‘Go find them’: How Mickey Joseph led a team of teenagers through Hurricane Katrina
Joseph #Joseph
Darwin had reached rock bottom. It couldn’t get any worse than this.
Two hundred fifty miles from the only home he ever knew, stuck in a strange place without his mother, the seventh-grader took off down a tree-lined dirt road. He ran all the way to the path’s end. Geographically and psychologically, Darwin was lost.
There, far away from his family’s home in New Orleans, in an unknown town called Niceville, Florida, his pre-teen voice pierced the still, starry night.
“Mickey!” he screamed. “Come get me!”
Two tears rolled down Mickey Joseph’s cheek as he recalled this moment from 2005, when he was athletic director and offensive coordinator at Desire Street Academy, a small Christian school in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward.
As Joseph sat in his office in Memorial Stadium, 17 years after Hurricane Katrina devastated his hometown, he took a breath to collect himself. The memory still elicited a deeply emotional response.
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“As much as we wanted to take them back home,” Joseph said, “we couldn’t take them back.”
In October 2005, there was no home to return to in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina had destroyed nearly everything.
Their school, in shambles. Their homes, submerged underwater or ripped from their foundations and reduced to splinters. Their families, those fortunate enough to survive, were scattered across the United States.
“You do get emotional about it,” Joseph told the Journal Star. “Put yourself in their shoes. They don’t know where they are. They don’t know what’s going to happen. ‘Coach, how can this happen?’ ‘Coach, why God did this to us? Why God took everything from us?’ And you can’t answer that.”
Joseph, who was elevated to interim head coach at Nebraska earlier this month after Scott Frost’s ouster, has crisscrossed the South and Midwest over 20 years in coaching. Still, he feels the heart-wrenching and painful connection to those soul-crushing months that followed Hurricane Katrina’s landfall.
Joseph transformed from athletic director, teacher and coach to confidant, counselor and surrogate father to those boys. Those roles remain at the foundation of how he coaches, how he leads and who he is.
“He was one of the people that really believed in me,” said Brandon Haskin, one of Joseph’s students and players at Desire Street Academy. “Nobody, man, believed in me like that, took a chance on me, took me under his wing. He really made me the player I am today.”
‘OVER-ACCOMPLISHED’
Then-D.S.A. vice principal Oscar Brown didn’t know Joseph personally, but he was plenty familiar. As a kid, Brown watched Joseph and Archbishop Shaw torch opposing defenses with precision and ease in the 1980s.
“When we interviewed him, I was just thrilled to be able to meet him and to hear his heart,” Brown said. “Even while talking with him, I really just felt like he was over-accomplished for a high school job. But he really wanted it.”
Joseph bounced around the college coaching ranks before making the pilgrimage back to his hometown. He’d been with Alabama State (2000), Nicholls State (2001-03) and Central Oklahoma (2004-05) before Desire Street Academy came into the picture.
D.S.A, with a new $3 million complex, opened its doors as a school for seventh- and eighth-year boys in 2002. As the boys aged, the school expanded in kind. In 2005, enrollment hovered around 200 and the school launched its football program.
Joseph didn’t look at the opportunity at Desire as just a coaching job, but as a chance to invest in a community that needed it.
The majority of D.S.A.’s students in 2005 hailed from either the Upper or Lower Ninth Ward and the neighborhoods within. Of New Orleans’ 17 wards, the Nine is among the most crime-ridden and impoverished.
Nebraska interim head coach Mickey Joseph (center) walks onto the field with his team before the Oklahoma game on Sept. 17 at Memorial Stadium.
KENNETH FERRIERA, Journal Star
“The Desire neighborhood definitely isn’t the best neighborhood in the country,” Brown said. “It definitely has its crime, violence, drug use and all of that stuff.”
Added Joseph: “‘I’m from the Nine, I don’t mind dying.’ That was their saying.”
Joseph saw past the tough exterior. He wanted to transform D.S.A. into the next New Orleans football powerhouse, and he wanted to do it with neighborhood kids.
“I wanted to give them something positive,” Joseph said. “And once school started, it was something positive. And then Katrina hit.”
‘BOOM’
The passage of time in New Orleans is measured in two periods — Before Katrina and After Katrina.
The Friday before Katrina, the Lions opened with a jamboree game and notched their first unofficial win. That next week, D.S.A. faced Kentwood — a team on a four-year streak of making the Class 1A semifinals.
“They’re the No. 1 team in the state,” Joseph said. “So we’re practicing that Saturday, getting ready, running and doing everything.”
Chatter erupted at practice on that Saturday before Katrina about the storm looming offshore, but it wasn’t serious conversation.
Hurricanes are a way of life in the Gulf South, especially in Louisiana. Still, after decades of near-misses and false alarms since Hurricane Camille in 1969, thousands of New Orleanians started to see evacuation as too much of a hassle. Why would this be any different?
“For all of my life, there’s always been a storm in the Gulf,” Brown said. “We never ran from hurricanes.”
At that point, the projected cone of uncertainty for Katrina had shifted from the Florida Panhandle to Louisiana and Mississippi. Even then, many New Orleanians felt the storm’s path would continue to move westward and life would resume as normal by the following Tuesday.
“I thought it was gonna turn, Katrina,” Joseph said. “It didn’t turn. Boom.”
