When New Orleans baseball called for help after Hurricane Katrina, New Mexico State answered

An unprecedented crisis hit New Orleans in 2005. Hurricane Katrina had made landfall. The city was underwater. Chaos was taking over.

Nearly all of the city's residents were displaced, the players and staff of the University of New Orleans's baseball team among them. Many of them had nowhere to live, nowhere to go and no blueprint for what came next.

Privateers coach Tom Walter combed through his Rolodex, desperately looking for a place that would take the program in. UNO's season was hanging by a thread, and its salvation came from the last place Walter ever expected.

That place was New Mexico State.

"(Walter) was worried about the program not surviving it," said Rocky Ward, the Aggies' baseball coach from 1997-2000 and from 2003-14. "He told me, 'We need a cool location to take our kids.' And he thought Las Cruces might fill that bill.

"I said, 'Listen, I have no problem. I'll share my facility, we'll share practice time, whatever we can do.'"

What followed was the entire NM State community mobilizing to wrap their arms around a group of stranded strangers. The university cleared out a soon-to-be-renovated dorm, waived tuition and gave extra spots in classes to UNO players. Academic coordinators pulled all-nighters, faculty stepped up to be caregivers and Las Cruces became an unexpected hurricane sanctuary.

The Privateers' scramble for survival became a powerful testament to humanity's healing power. Over two decades later, the story of how NM State saved UNO's baseball program remains a heartwarming chapter of the post-Katrina era. It proves that when disaster strips everything away, compassion can bring it all back.

"As you can imagine, it was crazy times," said Walter, UNO's baseball coach from 2005-09. "I'll never be able to thank the folks at New Mexico State enough for what they did for our program."

Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans and left residents scattering as governments responded poorly.

It also paralyzed UNO (Now LSU New Orleans). The flooding after city levees broke meant UNO's campus was essentially an island, and the university closed for the fall semester. UNO's sports teams that couldn't find a way out shut down until it was safe to resume play, while others had to find somewhere to go quickly.

UNO's athletics director at the time, Jim Miller, gave every head coach full autonomy on what they wanted to do for the fall, and the best situation Walter could find was at UCF. But the Privateers would be living in a hotel, and there were no clear transportation plans to reach UCF's campus for classes, so he kept looking.

Walter was going through his contacts and calling anyone who would listen until he got to Ward. There was just one problem: they didn't like each other. Ward said he and Walter had issues stemming from Walter accusing an Aggies player of stealing signs against UNO the previous season, which is why Ward was surprised when Walter called.

"I'm in the shower, and my wife answers my phone and says, 'Hey, Tom Walter's on the phone.' And my response to her was, 'Why the hell's he called me? He hates me,'" Ward said, before laughter caused a brief pause in the interview.

But Ward answered. What Walter told him, combined with the devastation Ward was seeing on television, moved him past the problems they had. UNO needed a home, and Ward was eager to provide it. It took only a couple of hours for then-NM State AD McKinley Boston and then-NM State President Michael V. Martin to approve.

"I call Rocky Ward, and I tell him what we're trying to do, and he's like, 'I'll call you back,'" Walter said. "And he calls me back and goes, 'When can you get here?' And I was like, 'What are you talking about?'"

NM State had an on-campus dorm that was about to close for renovations, meaning no students were in it. But NM State was willing to reopen it for the Privateers and make it free for them to live in. There would also be free tuition and unlimited spots in classes for however many UNO players needed them. The only thing UNO would have to pay for was books and a meal plan, which would be $38,000 in total for everyone.

There was no debate to be had. The Privateers were going to Las Cruces.

"I called Rocky back, and I was like, 'We're gonna be there on Saturday.' This was on a Monday," Walter said. "It was really cool."

UNO now had refuge. The Privateers just had to set up shop.

Eight players transferred away before the move, but UNO still took 30 players to Las Cruces. Some of them flew with the team, others took commercial flights paid for by UNO and those who had evacuated to the Baton Rouge area took a private flight offered by a friend of Walter's.

The Privateers rendezvoused in El Paso, TX, at 1 p.m. on a Saturday and bused to Las Cruces, where they met with then-NM State athletics academic coordinator Stacey Willmott. She had every player's class schedule ready by the time they got there, allowing for as seamless a transition as possible for the following Monday.

"It was a little bit of dumb luck that I had brought the class schedules with me when we evacuated," Walter said. "I sent our class schedules, what they were projected to take at our place. By the time we got there on Saturday, she had everybody in classes that they were supposed to take at all places."

Willmott's efforts took a village, and she worked with UNO athletics academic coordinator Kathy Keane, NM State Provost William Flores and NM State's deans to accommodate the Privateers. They looked at the players' UNO class schedules to find similar ones at NM State, making sure the credits would count upon the team's return and how they would be caught up after falling two weeks behind. They also made sure UNO's players had the same access to services as any NM State student.

