Sadness, stress linger for team

Five players were killed when the bus crashed while taking the team to spring training in Florida.

BLUFFTON, Ohio (AP) — Gazing toward the chain-link outfield fence, Bluffton University baseball coach James Grandey can’t stop staring at the banners hanging in left field.

He looks at the five names and numbers on those banners every day.

Sometimes, he comes alone. Other days, he brings his wife and their 10-month-old daughter.

“It’s a place of remembrance for me,” Grandey said.

The names are those of the five Bluffton baseball players killed nearly eight months ago when the team’s bus plunged off an Atlanta highway overpass.

Overwhelming grief no longer envelops the baseball team and this Mennonite school tucked amid the farm fields of Northwest Ohio. Yet sadness and stress linger.

Nightmares and flashbacks, though less frequent, still haunt players. So does the sight of a car or a truck coming too fast, too close. And there are the nagging pains from being tossed around the inside of a bus and falling onto a highway.

“There isn’t an hour, a half-hour that goes by that I don’t think about something,” Grandey said. “And I’m pretty sure that’s the same for the rest of the guys.

“It will be with all of us the rest of our lives,” he said.

Grandey walks with a limp and sometime feels numbness in his cheeks, the result of breaking his right leg and nearly every bone in his face.

The players injured in the crash also are back on campus.

All but two are expected to play baseball this spring. One will miss the season after having plates removed from his throwing arm. Another decided not to return to the team.

The only senior from last season’s team, student-manager Tim Berta, of Ida, Mich., graduated but didn’t get to attend the ceremony because he was in a hospital with severe head injuries. He has since moved home and undergoes therapy to learn to talk and do everything else that college kids often take for granted.

Nurses at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta still follow his progress. Berta’s family sends monthly updates that are posted on a bulletin board.

“They’re not forgotten to us,” said Cathy Churbock, who manages the nurses in the trauma intensive care unit.

The nurses see misery every day, but they built up relationships with the players and their families.

“That was just another wreck on the highway,” Churbock said. “We have them all day in Atlanta. This was about the people.”

The rest of the boys, as most call them, are trying to move forward.

Some, like first baseman Greg Sigg, have one more season before they go out into the real world. He’s a student teacher this fall.

Sophomore A.J. Ramthun is playing football again after recovering from a broken collarbone. He’s wearing No. 5 to honor his teammates.

Pitcher Brandon Freytag spent two weeks in France on a class trip in May.

But there are always reminders.

For Freytag, riding a swaying train at night through the French countryside was too unnerving. He didn’t even try to sleep. And when it came time for the class to board a bus, a host family drove him in their car.

“A lot of them had obstacles they had to overcome,” said Freytag’s mother, Gwynne. “There are still some kids that don’t want to get on a bus.”

Austin Gray, a junior infielder, felt it all come rushing back this summer while he was coming home from a camping trip with his family.

Another driver cut in front of them. “Austin screamed like a girl,” said his mother, Jodi Gray.

His nightmares have stopped. “He would fall asleep and feel like the road was caving in,” she said. “He’d wake up gasping for air.”