The Comeback Of All Comebacks

Remarkably, things got worse. Most players had no transportation. For a while, only senior guard Randy Verdin had a reliable car, and if he couldn't round everybody up, there'd be no practice. Players were living from one friend's couch to another. Transfers came in but would have to leave again with their unsettled families.

Hundreds of phone calls later, Collins finally quilted together a patchwork team--10 kids from five schools, including a cocky inner-city transfer named Brian Randolph whom nobody on the team liked. The feeling was mutual.

"He just had an attitude all the time," says Ehret's star forward, Christian Wall, who still lives in a trailer on his front lawn. The Ehret kids bickered almost daily with Randolph and the non-Ehret kids. It was like West Side Story in Reeboks.

They lost early and they lost often, then started 1-2 in the district. "We were at a point of no return," Collins said. So before a must-win game, he threw them all into a room and told them, Work it out, or the season is lost.

And lo and behold, they did. Almost to a man, the players say it hit them, in that room, that they could lose clothes and homes and trophies to Katrina, but they just couldn't bear losing hoops.

Randolph backed down and became a passer and a screener and a rebounder. Transfer Nicholas Washington, who'd been a star at Cohen High, swallowed hard and let Wall become the go-to guy. Everyone else chipped in as best he could. And they won 10 of their next 11.

"Other coaches would ask me, 'How are you doing this?'" Collins recalled. "I'd say, 'It's not me, it's them.' All I did was try not to let them get too low. No yelling. They've had enough negative stuff."

Next thing you know, Ehret was in the state 5A championship game, playing Woodlawn of Baton Rouge, a school whose biggest distraction all year was cheerleader practice. And while Woodlawn and the other semifinalists were happily snuggled in their hotel rooms near the Cajundome in Lafayette, Ehret commuted 2 1/2 hours each way back to their couches. They couldn't afford rooms.

Yet somehow, against all logic, Ehret beat Woodlawn, the most powerful team in the state--with the clinching dunk coming from none other than Brian Randolph. It was hard to decide who was crying harder, the players or their emotionally spent parents. "A mismatched bunch of riffraff won it all," Collins beams. "It's like Hoosiers!"

Actually, it's bigger than that. Ehret's Katrina Comeback has been a little patch of blue sky for a ravaged city, a symbol of how things can be rebuilt when you don't care who gets the credit.