onefrombills
08-06-2009, 11:38 PM
8/5/2009
By Gianmarc Manzione
Lori Conard had nowhere to turn, her entire life consumed under a fourteen-foot storm surge which, once the storm had passed, stood still inside her house as it gathered mosquitoes and mold. One of many doomed communities in the ravaged East Bank of New Orleans, Conard's hometown of Chalmette virtually dissolved like a pill under the smashing weight of water that Hurricane Katrina shoved over the levy wall. But with a family full of bowlers and one of its youngest, 8th-grader Ray Conard, looking for a high school bowling team to join, the Conards were about to find in bowling a way back to normalcy that none of them saw coming.
"It was indescribable," Lori Conard recalls of the day she finally returned to her house a month after landfall and found a 14-foot-high lake inside. "I never knew what the force of water could do. The house looked like somebody put everything in a food processor and pushed the strongest button. We had plates on top of ceiling fan blades. But one thing that was funny, on a mantle piece is a crystal clock, and the clock never moved. It was really indescribable. You had to think 'OK, what next?'"
What was next was an unwanted move to Houston, a son who did not want to be there, and a search for a high school back home that had not been battered to the ground.
"We thought we would stay in Houston," Lori Conard explains, "and then my son wanted to come home so badly, so we wound up staying on the West Bank where Shaw is."
The "Shaw" Lori Conrad alludes to is Archbishop Shaw High School in Marrero, La., where Coach Denise Vedros would soon lead the bowling team to a State Championship after becoming, for a time, the only team in the state to represent New Orleans after so many storm-ravaged bowling centers ended the seasons of high schools which themselves remained closed for months.
"We've always had a successful bowling program," Coach Denise Vedros says, "but the last couple of years have been a struggle due to hurricane Katrina. We lost our bowling center in the area where our school was located, and the only one left after the storm was a very small one called Colonial Bowl on Jefferson Highway, so my students had to make a commitment to travel across the river for both practice and matches-you don't get that kind of commit unless they're really bowlers."
It was this cadre of "real" bowlers that Lori Conard's son Ray might never have met had he not been forced on a hunt for the area's last remaining bowling centers by one of the worst natural disasters in American history. In the center across the river, Ray Conard found a place where instant friends gave him somewhere to belong to again after months of displacement. For his mother Lori, it was a place where, for maybe a few hours a week that removed her from the stress of rebuilding her Chalmette home, she could "be in a normal situation with people who were having a normal life. You didn't have to think about things like sheet rock."
But for Shaw's Bowling Coach Denise Vedros, the boy that the storm blew her way became the pulse of her team's success and an indispensable component of their 2009 State Championship. "Ray started as an 8th grader in 2007-2008 and was one of the best bowlers I had," Coach Vedros says. "He was eligible for Varsity his freshman year, 2008-2009, and started as my top bowler. He was a true motivator and inspiration for our team."
Any championship team needs leaders, but the confluence of victory and adversity bred many leaders at Archbishop Shaw. Patrick Kravet, the aspiring graphics designer who concluded a five-year stint with the Shaw bowling team with a championship-clinching strike in the tenth. "The team tackled me. It was awesome, really awesome," Kravet recalls. Brandon Palmisano, who tired of the football team and quit to try his luck at bowling instead. "Little did he know he would help the team win a State Championship," Coach Vedros says. Greg Cruice and Michael Niven, who joined Ray Conard and Patrick Kravet on the All-District Team.
"I think before Katrina they always relied on one or two bowlers to carry the team," Coach Vedros observes, "and I think everything they experienced-being displaced from their homes for two months, their school for a month, and then we had some victims that transferred into our school that lost everything, it taught the team a lot. It was more about teamwork, not just bowling."
By Gianmarc Manzione
Lori Conard had nowhere to turn, her entire life consumed under a fourteen-foot storm surge which, once the storm had passed, stood still inside her house as it gathered mosquitoes and mold. One of many doomed communities in the ravaged East Bank of New Orleans, Conard's hometown of Chalmette virtually dissolved like a pill under the smashing weight of water that Hurricane Katrina shoved over the levy wall. But with a family full of bowlers and one of its youngest, 8th-grader Ray Conard, looking for a high school bowling team to join, the Conards were about to find in bowling a way back to normalcy that none of them saw coming.
"It was indescribable," Lori Conard recalls of the day she finally returned to her house a month after landfall and found a 14-foot-high lake inside. "I never knew what the force of water could do. The house looked like somebody put everything in a food processor and pushed the strongest button. We had plates on top of ceiling fan blades. But one thing that was funny, on a mantle piece is a crystal clock, and the clock never moved. It was really indescribable. You had to think 'OK, what next?'"
What was next was an unwanted move to Houston, a son who did not want to be there, and a search for a high school back home that had not been battered to the ground.
"We thought we would stay in Houston," Lori Conard explains, "and then my son wanted to come home so badly, so we wound up staying on the West Bank where Shaw is."
The "Shaw" Lori Conrad alludes to is Archbishop Shaw High School in Marrero, La., where Coach Denise Vedros would soon lead the bowling team to a State Championship after becoming, for a time, the only team in the state to represent New Orleans after so many storm-ravaged bowling centers ended the seasons of high schools which themselves remained closed for months.
"We've always had a successful bowling program," Coach Denise Vedros says, "but the last couple of years have been a struggle due to hurricane Katrina. We lost our bowling center in the area where our school was located, and the only one left after the storm was a very small one called Colonial Bowl on Jefferson Highway, so my students had to make a commitment to travel across the river for both practice and matches-you don't get that kind of commit unless they're really bowlers."
It was this cadre of "real" bowlers that Lori Conard's son Ray might never have met had he not been forced on a hunt for the area's last remaining bowling centers by one of the worst natural disasters in American history. In the center across the river, Ray Conard found a place where instant friends gave him somewhere to belong to again after months of displacement. For his mother Lori, it was a place where, for maybe a few hours a week that removed her from the stress of rebuilding her Chalmette home, she could "be in a normal situation with people who were having a normal life. You didn't have to think about things like sheet rock."
But for Shaw's Bowling Coach Denise Vedros, the boy that the storm blew her way became the pulse of her team's success and an indispensable component of their 2009 State Championship. "Ray started as an 8th grader in 2007-2008 and was one of the best bowlers I had," Coach Vedros says. "He was eligible for Varsity his freshman year, 2008-2009, and started as my top bowler. He was a true motivator and inspiration for our team."
Any championship team needs leaders, but the confluence of victory and adversity bred many leaders at Archbishop Shaw. Patrick Kravet, the aspiring graphics designer who concluded a five-year stint with the Shaw bowling team with a championship-clinching strike in the tenth. "The team tackled me. It was awesome, really awesome," Kravet recalls. Brandon Palmisano, who tired of the football team and quit to try his luck at bowling instead. "Little did he know he would help the team win a State Championship," Coach Vedros says. Greg Cruice and Michael Niven, who joined Ray Conard and Patrick Kravet on the All-District Team.
"I think before Katrina they always relied on one or two bowlers to carry the team," Coach Vedros observes, "and I think everything they experienced-being displaced from their homes for two months, their school for a month, and then we had some victims that transferred into our school that lost everything, it taught the team a lot. It was more about teamwork, not just bowling."