OKLAHOMA CITY – The Mid-America Christian University baseball team was set to have their first intersquad game on Thursday, September 14 in what would have kicked off the competitive portion of their fall practice schedule. However, when Head Coach Adrian Savedra got word of an opportunity to make a more important contribution, he knew that the schedule needed to be adjusted.
Savedra took a group of MACU baseball players south to the Houston area to help with cleanup from Hurricane Harvey, which devastated the Gulf Coast of Texas in late August.
"Henderson Hills Baptist Church put out a call for volunteers to help," Savedra explained, "and so we got back in touch with them and asked if a baseball team would be too many at once, and they said no, that they needed all the help they could get and to come on down."
The Evangels went down for only two days, but they put in two very full days of work. The group, which included 15 players and two coaches, left campus after class on Thursday, arriving in the area late on Thursday evening and staying in Katy, Texas for the weekend. The group helped with what are known as "Mud-Outs" where they cleaned out the flooded portion of homes of all the mud and debris, as well as the after effects of the flood.
"The homes we worked in were not in a flood plain, and they survived the initial storm, but because so much rain fell, there were several reservoirs from which water had to be released to alleviate pressure, and when that was done, these homes flooded up to a depth of about four feet," Savedra noted.
The MACU group cleaned out four homes in two days, which included removing sheetrock, flooring, and insulation in order to clean the mess and also clean out things like mold, which had already set in because of the extreme amount of moisture combined with the south Texas heat. Many of the people in the area did not have flood insurance, and as a result, the repairs would have cost thousands of dollars if not for the MACU group.
Savedra was particularly proud of the attitudes of the players who helped, many of whom come from other countries in the Caribbean.
"We have a great group of guys," he said. "Their hearts were already heavy for their home countries [because of the effects of Hurricane Irma], and they couldn't get home because of school, but when the opportunity came up, the guys stepped up immediately. Juan Rafael Puente said to me, 'Coach, you don't need to ask me. Just tell me where we need to go and I'm ready to help,' and that is an attitude that many of our guys took."
He continued, "If I had something like this happen to my own family, I would want someone to come down and help. That, for me, was the least we could do, and I was really proud of the way our guys stepped up. Often times, you hear teams use the phrase 'Blood, Sweat, and Tears' to refer to the hard work they put in on the field, but in this case, our guys literally did that for two days with people who had lost everything. It was emotional experience – we were not mentally prepared for the devastation we witnessed – but these families desperately needed our help. It was a great experience for all of us."
