"I ended up in a car with a few other teammates, heading toward Atlanta. Well, about 20 minutes outside of New Orleans, heading right when you get to the Mississippi border, we realize both ways traffic all the way is clogged up. We're not moving. We're going to end up going through Katrina in this car. One of my teammates in the car says 'We're coming up on Picayune, Mississippi which is literally a half hour, 45 minutes from New Orleans. And my grandmother lives there.' We all kind of have one of those TV look at him weird moments, Â like you could have suggested that a little earlier. We literally back-roaded in arguably the scariest few hours before the hurricane. We eventually got to Picayune, and that's where we kind of went through Katrina, at my teammate Jacob Manning's grandmother's house, who will forever be a saint in my eyes because she was easily the warmest person.
"What it's hard for me to make people understand is, we couldn't get out, even after. there's literally no streets, there's no streets, there's no sidewalk there's no houses. There's everything is everywhere it's not supposed to be. And so, day one, we get into the car with less than half a gas tank and literally our plan is to drive as far North as possible. Any street going north we're going to drive and if we see a dead end, we go east or west and then go north. Day one, we get about 200 yards away from the house and we turn around kind of laughing, saying it's impossible. And so we go walking. And as far as we can walk and as far as we can see, there's no streets. There's no more streets. No driving around stuff. We had a small SUV. There was no driving on the sides, there's nothing really to drive on. You know if you get stuck on the other side of one of these things, getting back to grandma's house is going to be a little more difficult.
"We literally played that game for four days until day five, we say Grandma, we're just going to try to go north, and whatever happens happens. Obviously at that point, no cell phones and no contact with outside world, and about 30-40 minutes of driving north, we eventually get to a telephone booth that actually works. And the call where my mom cries for literally as long as the call could go on before the guys say Come on, let's go. That call happened, and they at least knew I was safe. But they still had no way of ensuring that I would get to where we were eventually going to get to, which was Jackson, Mississippi. and then kind of figure it out from there.
"Two days into it, everything seems okay. Day three, when the fridge is empty and the frozen meat is already cooked, you immediately begin to see the empathy and compassion from the people in Picayune, Mississippi. We literally walked around and just waited for families to wave us down. To come make sure we were well fed, and that we were okay. And that's how we ate for two of those days. Those first two days, grandma cook everything she had for us...man. The people of Picayune, Mississippi...I have to make that pilgrimage one day and just give back to that community because they literally saved our lives. We wouldn't be who we are today, or in the situation we were in that car if those people in Picayune didn't do what they did.
"And then, there was a police officer right outside of Jackson, Mississippi. We were out of gas. It was past E, we were flirting with it. We're just stopping in lines where there was 100 cars, and it would move one car an hour and it's just like, man, I don't know what to do. I get out the car with Nick, who's a cop now in Atlanta, and I don't think wanted to be a cop at the time. We walk up to the officer, and we just kind of say hey man, we're athletes at the University of New Orleans. We have no idea what's going on. We're just trying to get somewhere to where we could communicate with our team and our families. And he brought us to the front of that line and gave us gas. That changed everything. Everyone that went through what we went through, there's about 10 of those moments where you rely on someone you don't know. And every time, someone stepped up for us. That was one of the most hopeful parts of going through Katrina."
