road. They have had trouble driving in runners in scoring position, but their starting pitching has been pretty good and the revamped bullpen is rated the best in baseball so far.
Here is the key: THE SEASON IS LESS THAN TWO WEEKS OLD! Cubs fans rightfully understand that the window to win in baseball tends to close quickly and this glorious time in franchise history won’t last forever. But to demand managerial changes, trades or outright releases at this point is just unnecessary. Yankee fans can demand to win the World Series every year simply because they are the Yankees. We’re the Cubs … we should be better than that.
Stay warm everyone!
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