Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Ron Everhart -- Could he still hope to fix what remained of his team?

By Chico Harlan
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette On a Sunday night last month, after his basketball team's latest defeat, Ron Everhart retreated to his basement, no intention of sleeping. He placed four cans of Copenhagen to one side and his spit bottle near the coffee table. Stacks of statistics and recent game film towered side by side. Here, spread on the floor, watching taped footage of his afflicted team, the coach tried to fix everything.

	Matt Freed, Post-Gazette Duquesne's Aaron Jackson and La Salle's Rodney Green fight for a rebound in the first half Jan. 10. Click photo for larger image. Related Coverage: Video: From tragedy, a team is formed Dukes' rally falls short after sloppy start

Everhart, 45, had accepted this job at the end of March, believing it another chance at his specialty: Transforming weak programs into strong ones. The 2005-06 Duquesne Dukes had won just three games, finishing 332nd of 334 Division I-A programs. The school's four previous coaches had left, as one athletic department official said, "in body bags."

Sitting there in his basement, Everhart still could still hope to fix what remained of his team.

But rebuilding a world on the court?

Not when he awoke at 2:48 a.m. Sept. 17 to a phone call, one of his assistants screaming, "They've been shot. They've been shot." No, not when a fusillade of 9mm and .38-caliber bullets took down almost half his roster; not when the other players were walking into his office and crying, "I was right in between Sam and Stuard. Why wasn't I hit?"

Somewhere amid all that chaos, you can find those first months at Duquesne. It began in April, when Everhart drove his Jeep from Boston, his three assistants from Northeastern University following, recruiting by cell phone all the way.

The next morning, Everhart unloaded his belongings at A.J. Palumbo Center and returned to the road -- even before unpacking. For the next weeks, he moved like a storm to restock his roster. He covered 6,200 air miles and visited six states.

Work began immediately. The seven remaining Dukes players from the 2005-06 team faced daily 6 a.m. runs supervised by his assistants at the on-campus track. Swingman Chauncey Duke showed up the first morning and told an assistant, "I want my release." Soon, the roster had shriveled to two: Aaron Jackson and Kieron Achara, who debated the sanity of their sticking with the team. They named their trips to the movie theater, in jest, Team Night Out.

Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Duquesne coach Ron Everhart instructs his team during a game against Charlotte at the A.J. Palumbo Center Wednesday. Click photo for larger image.

To those he recruited, Everhart emphasized what he saw as Duquesne's greatest asset: opportunity, a chance for immediate playing time. Everhart himself wanted the job for an analogous reason: An opportunity to move closer to his parents, still living in Morgantown, W.Va., who'd never seen him coach a basketball game in person.

He'd grown up in Fairmont, W.Va., listening to the Dukes on KDKA-AM radio. His ambition forced him to chase opportunities anywhere they arose: at basketball powerhouse DeMatha High School, near Washington, D.C., where he enrolled for his senior season; at Virginia Tech, where he attended college; at Virginia Military Institute, where he accepted his first full-time assistant job and promptly spent 326 of the next 365 days on the road.

Life lessons had affirmed the value of good work. He knew the comparative luxury of coaching basketball because he'd worked in coal mines in summers during college, ordered to do so by his father. He worked 12-hour shifts, beginning at midnight, and, after a few years, he could fill pages with his hardened stories: How he'd hung above 140-foot ravines, fastening rivets onto conveyor belts, staring down at the end of everything.

Effort became the coach's cure-all. One day, after a 2002 appendectomy, he coached an evening basketball game, blood from the incision staining his dress shirt. He accepted the Duquesne job after seven years at McNeese State and five at Northeastern knowing the challenge. NBA scouting savant Marty Blake, speaking to a reporter in April from Norfolk, Va., likened Everhart to the "captain of the Titanic."

By summer's end, Everhart had compiled a rough-hewn roster of 16 players. Four came from foreign countries, six from junior colleges. They ranged in age from 18 to 23. They were nomads and no-names, with a few marquee talents mixed in, and they'd converged at Duquesne in equal parts by choice and by chance.

