GALVESTON — Their Galveston campus just a couple of blocks from the Gulf of Mexico, O’Connell Consolidated’s volleyball players didn’t have their minds on their game during the last seven days.
Neither did their coach and O’Connell’s athletic director, Larry Zeringue.
Neither did high school sports fans in Galveston County, which experienced the first mandatory evacuation in its history a week ago as Hurricane Rita menaced the upper Texas Gulf Coast.
The Lady Bucs ushered in normalcy to the county’s sports world Tuesday in a five-game loss at Living Stones Christian School in Alvin. Despite the kind of errors from both squads that made the match seem more like the first of the season, it was back to sports as usual in a place that stood a chance to not see it for a much longer period.
Drive times to inland destinations that normally take three to five hours took a whole day instead. With the traffic crush and the prospect of widespread destruction in Galveston County, there was little room for staying prepared to play through an ordeal few in the region will forget.
“I think (the players) had their minds on their safety and their homes, not on volleyball,” Zeringue said Tuesday after the match. “My mind wasn’t on volleyball.”
Instead, local athletes were among more than three million people who moved in advance of Hurricane Rita. Rita, which at one point last week was among the three strongest hurricanes in recorded history, threatened to become the strongest storm known to hit Texas.
While Rita veered north and weakened, it hit towns near the Texas-Louisiana border hard. High school athletic squads from Beaumont to Lake Charles, La., have a more complicated process for saving their seasons. In Galveston County, it’s largely a matter of fitting postponed meets into their schedule during the coming weeks.
Zeringue said the O’Connell campus received minimal damage from Rita. Barbara Kleinecke Gymnasium — the closest sporting venue to a large fire that consumed three buildings just blocks away — had not one shard of glass on its red-hued floor.
“I was expecting to lose all the windows in the gym … on the side the wind was blowing in,” Zeringue said. No significant damage to other high school gyms or stadiums in the county was reported.
O’Connell, like the county’s public high schools, has a backlog of district matches that will be made up in the coming weeks. The Lady Bucs resume league play against Cypress Christian at 6:30 p.m. today in Galveston.
O’Connell plays Mount Carmel as scheduled Friday.
Districts 24-5A and 23-4A resume their regularly scheduled matches Friday.
