The Storm Troupers

This is what Tulane men’s basketball Coach Dave Dickerson screams to his team while a thousand or so fans bellow encouragement in full-throated roar: “You’ve got heart guys, you’ve got heart.”

This is what Dickerson, a thin, earnest man in the middle of the first season of his first major college head-coaching job, says while sitting in an empty gym a day later: “If I’d known what was going to happen would I have taken this job? The answer is easy. No.”

As far as sports go in New Orleans right now, the men’s and women’s basketball teams at Tulane and the University of New Orleans are about it.

Since Hurricane Katrina rewrote the future of everything in this shell-shocked city 5 1/2 months ago, the NFL’s New Orleans Saints spent the 2005 season in San Antonio, returning to play four games in Baton Rouge, La. The NBA’s New Orleans Hornets have relocated to Oklahoma City, where it was recently announced they’ll also play 35 of their 41 home games next season. Tulane’s football team played 11 games in 11 places, none of them home. The Sugar Bowl game was temporarily moved to Atlanta.

But on Christmas Eve the Tulane Green Wave men’s basketball team returned to the city after spending the fall semester at Texas A&M;, and the New Orleans Privateers tiptoed back to a devastated campus from their temporary rest stop at the University of Texas Tyler.

“We were driving up Claiborne Avenue towards campus on Christmas Eve,” Tulane senior forward Quincy Davis said, “and we were all very quiet. It was just eerie. There were no people. But even so I just had a great feeling. We were coming home.”

Davis is a bright, engaging native of Los Angeles. His father still lives in Inglewood, but when he was in high school Davis had moved to Alabama with his mother when his parents divorced.

What he has seen since August, Davis says, “will stick with me for the rest of my life.” Davis lost all his possessions, his clothes and CDs, his collection of basketball shoes, his photos and his memories, because his apartment less than three blocks from Tulane’s lush Garden District campus was flooded with five feet of water.

When Davis walks from dorm to class to Fogelman Arena, he sees new shrubs and brick buildings sparkling in the sun. He smells fresh paint. A block or two off St. Charles Avenue or Broadway or Claiborne, the main streets surrounding campus, Davis sees tree stumps the size of small cars tossed along the curb like croutons in a salad. He must navigate between piles of trash. He sees his old home, where the flood line makes a muddy mark on the shingles.

It is as if he walks a tightrope between normality and disaster.

“I’m so glad I’m here,” Davis says, “and people thank me every day for our team playing. But things aren’t the same. Not at all. It will be a long time.”

*

Here is what New Orleans men’s basketball Coach Monte Towe bellows to his tiring Privateers in front of a few hundred fans: “You’ve got it in you. You’ve got the fight.”

A day later Towe is sitting on a bench outside the Human Performance Center. It is hot and sunny and Towe is wearing shorts and sunglasses.

His Privateers used to play basketball at Lakefront Arena just up the street a block or two. But the arena is still damp and moldy and being repaired, so the Privateers have tried to recapture the past in the present by making the 1,800-seat Human Performance Center their home. The Privateers used to be an NCAA Division II power at the Human Performance Center. The bleachers have a worn shine like grandpa’s favorite pants -- worn thin but still comfortable.

Students who just returned to campus Jan. 27 have tried to make the small gym seem homey by putting up posters and banners. “We Will Endure” is a favorite. “Return to the Chamber” is another.

Back in the day the Human Performance Center had been known as the “Chamber of Horrors,” and when New Orleans had played Denver on Feb. 2, many of the students, who were at their first home game of the season, had dressed in costumes and painted their faces and tried to recreate the “horrors” atmosphere.

It helped. The Privateers got their sixth victory of the season, 64-54, and afterward Towe had run to the student section to offer high-fives. “Thank you very much,” said Towe, sweat dripping from his nose. “Thank you for coming.”

A day later the exuberant high of the night before is gone.

It is moving day again. For the sixth time since Hurricane Katrina, the Privateers are packing their bags. They had stayed in shelters and makeshift apartments, in dorms at Texas Tyler and at a tatty, soggy hotel when they’d first returned to the city.

For the last couple of weeks the Privateers had scored better digs, down in the French Quarter at the Monteleone, a stately, venerable hotel. Bartering had helped. The university offered up some free advertising, the hotel made some rate concessions.

“It’s been nice in a way,” junior guard Jamie McNeilly says. “There’s a little life around the hotel. But it’s not home.”

On Feb. 3, with little notice, Towe was told there was a dorm ready and that his kids needed to pack up and check out.

As Jeremie Davis, a junior guard, walks past Towe 10 minutes before practice, Towe says, “Did you get moved?”

Davis looks surprised and says, “Coach, I just got done with class. I didn’t hear anything about moving.”

So instead of making final preparations for a practice, Towe is arranging hasty transportation for Davis back to the hotel. “Pack fast, Jeremie,” Towe says. “Try and make it back for a little practice.”

As Davis walks away, McNeilly’s father comes to talk to Towe. McNeilly is from Toronto and his father had come to support his son.

“Coach, there’s water on the floor of Jamie’s room,” McNeilly’s father says. “I don’t find that acceptable. Is that acceptable? They shouldn’t be in the dorms. They should be in the hotel.”