One player, Sam Ashaolu, had shown up at the request of his AAU coach at a gym in Toronto the day a Dukes assistant coach appeared to scout another player, Marvell Waithe. "How's Marvell doing?" Everhart asked when his assistant, Daryn Freedman, called.

Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette Duquesne University basketball player Sam Ashalou near the spot where he and four other Dukes players were shot after an on-campus party Sept. 17. Click photo for larger image.

"OK," Freedman said, "but there's another kid here who is just ridiculous."

Another, Aaron Jackson, a sophomore point guard from Hartford, Conn., who'd been on the 2005-06 team, formally agreed to play for his new coach when he walked into Everhart's office, concerned about his status. With Everhart's attention devoted to recruiting, Jackson wondered if the coach wanted the players he already had. "If it's up to me," Jackson declared, "you can't get me out of here with an army."

Everhart, taking stock of his team's jagged composition, counteracted it with rules and uniformity. No headbands, no jewelry, no braids, no dreadlocks. When the team walked through airport terminals, players wouldn't be allowed to use iPods. When the team took the court, socks had to match. Everhart didn't watch any film of the previous year, forcing even Achara and Jackson to provide first impressions.

After a summer of workouts, Everhart believed Jackson, bony and athletic with a kinetic energy to match his own, could serve as the Dukes' point guard. He thought Ashaolu, a thick-bodied Nigerian by way of Canada who'd played at prep school in Virginia and at junior colleges in Texas and North Dakota, logging an itinerary with more miles and less fortune than Everhart's, could serve as one of the team's primary big men.

THE FIVE SHOOTING VICTIMS

SAM ASHAOLU

6-foot-7, junior forward

Shot in the head; discharged on Nov. 3 from the Mercy Hospital rehabilitation unit. Missed the basketball season -- and the school year -- as a result of his injuries. Attempting to return for the 2007-08 season.

STUARD BALDONADO

6-foot-7, junior forward

Shot in the arm and back; released from Mercy five days after the shooting. Missed the basketball season as a result of his injuries. Will play in 2007-08.

AARON JACKSON

6-foot-2, sophomore guard

Shot in the hand; treated and released from Mercy on the night of the shooting. Was able to play at the start of the season.

SHAWN JAMES

6-foot-10, junior forward

Shot in the foot; treated and released from Mercy on the night of the shooting. Began practicing with the team in November. Unable to play this season because of NCAA transfer rules.

KOJO MENSAH

6-foot-1, junior guard

Shot in the forearm and shoulder; released from UPMC Presbyterian three days after the shooting. Began practicing with the team in November. Unable to play this season because of NCAA transfer rules.

The fast friendship shared by Jackson and Ashaolu emphasized the bonding power of new faces in one new circumstance. The point guard was hyper-everything, sometimes too animated, sometimes too self-reliant, often too quick for defenders.

"He'd whine about running, even though he was the best runner on the team," Everhart said. But once he started moving, he became the team's pacemaker. He owned a car and knew Pittsburgh, and teammates, including Ashaolu, followed him on shopping trips to the Monroeville Mall, to restaurants on the South Side, to dance clubs in the Strip District.

Ashaolu, though shy, "just loved to look at the girls," Jackson said.

All yessirs and head-nods, Ashaolu had long aspired to a scholarship with an Atlantic 10 school, just as some of the older guys he knew in Toronto had done. But he didn't tell teammates much of his story, about how his mother had taken her boys, Sam included, from Lagos, Nigeria, in the late 1980s and planted them in a foreign country, away from her husband and anything familiar. Or how he'd watched her work three jobs, sometimes 16 to 18 hours a day. Or how he'd learned from her to throw everything at a big risk, even the one that exiled him to a junior college in Devils Lake, N.D., where he walked the campus in a burly parka, shivering in minus-20-degree-wind-chill weather. This, too, was an opportunity that might lead to something better.

