Louisiana teams flee Gustav
As Tulane’s football team embarked on an unexpected trip to Birmingham, Ala., with Hurricane Gustav on their minds, center Michael Parenton figured it couldn’t be any worse than the last time the Green Wave left campus with a major storm threatening Louisiana’s coast.
“We’ve been through it before and we made it,” Parenton said, recalling the 2005 season, when Tulane played all its games on the road after Hurricane Katrina flooded most of New Orleans. “We’ll be all right.”
Across south Louisiana, college and pro teams spent the weekend packing up and leaving their regular training sites for safe havens.
The New Orleans Saints, who like Tulane spent their entire 2005 regular season outside New Orleans, were in Indianapolis, where they intended to practice until Friday. The Saints tentatively scheduled a Saturday walkthrough back in New Orleans, hoping their Sept. 7 regular-season opener against Tampa Bay still can be played in the Louisiana Superdome.
The New Orleans Zephyrs, the Triple-A affiliate of the New York Mets, canceled their last two home games of the season on Sunday and Monday.
After canceling its game next Thursday at New Mexico State, Nicholls State’s football team told players to evacuate and seek refuge with their families as Gustav threatened to unleash catastrophic damage in the low-lying town of Thibodaux, La., nearly 60 miles southwest of New Orleans.
Louisiana-Lafayette and McNeese State football players also were told to ride out the storm with their families and stay in touch with coaches, who would give them instructions on when and where to regroup.
McNeese’s football team has experience with setting up shop on another campus. After Rita left 6 feet of water in Cowboy Stadium in 2005, the squad spent several weeks at Southeastern and had some games canceled or rescheduled.
The Southeastern Louisiana football team left campus in Hammond on Sunday, bound for Oxford, Miss. University spokesman Matt Sullivan said the team had been invited to use practice fields and the weight room at Ole Miss while preparing for next weekend’s game at Mississippi State.
A day after its season opening victory over Appalachian State, LSU held meetings on its Baton Rouge campus, waiting to see how the storm was expected to affect the state capital before deciding whether to look for a temporary home elsewhere.