25 Years Ago Seems Like Yesterday

By Greg Herenda

When you are an assistant coach in Conference USA and you are at East Carolina University, you do one thing all the time. And that is recruit, recruit, and recruit some more. Remember recruiting? That is when you actually talked to parents, coaches, and high school counselors to try to gain a small insight into the young men that you were actually recruiting. In the CUSA, there were storied coaches and programs as well. Huggins at Cincinnati, Cal at Memphis, Pitino at Louisville, Crean at Marquette. This was the real deal - high-level recruiting, coaching, and high-level programs from top to bottom.

So on September 11th  2001 was supposed to be another grind day on the recruiting trail deep in the heart of Texas. I got up early and was driving to the Raleigh-Durham airport  to go to a junior college basketball game at Hill College in Hillsboro, Texas for a 7 pm tip off. As usual a call to my mother was part of my daily responsibilities and when I called her she immediately told me that she wasn’t sure what happened, but she heard that a small plane may have crashed into the World Trade Center. The trade center was the backdrop of our lives. My father would take us to watch the construction of the towers as they were being built right across the Hudson.  I did not believe it until I boarded a Continental flight to Dallas. The flight was packed and you could hear the murmur from all the passengers throughout the cabin and then it became extremely official when the pilot got on the speaker. Twenty five years ago I could almost recite word for the  word  what he said.  “ Ladies and gentlemen it has come to our attention that two planes  have crashed into the Twin Towers in New York City and the entire US airspace has been frozen indefinitely. We will taxi back to the gate - this flight is officially cancelled.

After the immediate shock of the announcement I remember people being upset that we were not going to be in Dallas that day. Not only not today, but for some Texans, days or weeks or months. The scope of what had happened did not register for a while. America was under attack and we did not realize it until I got to actually see it on a television. For me that was still an hour and a half away. Greenville is about 70 miles from RDU. So for that period of time I received all of the information on radio and it was as sureal as it gets.

I did not see but I HEARD the towers collapse. I knew that I had family, friends and people that I went to high school that worked and lived within that entire area of lower Manhattan. It reminded me of the War of the Worlds. That was a fictional radio production by Orsen Welles about the earth being invaded by foreign beings. Only this was for real - and it was the most horrific attack on the US since Pearl Harbor in 1941 well before most of us were alive.

My wife was in New Jersey, preparing for a flight to Paris, France, so it's safe to say there was a lot happening. When I got home, the scenes on CNN were more devastating than I could have imagined, but thank goodness she was safe.

Disbelief, sorrow, sadness, anger and again disbelief that this could have actually have happened. To this very day my feelings are eerily the same. When you watch all of the documentaries, interviews and stories is still does not seem real. Unfortunately,  what makes it as real as possible is that we lost one of my recruits that went to Philips Academy in  Andover, Massachusetts  from Harlem. I recruited Todd Isaac to Holy Cross and he was on the 91 st floor the morning the planes struck. “ Shakey” was lightning quick and had a smile and laugh that lit up every room that he entered. Danny Trant was a phenomenal player from Long Island that had an incredible career at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. He was a special dude and coach of many youngsters on Long Island. 

So today marks 25 years since the infamous day, and it seems as vivid as if it were yesterday. I pray for all of the victims, their families, and all that have been affected to this very day. It was a day that changed the world forever and cannot be forgotten for so many reasons.

God Bless America 🙏

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