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College Sports in the Carolinas
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from the 'ville
Thursday,
November 17, 2005
By Al Myatt |
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No shortage of passion
expected in Huntington
©2005 Bonesville.net
When the Marshall football team hosts East
Carolina at 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, the Thundering Herd will wear special
decals on their helmets in memory of the plane crash in 1970 that killed 75
Herd players, coaches, staff, supporters and flight crew on a return trip
from a 17-14 loss at ECU.
The first ever Conference USA gridiron meeting
between the two programs will mark the first time the Pirates have played in
Huntington since the tragedy occurred 35 years ago.
ECU coach Skip Holtz was just six years old
when it happened.
"I know this is a very emotional series
because it was with East Carolina and Marshall that the event took place,"
Holtz said. "I just recall the tragedy of it all. Fortunately, it's not
something you hear about very often in sports."
Holtz recognizes the potential for an
impassioned situation at Joan C. Edwards Stadium with 14 Marshall seniors
playing their final home game — a repeat of the scenario in last week's trip
to Tulsa — in addition to the significance of the matchup in terms of the
crash, especially for older fans.
"It is an emotional time," Holtz said. "It's
the last time they're going to have the opportunity to run out in that
stadium. They're going to be full of fire and energy."
Herd coach Mark Snyder was five years old when
the Marshall program was devastated in 1970 and he anticipates a poignant
setting as well.
"I think it's going to be a very emotional
weekend for the tri-state area," Snyder said. "If you look back 35 years and
the East Carolina game, now we have them coming here. First and foremost,
it's going to be a special game for this area and the state of West
Virginia."
Tony Guzzo experienced a range of emotions
after kicking the winning field goal when ECU topped the Herd in 1970.
"You hear about tragedies in the news, but
most of the time you don't seem connected to them," said Guzzo, who went on
to successfully guide several college baseball programs in the region.
Guzzo and some of his teammates were out
celebrating one of ECU's three wins during Mike McGee's lone season as ECU
coach when they heard the chilling news.
"We stopped celebrating," Guzzo said. "We went
back to campus. I kept seeing those guys (Marshall players) — their faces in
the helmets."
The Pirates lead the series with Marshall,
4-2. ECU has split previous meetings in Huntington, winning 29-13 in 1967
and losing 38-7 in 1969.
The teams have met twice since that fateful
evening of Nov. 14, 1970, when one of the planes carrying the Marshall
contingent ran into the side of a mountain. Poor conditions and visibility
were blamed.
ECU rolled to a 45-0 win over a Herd team that
included a linebacker named Mike Hamrick in a game in Greenville in 1978.
"Everyone on our team knew the significance of
getting on that plane to go to Greenville to play that game," said Hamrick,
who was athletic director at ECU from 1995 to 2003. "It was an eerie
feeling. We had a memorial service on campus before we made that trip."
Hamrick grew up in West Virginia and was a
ninth-grader playing pinball with some friends at a hot dog stand when he
became aware of what had happened to one of the planes carrying the Marshall
traveling party. Hamrick's dad, Jim, was a high school football coach, and
members of the Marshall staff who were killed sometimes recruited players
Jim Hamrick was coaching.
"I was a Marshall fan," Hamrick said. "It was
just total shock."
It took years for the Marshall program to
recover the virtual decimation of its program. It wasn't until 1984 in the
aftermath of the crash that the Herd had a winning season.
The 2001 meeting between ECU and the Herd
wasn't defined by life and death circumstances but the ECU program is still
trying to recover from the aftershock of an incredible Marshall comeback.
The last time the Pirates and the Herd played,
Marshall rallied from 30 points down to edge ECU 64-61 in two overtimes in
the 2001 GMAC Bowl in Mobile. Coincidently, the two quarterbacks who
contributed to the highest point total ever in a bowl game, David Garrard of
ECU and Byron Leftwich of Marshall, are now teammates with the Jacksonville
Jaguars.
The Pirates finished the 2001 season at 6-6.
When the record slipped to 4-8 the following season with a first-year
starter, sophomore Paul Troth, directing the offense, Steve Logan was
dismissed as coach despite compiling a school record 69 wins over 11
seasons.
ECU has struggled to a 10-34 record since it
last met Marshall. In the 44 games before that bowl collapse against the
Herd in 2001, the Pirates were 28-16 with two bowl trips, including ECU's
last postseason win, a 40-27 triumph over Texas Tech in the
galleryfurniture.com Bowl in 2000.
Learning and refocusing
ECU's bowl hopes for the current season were
wiped out with a 45-13 loss at Tulsa last Saturday as the Golden Hurricane
seized momentum in the second half to win going away. The Pirates were
outscored 35-0 after leading 13-10 at the half.
"With a young football team, I don't think we
handled the adversity very well," Holtz said. "Part of the troubles of
playing on the road when things like this happen to you — all of a sudden
you rough a punter and the air starts to go out of your balloon, you start
fighting your way back and all of a sudden, you fumble. It's boom, boom — 14
quick points.
"You've got to have great mental toughness and
a lot of leadership to overcome things like that on the road. You don't have
a crowd in your favor that's going to turn and take any small thing and
start to give you momentum and get the crowd back into it.
"A lot of that I attribute to Tulsa. They
didn't make any mistakes. They played a very solid football game. ...
Sometimes when the momentum gets going against you, it's very hard mentally
to get a team back, to get them to play with the same enthusiasm and energy
that they did at the beginning of the game or when everything is going well.
"The mark of a good team is a team that can
overcome those mistakes. This was a great learning process for us. We're
using this as something to teach from and hopefully develop so if something
like that were to happen again on the road, we would react to it a little
bit better than we did this time."
With a road game at Marshall and a home game
with UAB, Holtz would like to see a leadership transition begin.
"We still want to be as good as we can be,"
Holtz said. "You're not playing for a bowl game. You can't have a winning
record, but we're still in the building process in this program.
"I would like to see some of the juniors start
to step up during the final two weeks of the season, take a little more of a
leadership role and start to understand that the last two games of the
season is going to have a lot to do with the attitude that we take into the
offseason.
"I expect to continue to grow this program
from an attitude standpoint."
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02/23/2007 12:33:45 AM
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