"These were hours and hours and hours of conversations on the phone," Willmott said. "I had many a sleepless night just wanting to make sure. We can't invite these kids here and then not take care of them. That would be horrible."

Given the circumstances, the Privateers' academics fared well. Willmott recalls one player earning a 3.0 GPA for the first time that semester. No one became academically ineligible.

There was also the challenge of getting supplies. Having frantically fled a city devastated by one of America's most destructive hurricanes, most of UNO's players brought very little with them. Some couldn't bring anything because Katrina destroyed their belongings.

"Our guys, our coaches and our players lost everything," Walter said. "We went out to Las Cruces with nothing, so we were basically starting over."

Many people and organizations stepped up to help. Fundraisers saw several large donations. The NCAA lifted its restrictions so all UNO players could go on scholarship. The American Red Cross provided everything from breakfast in the mornings to blankets and sheets for the dorm rooms. Companies like Adidas and Wilson sent the Privateers gear like baseballs, gloves and bats. Some NM State professors even offered to fly Privateer players back home for Thanksgiving.

Ward even remembers a trip to Walmart during the bus ride to Las Cruces. Each player brought around $1,000 to $2,000 in hurricane relief money, and many players used it on necessities. Others, being college kids, came back with televisions.

"They were coming back with carts with TVs on them," Ward humorously recalls. "Somebody in Walmart goes, 'What, is there a big sale on TVs?'"

Overall, though, UNO was set. Academics were taken care of. Food and lodging were taken care of. Gear was taken care of.

"It's just the power of the human spirit," Walter said. "Not only the people of Las Cruces and how they welcomed us into their homes and into their community, but also the resilience of our players."

Now it was time to play some baseball.

The Privateers mostly practiced in the evenings at Presley Askew Field while NM State kept its regular practice time. They turned chaos into a routine of weightlifting in the mornings, classes in the afternoon and practices in the evening.

Ward and Walter became close friends, a relationship that remains strong to this day. The two coaches and their staffs would constantly get together, whether it was to play poker or have dinner. Walter also took every chance he had to show his gratitude.

"Tom was extraordinarily appreciative, and he kept saying thank you. I'm going, 'Dude, what else?'" Ward said. "We did the right thing. I had no problem. I had no doubt that I was going to help a colleague and other players."

When Katrina inevitably took its emotional toll, those at NM State gave the Privateers a shoulder to cry on. They viewed them as a new family under their wing, nurturing an encouraging environment where doubt was replaced with a steady drumbeat of validation. Willmott even showed up to some of UNO's practices to show her support.

"You look at yourself, or at least I did, as the gardener," Willmott said. "It's my job to plant the seed. It's not my job to grow, but it's my job to water and tend to them and try to make sure that when they leave here, it was a positive experience."

Two players left the Privateers before they returned to New Orleans, and they came back to a city still in rough shape. UNO's campus wasn't ready by the beginning of the spring semester, so the Privateers had to find a second alternative home at South Alabama for three weeks. There weren't many classes to attend by the time they got back, and only one dorm was reopened. Four more players quit during the 2006 season.

UNO found its home stadium of Maestri Field in bad shape. The lights didn't work, and the field was ruined. However, flags were still flying at center field. They became symbols for what the Privateers could be for New Orleans: a shining beacon of hope for a city that needed one.

UNO won 10 more games than the previous season and finished with a winning record in 2006 at 30-28. The Privateers followed by winning the 2007 Sun Belt Tournament, and then went 43-21 with an at-large NCAA Tournament bid in 2008.

Walter said the Privateers' time at NM State "enabled us to keep the program together." That program became something a post-Katrina New Orleans could take pride in.

"What came out of that was just a group of kids who really cared about each other," Walter said. "There were so many bad stories coming out of New Orleans, and so many of our kids are from that area and have such pride in being from New Orleans. It was just one of those things where they rallied like, 'Let's be the story.'"

It also led Wake Forest to hire Walter as its baseball coach in 2010, where he remains today. That's something Walter believed wouldn't have happened if it weren't for NM State. "I wouldn't be the coach at Wake Forest today without Rocky Ward and what New Mexico State did for us," he said.

UNO did its best to repay the favor in 2007 when it hosted the Aggies for a non-conference series. NM State was given a thank-you plaque by UNO, and the Aggies were even made honorary members of one of the Mardi Gras parades that year.

Walter thinks highly of NM State to this day, to the point where he would "never say no" to the Aggies if they asked him for something. NM State even gave Walter another favor in 2012 when the university allowed ESPN to film an "E:60" feature during a Demon Deacons-Aggies game at Presley Askew Field about Walter's kidney donation to a Wake Forest player.

For Walter and the 2005-06 Privateers baseball team, the lifeline handed to them in the desert all those years ago will never be forgotten. Walter knows the scoreboard on that kind of compassion never really shuts off.

"I'll never be able to repay," Walter said. "And I'll never stop being grateful."

This article originally appeared on Las Cruces Sun-News: When New Orleans baseball called for help after Hurricane Katrina, New Mexico State answered