Five days before it hit, Tulane shortstop Cat Everett had arrived in the city to prepare for his second season with the Green Wave. On the morning of the 29th, he received an urgent call from his coach to get out.

“I was with my buddies when our coach called that morning and said, ‘You guys need to get out of here now,’” Everett recalled. “Two years earlier, we had been evacuated, and everything turned out fine, so I only packed an overnight bag, but this time, that turned out not to be the case.”

As a team, the Tulane Green Wave was evacuated to Lubbock, Texas, the campus of Texas Tech, 735 miles away. Local information from the New Orleans area was impossible to come by. With the exception of what the national media was telling them, they had no idea of the extent of the damage. 

“It was so disorganized,” Everett said. “There was no communication. None of the 504 numbers, the New Orleans area code, worked, so everyone had to get new cell phones. It was just impossible to find out what had happened.”

The gravity of what had happened to their school and the city of New Orleans took a couple of weeks to set in. Meanwhile, the administration and athletics department at Texas Tech went to great lengths to accommodate the team.

“The people at Texas Tech were incredibly nice,” Everett said. “They really took care of everything for us. But none of us had our belongings, and we had no idea what had happened to them. Eventually FEMA gave us some money, but initially our parents helped us out with laptops, what we needed for school and clothes, and just the basics you need to live.”

Back on the Tulane campus, everything was in disarray. Scattered debris littered the damaged grounds, and flood water filled Turchin Stadium, the home of the Green Wave.

“I don’t think it hit any of us right away,” he remembered. “It wasn’t until we settled into our classes (at Texas Tech) a couple of weeks later that we realized what had happened. Then, we were all pretty upset about it.”

Once the basics were attended to, the team had to find some equipment. Their baseball gear had been left in New Orleans, and they only hoped it was still there.

“We didn’t have anything,” Everett explained. “We borrowed some things from Texas Tech and their players and then Rawlings lent us some demo equipment for a while.”

Putting their baseball program back together wasn’t the only hurdle facing the team. They needed to get back into the classroom. “It was a bit of a struggle because we picked up classes that the other students had already been in for two or three weeks,” Everett noted. “We had to get tutors and get caught up.”

The homeless Green Wave baseball players, realizing what was being done for them gave back to the Lubbock community by helping out in the local Boys & Girls Club. “We went to an after school program every day to work with the kids,” Everett said. 

At Christmas, the Tulane players returned to their family homes around the country, grateful for all Texas Tech had done for them. Four months after Hurricane Katrina had hit, in January, the team returned to New Orleans for the spring semester.

“A lot of the campus was still pretty badly messed up,” Everett said, “It’s hard to describe. People may doubt the level of destruction they see on TV, but it was bad. You really had to see it to believe it. When we got back, there was still trash all over the place, and the roads were terrible. I still had eight feet of water in the house where I lived. We basically camped out there. We spent two months without electricity, heat, air conditioning or hot water. It was miserable at first, but we were happy to be home in New Orleans and to try to get things going again.”

There was no hope of using Turchin Stadium. In the words of Cat Everett, “It was destroyed.” Water had initially filled it to the top of the outfield fences. Once drained, it was turned into a parking lot for the emergency and construction equipment being used to repair the campus buildings.
The Washington Nationals stepped in and offered to share Zephyr Field, the home of their triple-A franchise in Metairie about 30 minutes away. Zephyr Field had suffered some damage as well, but the major league club had the playing surface ready in time for the Tulane team.
“It still had some damage,” Everett said. “It had the roof blown off, but the field was ready to go. Their season starts later than ours does. It worked out. Just like in Lubbock, they helped us out a lot.”

The previous fall, Tulane and the Red Raiders of Texas Tech shared equipment and a facility in Lubbock, but by NCAA rule, never so much as scrimmaged. They wouldn’t normally face one another during the regular season, but this spring, in the second game of the season for the Green Wave, they did. For Everett it proved memorable.

“I had a game-winning RBI against them in the ninth inning,” he smiled. Tulane won the game 6-4.

Baseball proved to be cathartic. Five months after the storm, still surrounded by destruction and debris and an overall sense of loss, the Green Wave played baseball.

“It was tough at first, but baseball is what we enjoy,” Everett said. “It was a mental break from what was going on around us.”

The team had a great deal of their equipment destroyed by the storm. Their weight room was gone, as was their batting cage.

“We got off to a slow start,” Everett said, “but we came on strong, winning about 22 of our last 26 games. In the end, we really had a great year. What we went through in New Orleans was terrible. It makes me appreciate the smaller things a lot more.”

About a month after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Hurricane Rita, another Category 3 storm, ravaged the Texas-Louisiana coast. Cat Everett, a native of Houston, Texas learned while in Lubbock that his parents had been evacuated from the family home. Fortunately their home received little damage.

Even after all they did, the hurricanes couldn’t destroy baseball.

“I’m here this summer to work hard and to have fun playing baseball,” Everett said. “I still want to take my game to the next level, and maybe someday I will. We went through a lot, but I guess you could say adjustments are something I’m used to.”