Towe says he’ll check into it and dispatches assistant coach Mark Downey to find out what is going on.

“Thing is,” Towe says, “every day I ask these kids if they want to be here. If they say yes, I tell them they’re going to have to accept that everything isn’t going to be easy but that the rewards will be great. There is no blueprint for what we’re doing.”

As if Katrina didn’t cause enough disturbance to the season, Towe lost starting guard Bo McCalebb, a preseason Naismith Award candidate, when he fractured his wrist in a Nov. 30 game against Mississippi. And junior Ben Elias, a candidate to start at center, tore up a knee in preseason practice and needed season-ending surgery.

In a final Katrina blow, Towe lost his second-leading scorer when Wayne Williams, who had ridden out the hurricane in a New Orleans apartment with his girlfriend and baby, quit the team in mid-January and went home to Florida.

“I think he just couldn’t take everything anymore,” Towe says.

And yet the win over Denver was followed by an emotional 75-74 victory over North Texas when McNeilly hit a 14-foot jump shot with 4.3 seconds to go. It was the Privateers’ first two-game winning streak of the season. There was almost a three-game winning streak too, but Thursday night New Orleans (7-15) blew a 17-point second-half lead and lost at Troy, 62-58.

New Orleans sports information director Mark Duggan advises visitors to campus to beware.

“Just so you know,” he says, “Elysian Fields doesn’t have any stoplights yet.”

So here’s what the Privateers saw every day when they came from the Monteleone to class. As their borrowed cars or vans exited the freeway at Elysian Fields, a major, four-lane road that heads for two miles from I-10 to campus, there are no signs of life.

Nailed into trees are signs advertising “stump grinding” or “House gutting” or, even more awful sounding, “house cutting.”

All the fast-food places are closed, their signs hanging at cockeyed angles. At the corner of Elysian Fields and Leon Smith Boulevard, sophomore guard James Parlow would look left and see his campus. Kind of.

“Man,” Parlow says, “Where’s the life? All our places are gone, you know? Our places. Where we eat and go hear music and just have fun.”

What had been a popular intramural field set up next to the Human Performance Center is now covered in acres of trailers used by federal workers.

When Towe was sitting on his bench a student stopped. “Coach Towe,” says Andrew Scorsone, “Thank you very much for that win last night.”

Towe smiles. “Don’t thank me,” Towe says. “Thank the guys.”

Scorsone, a sophomore from Metaire, La., spent last semester at Tennessee. He said he didn’t have any qualms about coming back.

“Coach,” Scorsone says, “if you could come by some afternoon and talk to the students, it would be great.” Towe says he will and asks Scorsone how things are going.

“Well,” Scorsone says. “I’m supposed to be at my engineering class. But I went to the classroom and there were no doors and a bunch of workmen in the room. So I guess I don’t have class.”

But he does have basketball. “It was so fun to go to the game,” Scorsone says. “It was normal. Just ... normal.”

*

The Green Wave (9-13) had won four straight games and five of their last six before losing at Central Florida on Saturday night. They are 5-4 in Conference USA, tied for sixth place.

“This is a very good reason why we should have come home,” Quincy Davis says. “Because it’s home. It’s our gym, our classrooms. It’s us.”

Davis says he has found Dickerson’s demeanor this season amazing.

“Coach is in his first year and, you know, could you handle this?” Davis says.

Dickerson had been a valued assistant at Maryland for Gary Williams. When he accepted the Tulane job last year, Dickerson says, “It was an amazing day for me. One of the best. I had all sorts of plans about how I was going to market the program, how I was going to recruit, how I was going to get the students really involved. I was going to go out to the dorms and meet with the kids. You know, you plan for something your whole life, how you’re going to do it and then ... “

The coach looks away for a moment and continues.

“There were days I was coming home, walking on eggshells. I was afraid there would be a note on the door from my wife. You know, ‘Honey, I’ve taken the baby and gone home.’ It’s hard. We had only moved into our house about a month before the hurricane. I was out recruiting. My wife didn’t know many people. She has no support system. How could you plan for something like this?”

It is what coaches do, plan.

Game plans, practice plans, travel plans, recruiting plans.

Dickerson had no plans for watching his players worry for loved ones, cry over lost stuff, struggle with daily life at an unfamiliar campus, then come home and find another unfamiliar campus.

“Sometimes it’s strange,” Davis says. “Stuff that’s normally there, it’s just gone.”

Tulane President Scott Cowen says the Green Wave basketball teams, men and women, are “beacons of hope. A slice of life the way it used to be.”

Amazingly, Cowen says, 93% of students who had been enrolled last semester before Katrina hit have come back to Tulane. Normally only 88% of students enrolled in a fall semester return for the winter semester.

“That’s the cool thing,” Davis says. “I feel like we’re playing for all of them. Really, I think we’re playing for the city. I feel like I’m doing something for the city of New Orleans. Who doesn’t want to root for us? I feel proud.”

This is what Dickerson sees when he looks ahead. His plan. He has one. He is encouraged because the Tulane football team signed 24 recruits.

“Kids are taking my calls,” he says. “I have a lot to sell. Playing time. A good conference. A great education at a great university. A chance to build something. A chance to be special.”