Download Hurricane Season: A Coach, His Team, and Their Triumph in the Time of Katrina AudioBook Free
"There's always a point in the season when you're faced with a challenge and you also see what you're with the capacity of. Therefore you grow up." —J. T. Curtis, head coach, John Curtis Christian School Patriots On Saturday, August 27, 2005, the John Curtis Patriots met for a grueling practice in the late summer New Orleans sun, air a obvious fog of humidity. They had pulled off a 19-0 shutout in their preseason game the night time before, but it was a game full of dumb mistakes. Head coach J. T. Curtis was determined to drill those mistakes out of them before their highly anticipated next game, which sportswriters had dubbed "the Battle of the Bayou" against a big team to arrive all the way from Utah. As fate played out, that afternoon was the last time the Patriots would see each other for weeks; some teammates they'd never see again. Hurricane Katrina was going to tear their lives apart. The Patriots are a most unlikely football dynasty. Theirs is a little, nondescript, family-run school, the buildings constructed yourself by the school's founding patriarch, John Curtis, Sr. In such a era of senior high school football as big business with 20,000-seat stadiums, John Curtis does not have any stadium of its. The team plays an old-school offense, and Coach Curtis insists over a no-cut policy, giving every kid who would like to play the opportunity. As of 2005, they'd won nineteen state championships in Curtis's thirty-five many years of coaching, making him the second most winning senior high school coach ever. Curtis has honed to a fine art the skill of teaching players how to transcend their natural talents. No screamer, he strives to teach kids about playing with purpose, the power of respect, dignity, poise, patience, rely upon teamwork, and the payoff of perseverance, showing them how to be winners not only on the gridiron but in life, and making boys into men. Hurricane Katrina would put those lessons to the test of a lifetime. Hurricane Season is the story of a great coach, his team, his family, and their school—and a remarkable fight back from shocking tragedy. It really is a tale of football and faith and of the transformative power of a team that rises above adversity, and above its abilities, to come together again and prove what they're manufactured from. It is the gripping story of how, as one player put it, "football became my place of peace."