A coach's longest day

On a warm Saturday in September some two months before the season began, teammates filed into the Palumbo Center gym for informal morning workout drills. They stuck together for the rest of the day, attending the school's home football game and, later, meeting at a barbecue hosted by the Red & Blue Crew, the Duquesne student fan organization. Before Everhart left, heading home to play some outdoor basketball with his 8-year-old twins, he told his players, "I don't want anybody off campus tonight."

In part because of that message, the Dukes decided to attend a dance sponsored by the Black Student Union at the on-campus student center. Two white players, Scott Grote and Lucas Newton, decided not to go, and another, Gary Tucker, had flown home to Florida for a friend's funeral. Everybody else returned to their dorms to shower and prepare. Stuard Baldonado threw on his new sky-blue Lacoste polo. Ashaolu found his Jordan sneakers and, before leaving his 13th-floor Duquesne Towers dorm room, called Jackson. They decided to meet in the dorm lobby and head over together.

When several of the players arrived around 11 p.m., the dance was starting to find its momentum. Baldonado, lagging behind, called Ashaolu and asked about the scene.

"Yo, what does the party look like?" he asked.

"There's not many people here," Ashaolu told him, "but it's getting better."

Soon, moving bodies packed fourth-floor ballroom. Some had come from Pitt, others from Carnegie Mellon, others from the city; all were welcome. Jackson and Achara, the team's tallest player, danced on stage. The hip-hop bass pulsed. The more reticent Dukes -- Ashaolu, Shawn James, Almamy Thiero -- spent their time on the perimeter, talking. At one point, Jackson and Ashaolu considered leaving for an apartment party on the South Side. Both wanted to go, but thought better of it. Jackson's Honda could seat only a couple of players. "We stuck [at the dance]," he said later, "because we didn't want to leave the whole team behind."

The party cleared at 2 a.m., and nine or 10 Duquesne players, along with several members of the football team, moved in a loose procession, returning toward the dorms on the west side of campus. On the brick walkway, a girl, later identified by police as Erica Sager, now 19, approached the team. She remarked on the height of James and Thiero, and flirted with freshman basketball player Stephen Wood, several who were there said.

A group of men who'd attended the dance with Sager grew angry at the attention she showed the athletes. According to the criminal complaints against those charged, Sager told her companions, armed with guns, to "get them." William Holmes and Derek Lee, like Sager, non-Duquesne students, brandished their weapons, which they'd smuggled into the dance with the help of Duquesne student Brittany Jones, who asked a doorman if he would conduct pat-downs.

The gunmen fired shots, roughly a dozen, witnesses said. Bullets flew at the players from their front and right sides. Ashaolu, with his back turned to the confrontation, speaking by cell phone to his girlfriend, fell to the bricks, struck in the back of the head. Another bullet struck an artery in Baldonado's arm, then continued through his chest, one centimeter shy of his spine. Players scanned the damage. ... How many were down? Three? James had been hit in the foot. Four? Kojo Mensah, another transfer player, had been hit in the forearm and shoulder.

Wood stripped off his white tank top and tied it around Baldonado's arm as a tourniquet. Jackson sprinted to his car, returned and lifted the 225-pound forward into the back seat and sped toward Mercy Hospital.

"That's when I went to Sam," Wood said. "I was just talking to Sam, trying to keep him aware. He kept saying, 'Save me. Don't let me die.' That's what he kept saying. Like, 'Save me. Save me.' I'm just looking at him, seeing the blood going through the bricks on the floor, thick blood. ... And he just started freaking out, kicking his shoes off and stuff."

