By Rick Bozich
Column appeared in May 12, 2012, edition of The Courier-Journal.
When the 175 mph winds began turning Henryville High School upside down, both Mitchell Speedy and Matt Denison had the same concern:
The safety of their friends, Perry and Kristi Hunter.
Hunter coached the boys’ basketball team at Henryville. He and his wife taught at the school. The storm whipped through Henryville around 3 p.m. Friday, March 2. Speedy and Denison knew the Hunters were at the school.
“I started calling his phone but didn’t get a response,” said Speedy, a former Silver Creek basketball star. “I called his mother’s house, and she hadn’t heard from him. Then I started texting him. I figured service was out, but it was pretty nerve-wracking when you knew what was happening in Henryville.”
It remained nerve-wracking until Hunter eventually found a spot where he could start answering the 45 or so text messages on his phone. No calls, just texts. Kristi was fine. So was he, other than a cough created by debris he’d inhaled from a safe spot he found in a school office about 150 feet from walls that imploded around the gym.
In November, Hunter, Speedy and Denison had strengthened their friendship through a Sunday night Bible study. In the aftermath of the tragedy, they discussed this idea:
What could they do to assist the communities recovering from the trauma created by the ferocious EF-4 tornado?
The answer is the celebration of basketball that started in Southern Indiana on Friday evening and will continue through tonight. They named it “A Night of Hoops and Hope for Southern Indiana.”
“It’s really very cool,” said B.J. Flynn, the former University of Louisville player who is competing for a team representing Jeffersonville High, where he won the 1993 state championship. “It’s great to go back, put on the old high school uniform and relive the good times from those days. To do it for a good cause makes it even better.”
Flynn, 37, said he still tries to play basketball twice a week. He’ll be the oldest player on a Jeff High legacy team that will compete in a 16-team double-elimination tournament that began at 6 p.m. Friday at Charlestown. The tournament matches former Southern Indiana high school players from 16 schools from Austin to Crawford County.
The team of former Red Devils also includes Bellarmine University standout Jeremy Kendle. Jeff is in the opposite bracket from its New Albany rivals. The team of former Bulldogs features Lamont Roland, who played for the 1996 state runner-up team before a college career at Ball State and Louisiana State.
“It would be fun to go against New Albany again,” Flynn said.
That meeting could develop in the championship game of the legacy tournament at 4:30 p.m. today at Silver Creek in Sellersburg. That will be followed a girls’ all-star game featuring players from Southern Indiana schools at 6, then a boys’ all-star game at 8:15.
Admission is a minimum $5 donation. There will be live and silent auctions featuring four premium tickets to a concert by the Dave Matthews Band in Indianapolis as well as a pair of autographed sneakers donated by former University of Kentucky star Terrence Jones. John Calipari of UK, Rick Pitino of Louisville and Tom Crean of Indiana sent autographed basketballs. Graduates of Henryville High have provided boutique gift baskets.
The beneficiaries will be the communities that suffered from the storm. Denison, the event director, said the goal is to generate at least $20,000.
“When the storm hit, we wondered what we could do,” he said. “People from across the community have really stepped forward.”
