“No rain, no flowers.”
In the short time that the Omaha basketball team knew Deng Mayar, they became familiar with his phrase.
It was his way of saying to fight through the hard times because it will lead to better times.
It’s a fitting title for the Mavericks’ upcoming season.
Coach Chris Crutchfield’s group opened practice this week with a bright forecast. They return a nucleus from last year’s NCAA tournament team, season ticket sales are up.
But there is a vacant space in the locker room and empty place in their hearts.
The sun was interrupted by rain.
It came in mid-August, when the team learned that Mayar died in a drowning accident.
The graduate-transfer from North Dakota arrived in Omaha in late spring and quickly fit in with his new teammates. Through late July practices, the 22-year-old was being penciled in at starting power forward.
Then Crutchfield’s phone rang at 6:30 a.m. Sunday, Aug. 17, and everything changed.
It was assistant Keenan Holdman with the kind of news no coach ever expects. Suddenly, Crutchfield was not just a coach trying to get his team to refocus after an historic season. He was a coach trying to guide them through an unthinkable tragedy.
“It was so emotional,” Crutchfield said. “We had a week where we were devastated. Once they got back (to campus) and we had meetings and counselors, we were getting back to a normal routine.
“Then you go back out there and pull the Band-Aid off again.”
That was the first weekend in September, when coaches and players traveled to Salt Lake City for Mayar’s funeral.
“It was an open casket,” Crutchfield said. “To see him lying there like that, knowing he has his whole life in front of him. … It was hard.”
UNO had one counseling session where the players sat in a circle and talked about their teammate and expresses their emotions. Crutchfield had to be the constant shoulder for each player to lean on.
In three decades of coaching, Crutchfield had never been through this. He had to come up with a message.
“The message was, ‘Guys, we’ve got to move forward. We’re always going to remember Deng. We’re going to honor him with a patch on our jersey. We’re going to honor him on Senior Night. We’re never going to forget the impact he had on the program the short time he was here,'” Crutchfield said.
“But life is going to move on. The season is going to happen. You can still mourn and grieve but life is going to go on.”
The coach said the team turned an emotional corner last week, when the staff put them through a preseason “boot camp.”
“It got hard for a while,” Crutchfield said. “And Ja’Sean (Glover) made the comment … ‘Guys, we need to do it for the guy who’s not here.’
“That resonated with everybody. It changed the whole deal. You could hear them say ‘that’s right.’ It never came up in practice, so that was good that Ja’Sean said that. It was a good point.
“Things were hard and Deng would have wanted us to fight through it.
“Let’s do it for Deng.”
There’s no page for this in a coaching manual. Crutchfield leaned on mentors Lon Kruger and Dana Altman, but neither had been through this, either.
Crutchfield called someone who had: Tulane coach Ron Hunter. Golden Hurricane center Gregg Glenn drowned this summer.
The message for both coaches is to be there for the players. Work and play through it.
“I think it has made us stronger and closer,” Crutchfield said. “We have a closer group now than we would have ever had. The team is more connected because they all shared something about themselves. We all came together.”
And one day later this season, they will all wear T-shirts to a game bearing the phrase that will be a motto for the season.
“No rain, no flowers,” Crutchfield said. “The kind of thing that got him through when he was going through a hard time. You go through the rain and flowers are going to grow back up.
“I think so. I really believe that.”
tom.shatel@owh.com, 402-444-1025, twitter.com/tomshatelOWH
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Tom Shatel
Sports columnist
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