At Mercy Hospital, a block from the Duquesne campus, the uninjured players joined in the waiting room, witnesses to how quickly news spreads and people flood in. Before 3 a.m., their coach was tossing on his old sweat pants, same thing he'd worn the day before, rushing in from the North Hills. He was only hours removed from his dinner at the North Park Lounge, where he'd met with a circle of Duquesne athletic department officials and where they'd been talking, "You know, if we can just catch a couple breaks this year ..." At 3:08, Everhart was at the Mercy parking lot, the same minute as athletic director Greg Amodio, who'd gotten the call at 2:40, just enough time for his wife to brew coffee as he whisked out the door for the longest day of his professional life.

The men, same as the players, tried to dig through the confusion. Yes, four were shot: three taken to Mercy, one to UPMC Presbyterian. Yes, doctors were worried about Baldonado, perhaps paralyzed, and Ashaolu, fighting for his life. Yes, the players had to speak with detectives. Yes, Grote and Newton, players who hadn't attended the dance, were on the way over. And, yes, Everhart told himself, he had to address his team, or whatever remained of it.

He told them to call their parents and let them know they were OK. Don't say anything yet to the press or to friends about what happened, he said. Outside Mercy, the Dukes formed a circle and joined hands. That's when Jackson withdrew in pain and noticed for the first time the burn of a bullet that had grazed his left hand. Five had been hit, not four.

In Toronto, John Ashaolu, Sam's older brother by two years, heard first in a voice mail on his cell phone from Mercy. For 45 minutes, he steeled himself to tell his mother. In between, he called his girlfriend, his older brother and Ro Russell, Sam's AAU coach. At 5 a.m., just as Christinah Ashaolu awoke for her nursing job, John walked into her room and told her that Sam had been shot in the head. She fainted before she could rise from her bed.

The Ashaolu family, along with Russell, hopped into one car, heading toward Pittsburgh. They found Ashaolu on the fourth floor at Mercy, in intensive care, his swollen head connected to drainage tubes. He breathed with a ventilator. Doctors told the family that he might never talk again. Christinah Ashaolu, Bible in hand, walked toward her son, put her hand on his head and said, "We're going to witness a miracle."

In the next weeks, those OK'd to visit Ashaolu -- providing the password for entrance, "patience" -- watched him first squeeze his mother's hand, then acknowledge his family, then leave the respirator and then beat an infection. Everhart visited two or three times a day. Jackson often arrived around noon, after his two morning classes.

Holmes and Lee now face five counts each of attempted homicide, for which they will be tried in July. And, some five weeks after the shooting, still with bullet fragments lodged near his brain, Ashaolu resumed walking. Dr. Gary Goldberg, medical director of the Acquired Brain Injury Rehabilitation Program at Mercy Hospital, expressed cautious optimism he might play basketball again.

Discharged from the rehabilitation unit Nov. 3, Ashaolu faced daily roadblocks, both cognitive and physical. He'd miss the entire basketball season and school year. He couldn't dunk a basketball. He struggled with balance. He grew fatigued when speaking. He couldn't remember his home telephone number.

Chaos on the court

Ashaolu wanted to resume playing basketball but couldn't. The other Dukes, a group whom coaches believed might manage "six or seven wins," assistant Richard Pitino said, resumed because they had to. Among those shot, only Jackson returned to the court. Duquesne began the year with seven scholarship players, and, by midseason, Everhart wondered if his undermanned team was sentenced to defeat regardless of effort.

The Jan. 14 home loss against Fordham dropped the Dukes' record to 5-11. Everhart found evidence of the shooting's toll everywhere: Ashaolu had resumed workouts at the Palumbo fitness center, straining to lift 145 pounds on the bench press, almost 100 less than before. He still lived at Duquesne Towers, struggling to fill his idle hours, especially when the team traveled. Every day, he walked past his still-visible blood stains on the bricks. Jackson found observing his friend's depleted routine "hard to take."

Everhart felt the strain beginning two days before Christmas when jackhammered by a pain in his gut he compared to a "lead ball." He slept for 28 straight hours, and on Christmas morning, he left his house for the hospital. Diverticulitis, doctors told him, an intestinal inflammation. Possibly stress-related. The resulting dietary restrictions -- nothing leafy, nothing with seeds, nothing fibrous, in short, among other things, none of the sauce-heavy comfort Italian food Everhart loved -- left him in his basement after that Fordham loss, eyes dark like thunder clouds, nothing in his mouth but tobacco.

