Baseball team marks crash anniversary

SARASOTA, Fla. (AP) — Bluffton University played its season-opening baseball game Sunday afternoon on a suburban high school diamond, with the bleachers behind the backstop filled mostly with families and friends of the players.

But the enormity of the event was lost on no one.

On the same day last year, a horrific crash of the team’s charter bus in Atlanta killed five Bluffton players and two others and forever changed everyone from the small Ohio college who survived it.

Bluffton was scheduled to play the same team, Eastern Mennonite University, on the same high school field later on the day of the crash. So Sunday’s game was about moving forward while reflecting on the past.

“Personally, it’s ever present,” said fifth-year coach James Grandey, who broke every bone in his face and fractured a leg in the crash. “I think about it all the time. And I think playing on March 2 is the appropriate way to go about the first year anniversary.”

The bus driver apparently mistook an exit ramp for a regular highway lane, crashing into a concrete barrier at a T-intersection at the top. Then it flipped off the overpass and fell 30 feet back onto Interstate 75. Besides the five players, the bus driver and his wife died. Twenty-eight others were injured.

The crash rocked the campus of 1,150 students tucked amid the farm fields of northwestern Ohio. But the baseball team was eager to get back to work. Starting a month late, the Beavers struggled to a 5-19 record.