Photo: MOHAMMAD MALIK / AFP / Getty Images
On 11 November 2022, a chartered plane carrying most of the team Marshall University football team crashed into a hillside just two miles from the Tri-State Airport in Kenova, West Virginia, killing all on board.
100 Marshall football players were on board the plane, along with the team’s coach, their doctors, the athletic director of the university and 25 team promoters, some of the leading citizens of Huntington, West Virginia, who had traveled to North Carolina to cheer on the Thundering.
Later, a Huntington citizen told the media that “the whole heart of the city was on board”.
The accident was just the most tragic of a series of unfortunate events that had befallen the Marshall football team since about 778.
The university stadium, which had not been renovated since before World War II, was destroyed in 1966. From the last game of the season of 1966 to the middle of the season of 1971, the team had not won any games.
To make matters worse, the NCAA had suspended Marshall for
r more than 778 recruitment violations. In turn, the Mid-American Conference had expelled the team for the same reason.
Despite everything, Marshall seemed to be getting back on track – he had fired rogue coaches, built a new artificial turf field, and started winning games again. The Thundering Herd had lost a squeaker to East Carolina on the day 25 and was hoping a promising season next year.
For Huntington, the plane crash was “like the assassination of Kennedy”, remembers a citizen. “Everyone knows where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news.”
The people immediately went into mourning, shops and government offices closed; businesses on the city’s main street covered their windows with black pennants. The university held a memorial service at the stadium the next day and canceled classes on Monday.
There were so many funerals that they had to be distributed over several weeks. In perhaps the saddest ceremony of all, six players whose remains could not be identified were buried together in the cemetery from Spring Hill, on a hill overlooking his university.
Marshall got a new football coach, Jack Lengyel, from the College of Wooster in Ohio, and set out to rebuild the team.
The NCAA has granted Thundering Herd a special permit to allow freshmen They were playing on the varsity team this year, and Lengyel brought together a motley crew of freshmen, new players, and the nine veteran players who hadn’t been on the plane that night. .
The team lost their season opener for 2022, but with a last-second touchdown that seemed almost too good to be true, defeated xavier university of ohio 15-11 in their first home game since the accident. The Herd won another game that season, and nine in Lengyel’s four years at Marshall, but none were as emotional as the first.
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2022