The coach leaned on one idea, albeit a long shot. When coaching as an assistant at Tulane in the late 1980s, his teams had used an implausible style, subbing frequently, often all five players at once, and running, pressing, shooting almost recklessly.

Why not resurrect that system? Everhart thought while in his basement.

He divided his roster into groupings of five. The walk-ons would play as much as the starters. He debated the idea of giving his atypical team an atypical style. He didn't sleep all night.

At the next day's practice, Everhart gathered the team and didn't mention a word of it. "I didn't pull the trigger," he said. "I didn't have the fortitude to do it." Teaching the necessary techniques on such short notice scared him. The Dukes would have to trap, defend the throwback lines and master the full-court defense. "It was a self-confidence thing," Everhart said. "I didn't have it."

Before the team met again for practice, it had lost another player, Thiero, sidelined with blood clots in his lungs. Everhart no longer saw any reason to hold back. He spread his players along the court's baseline and told them how everything would change.

"We're going to dictate the tempo of every game," he recalled telling them, "and this is how we're going to do it: We're going to get 100 shots per game. And at least 35 of those have to be 3-point shots. We're going to force 30 turnovers, because we will press the entire time, getting loose balls, diving. ... We'll be the toughest team in our league."

So this is what happens when you recover from chaos with more chaos: The Dukes, after losing their first game with the new system, won five in a row. They changed players five at a time, usually every two or three minutes. The team scored 93 points, then 96, then 111. The team traveled by bus to Philadelphia for a Feb. 7 game at La Salle, and players talked en route about their chances of earning a spot in the Atlantic 10 Tournament, beginning March 7, something even a losing skid won't prevent. The players took the court for that La Salle game with a confidence unmatched by any Duquesne team in a generation.

From the afterglow of that game alone, a come-from-behind Duquesne victory, you could find enough snapshots to proclaim winning's curative power. Jackson scored 15 points in the final 2:34, all while his coach, jacketless and pacing on the sideline, screamed "Attack! Get him! Attack!" The team poured back onto its charter bus, ready for the red-eye trip back to Pittsburgh. Laughing players tore open take-out orders of Italian food and waited for Everhart, still inside the arena, shaking every hand and answering every question.

Twenty minutes, the team waited. Assistant Kim Lewis stood at the front of the bus and said to the players, "Y'all cheer when Coach gets on the bus, OK?" When Everhart climbed aboard, he answered the applause with something he'd never done before: Smiling, he flashed his middle finger. The bus howled.

Still, one hour after the game, the celebration had cooled, the mood suggesting neither a win nor a loss. John Ashaolu, now a graduate assistant, sitting in the middle of the bus, finished a cell phone call and told those within earshot that his brother had listened to the game's radio broadcast online in his dorm room.

Everhart said that the season had changed his approach "to the job, maybe to life. ... Coaches, you sometimes get a little sheltered in your recruiting life, your basketball life. From my perspective, this has made a lot of the stuff that was so important to me for a long time practically irrelevant."

The bus lumbered down Philadelphia's Broad Street toward the turnpike. The players had done their part. Before the pregame meal hours before, they'd folded their hands and asked for a safe ride home. They'd offered prayers for a good game. They'd given thanks for the opportunity.

Duquesne players, from left, Stephen Wood, Kieron Achara, Shawn James, Jimmy Sherwood and Jason Duty cheer the team during a game against Charlotte at A.J. Palumbo Center on Wednesday. Steve Mellon, Post-Gazette

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Correction/Clarification: (Published Feb. 28, 2007) Dr. Gary Goldberg is medical director of the Acquired Brain Injury Rehabilitation Program at Mercy Hospital. His title was incorrect in this story about the Duquesne University basketball team as originally published Feb. 25, 2007.