During 30-hour ordeal, Duquesne players kept calm, dreamed of pizza
It’s painfully funny now, considering what would follow. But as soon as the bus carrying the Duquesne men’s basketball team reached the Pennsylvania Turnpike on Friday night, the players and coaches thought the coast was clear.
“To be honest, the mood was, we made it out of (the storm),” Duquesne assistant coach Rich Glesmann told USA TODAY Sports on Sunday. “Not that we’re home free, but we’re in really good shape. We’re good. We’ll cruise home.
“Obviously, that was not the case.”
Duquesne basketball team finally home after being stranded nearly 24 hours
At 9:15 p.m. Friday night, about five hours into the Dukes’ trip home following their win at George Mason and in between Bedford and Somerset, the bus came to a dead stop during the winter storm that had begun pelting the East Coast with snow. And it stayed put for nearly 24 hours in what head coach Jim Ferry termed “a big stretch of nothing. No other exits. No gas stations.”
At first, players entertained themselves with card games, charades and social media. The bus maintained heat and power, so everyone remained connected to the outside world. Around midnight, players started to fall asleep.
The front of the bus, where the coaches and staff members sat, awoke with Saturday’s first daylight. The coaches peered out the windows at the snow accumulation and cringed.
Glesmann, director of player development Brian Baudinet and graduate assistant David Steckel hopped off the bus to explore. They walked nearly a mile ahead and realized the situation had grown dire.
“It’s like a scene in a movie where everything’s abandoned,” Glesmann said. “All the trucks were abandoned. It looked like we weren’t getting out for a while.”
The concern then turned to nourishment. The team had last stocked up on food at a Sheetz convenience store just prior to getting stranded. But now, it appeared the team might have to survive another night on the bus — without food.
They had some water, delivered to them just before noon on Saturday by a local fire department. They had also some new entertainment; the players befriended a bus full of middle schoolers from Iowa next door and spent part of the day with them.
But they still needed food.
Pizza would have been the first choice, had Duquesne been able to convince a local pizza place to get a little creative with its delivery methods — during a blizzard, no less.
“They couldn’t come to the turnpike,” Glesmann said. “We were trying to see if we could go off the turnpike, cut through the woods and have a Domino’s person meet us at some side street.”
Needless to say, none of the pizza places bit. Only one Domino’s even listened to the coaches’ pitch.
Fortunately, Glesmann, Baudinet and Steckel found some emergency workers while walking along the turnpike, and these workers had with them an emergency all-terrain vehicle. The coaches got a lift to a Giant Eagle grocery store, where they then stocked up on rotisserie chicken and snacks, such as crackers and granola bars.
“At that point, we were anticipating being stuck another night,” Glesmann said. “We didn’t want the guys to go hungry overnight.”
After depositing some food to the middle schoolers next door, the Duquense bus ate chicken and resumed waiting.
Later, the coaches received word from their new emergency worker friends that the far right lane of the highway had been cleared enough for buses to pass through. Cars had been able to wiggle out for some time, but not buses or trucks. Until now.
Duquesne’s players began shoveling their bus out, using whatever they had at their disposal. Which meant, for most of them, they used empty pizza boxes left over from Friday to push snow out of the way. A few players used plastic garbage cans. When the bus finally moved an inch, cheers rang out throughout the bus.
“We get to the far lane, and the bus in front of us cruises off into the sunset,” Glesmann said. “We had more trouble.”
Not 300 yards from their original sticking point, the Duquense bus got stuck again. Players got out to help push the vehicle through its final obstacle.
The rest of the trip was smooth; the bus exited the turnpike at the next exit, and took alternative roads its final 80 miles back to Pittsburgh. The team arrived back on campus around 11 pm Saturday night, about 30 hours after it initially left Virginia.
And for Glesmann himself, the important part was that he made it home to his wife, who is pregnant with twins due Feb. 20.
“Twins can come early,” he said. “I felt better knowing my mother-in-law was there. I was never worried she was going to go into labor. But it’s in the back of your mind always.”