After a bus crash killed five of their teammates, Bluffton University's ballplayers never lost their poise, their faith or their will to compete

	Before each home game the Beavers bow their heads in prayer beside the leftfield memorial to their late teammates. Lynn Johnson/SI

By L. Jon Wertheim

The rest of the campus was asleep when the Bluffton University baseball players converged on their field at 8 a.m. last Sept. 30. It was a typical fall morning, needles of sunlight poking through the changing leaves, the occasional train whistle piercing the silence. The 40 players had gotten up early for the 50-inning game, an annual intrasquad rite that their young coach had inaugurated when he took the job a few years back. In truth the game didn't span 50 official innings. Each hitter started with a 3-2 count, and each team batted three innings at a time. The event lasted from the morning until the sky could no longer hold daylight.

A few residents of Bluffton, a village of 4,000 in a pastoral pocket of northwest Ohio, stopped by to watch an inning or two. So did a few curious students. But mostly the game was a team-building exercise, a means of getting acquainted with the freshmen and their families. With few exceptions the players' hometowns were within an hour's drive of campus, so it was an easy trip for their folks. After the 25th inning everyone took a long lunch break, digging into monstrous sandwiches from the Subway alongside the interstate.

The Beavers were coming off a 17-21 season, successful by recent standards and with luck the start of a turnaround. The baseball coaches believed that, as a hand-painted sign in the Bluffton basketball locker room put it, talent is important; dependability is critical. But particularly with no seniors, 29-year-old head coach James Grandey figured team chemistry would be important for the Beavers to continue improving. The guys seemed to get along well; the coaches would often run into a pack of them headed out for milkshakes at the Dari Freeze or wings at Luke's. "Every coach tries to emphasize that the players like one another," says Grandey, "but you can only lead them so far. It's really up to them."

The 50-inning game served another vital purpose: It was the baseball program's big annual fund-raiser. Every year the team spent spring break in Florida, where it played as many as nine games (a full quarter of its schedule), and the money raised helped pay expenses. The 2007 opener would be in Sarasota against Eastern Mennonite University, which like Bluffton is affiliated with the Mennonite Church.