Just over five months ago, Mark Downey was completing his first season as an assistant coach at Bowling Green, a program which had enjoyed its best season in more than a dozen years by winning 21 games. If you would've told him at the moment that his next season of coaching would be as an assistant coach with the Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne (IPFW) men's program, he most certainly would've been surprised, but he also would've been accepting and probably just asked, "When do I start?”
When it comes to dealing with a life change, a sudden and swift life change, there can be no better prepared coach than Downey. After all, he coached through Hurricane Katrina a decade ago.
“It was nuts,” Downey sighed recently at the Gates Sports Center with 10 years of distance put between him and the experience.
At the time of the storm, which hit the city of New Orleans on an early Sunday morning, Downey was an assistant coach at the University of New Orleans. He woke up Monday morning, having escaped with a 2 a.m. drive to his brother's place in Houston, and thought he had survived. However, what he didn't realize was that perhaps the literal storm had moved north into the Midwest, but the figurative storm was just unfolding.
Downey was part of a new coaching staff from an assistant's standpoint serving under former Oak Hill High School legend Monte Towe with the Privateers. He was in the process of moving that weekend, and Towe had left town to go to his vacation home in St. Augustine, Fla.
“What was frustrating, we had a brand-new staff,” Downey explained, “and I was in charge of getting our guys out of town.”
He organized an exodus that tapped into multiple transportation sources, as best as he could, but it was organized chaos, at best.
“It was nuts,” Downey repeated, again with a sigh. “We had one car with four guys headed north into Mississippi to a player's house. We had two junior college players that were on campus that were supposed to get on a bus, which the school provided to go to Baton Rouge. But they did not go on the bus. They thought that they could ride the storm out. Like a lot of other New Orleans' people, some were saying, 'We've been through this before.'
“We just had cars going everywhere. We had players scattered everywhere. It was just a crazy month or two.”
Or seven.
Following the storm, which had knocked out cell service, Downey flew from Houston to his sister's house in Phoenix for a week. He eventually managed to get in touch with Towe and asked, "What are we going to do?"
Two weeks after the storm, Towe and the university had a plan.
“We're meeting Tuesday in Tyler, Texas,” Towe explained to Downey. “You've got to be there. I want all of our guys there. Do whatever you've got to do. The most important one is Lester 'Bo' McCalebb, and he's in a hotel in Houston. Your job is to fly back to Houston and bring him to Tyler, Texas. Don't show up to Tyler without him.”
McCalebb was coming off a tremendous sophomore season in which he averaged more than 22 points per game. And in the cutthroat world of college athletics, other coaches didn't see tragedy in what the Privateer program was enduring, they only saw opportunity.
“The problem was, with Bo, everyone knew how good he was,” Downey said. “A lot of people were just starting school; the storm was in late August (the morning of the 21st). He was getting poached.”
Downey recalled that several high-major programs (Arkansas, Oklahoma State and USC, among others) were calling McCalebb and telling him not to return to the New Orleans program.
“I had to re-recruit him,” Downey said. “That was probably the best recruiting job that I have ever had to do.”
Downey spent three days meeting with McCalebb and his mother and trying to sell the benefits of remaining with a program, which had made the player a star.
“I had to get his mother's permission,” Downey said. “That was hard. We finally got it and 10 minutes later we were on the road.”
The fact that McCalebb ultimately broke his wrist in the third game of that season and missed the rest of the year was simply another terrible circumstance heaped onto Downey and the rest of the Privateer program in the ensuing months.
The players took online courses in Tyler and the team played three games at the NCAA Division III institution that they were living at, so every game was really an away game. Eight of the team's first 13 games were actually played on the opponents' home courts with two others against fellow New Orleans school Tulane, which were played on neutral courts (one at Texas A&M University).
The Privateers played games that first semester at Mississippi State, at Southern Mississippi, at LSU, at Purdue, at Vanderbilt and at Kansas. It was a death march in terms of hoops, and there wasn't a pleasant ending coming anytime soon.
“We struggled through that year without Bo,” Downey said. “And our post player tore his ACL. It was hard.”
The university reopened its New Orleans campus for the second semester, and its enrollment had dropped in months from nearly 18,000 to around 11,000. The students weren't the only ones that didn't truly want to be there.
“We were back on campus by Christmas,” Downey said, “and a lot of us didn't want to go back. It was like Iraq. It was awful.”
The decimation and filth left by the storm was difficult to endure on a daily basis, and from a basketball standpoint, it wasn't very good either.
The Privateers were forced to play in the university's auxiliary gym, which was essentially an old high school gym. However, somehow the team fought through and found a way to win half of its final 10 games.
But for Downey and the rest of the Privateers, New Orleans never really got any better.
At the end of the season, Towe left to take an assistant coaching job at his alma mater, North Carolina State, and Downey landed the head coaching job at NCAA Division II Arkansas Tech.
“It's somewhat better (now),” Downey said. “But I've been there two or three times since I left and it's, it's … it's a dirty city. It wasn't quite as dirty before (Katrina), but it's still dirty.
“New Orleans is a different place to live.”
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