Twenty hours before Hurricane Katrina made landfall near Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, as a Category 3 storm, the New Orleans office of the National Weather Service released one of the most apocalyptic forecasts in the history of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
“Hurricane Katrina … a most powerful hurricane with unprecedented strength.… Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks … perhaps longer … at least one half of well-constructed homes will have roof and wall failure. All gabled roofs will fail.… All wood-framed low-rising apartment buildings will be destroyed…Power outages will last for weeks.… Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.… Once tropical storm and hurricane force winds onset … do not venture outside!”
As the bulletin’s writer began drafting the sobering memo, New Orleans’ mayor issued the city’s first-ever mandatory evacuation.
“That’s when you’re like, ‘Wait, hold up,’ ” Brown said. “ ‘There’s something different about this storm because that’s something I had never heard before.’ And immediately we started getting phone calls from kids.”
The majority of New Orleanians who could afford to evacuate did, but thousands of people had no choice but to stay, including many D.S.A. students and their families — riding out the storm and its aftermath in the “refuge of last resort” at the Louisiana Superdome, or their homes, or at other “shelters of last resort.”
Brown arranged for an impromptu trip to Twin Lakes, a church camp near Jackson, Mississippi. He estimates 60 students and their families plus a handful of staff members made the drive.
Joseph, who lived with his parents at the time, first went to his brother Sammy’s place in Baton Rouge, 80 miles northwest of New Orleans. Then on the morning of Monday, Aug. 29, he drove to his house in Oklahoma, which he’d kept from his time coaching at Central Oklahoma.
“You could tell when the wind was blowing that morning, like, ‘Oh, shit; this is going down,’ ” Joseph said. “When I got to Oklahoma, that’s when it hit.”
Between Katrina’s storm surge and rain deluge paired with three catastrophic levee breaches, water in parts of New Orleans reached 12 to 15 feet high, drowning entire neighborhoods and leaving only some rooftops and bridges above the waves.
‘GO FIND THEM’
A few days after Katrina, Danny Wuerffel called.
Wuerffel, long removed from winning the Heisman Trophy at Florida and his New Orleans Saints career, led D.S.A. in its fundraising and development. In that conversation, Wuerffel had one message for Joseph.
“We gotta go get those boys.”
This wasn’t about football anymore. Messages poured in from their students. They were traumatized, frightened, confused, homesick, hungry.
“If we had not heard the voices of our kids, we would have never even dreamed about doing something like that,” Brown said. “It was the stories of all the things they were experiencing. It was a need for those kids to be back together.”
Joseph added: “That’s the reason Danny said, ‘Go find them.’ We had to do something.”
In this Aug. 30, 2005, file photo, floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina cover the lower Ninth Ward, foreground, and other parts of New Orleans a day after the storm passed through the city.
DAVID J. PHILLIP, Associated Press file photo
The scores of D.S.A. students were scattered all over the country — Kansas City, Omaha, Utah, Mississippi, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Atlanta, northern Louisiana — but most found refuge in Texas.
The coaching staff reconvened in Dallas to set out on rescue missions with a fleet of borrowed church vans.
“It was a challenging situation, but we also felt like, ‘We’re getting our boys back,’ ” said then-D.S.A coach Byron Addison. “It felt like we were a bunch of coaches game-planning for a game.”
Joseph and Addison lost count of how many shelters they visited, but the routine was the same. The boys reached out to their coaches to share their location. When the coaches showed up, they raised their “D.S.A.” sign and called the boys over.
At each shelter, Joseph’s heart broke.
“You see all these people just coming up to you,” Joseph said, recalling the pleas of parents with kids younger than seventh grade begging the coaches to take their young children to a safer place. “I could have filled a whole school from kindergarten through 12th-graders.
“It was so sad because they had the same clothes on that they had on for five or six days. And when I got my kids, they were reeking. But they were happy to see me. They didn’t know what was happening.”
Sophomore Lavar Edwards evacuated with his family to Austin, Texas. Packed in a house with more than 10 people, Edwards perked up at the prospect of reuniting with his classmates and teammates.
He remembers being greeted by one of his coaches and several of his teammates, who were already aboard the van.
“We were all just glad to be around each other,” Edwards said. “We were all just happy to be back together again.”
The Texas caravan found nearly 50 boys from the Ninth Ward. They weren’t all D.S.A. students, either — some went to George Washington Carver, a public high school down the street from D.S.A.
Other D.S.A. students who found shelter in far-flung areas of the country were either flown back privately or through commercial airlines. The cost of those flights were fronted by donors.
“A lot of the kids from Desire Street really had no decent options after they were dispersed out of New Orleans,” Wuerffel said. “Mickey’s passion and willingness to do whatever it took during a very difficult time inspired many of us to keep going.”
Brown added: “As a mother or as a father, you just experienced this and the only thing you want to do is keep your babies close to you. To have the trust of those families, to have their kids hours away, that was amazing.”
‘TRYING TO KEEP THEM ALIVE’
They couldn’t go home, and they couldn’t stay there, so Wuerffel sprung into action.
The Florida alumnus used his connections with his alma mater to secure a place for Desire Street to call its interim home: Camp Timpoochee, a youth camp owned by UF that’s nestled between a grove of oak trees and the Choctawhatchee Bay near Niceville, Florida.
Roughly 100 of D.S.A.’s students relocated to the impromptu satellite campus from October to May. Classes began Oct. 3. Some students left midway through, others came aboard later.
Floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina fill the streets near downtown New Orleans on Aug. 30, 2005.
DAVID J. PHILLIP, Associated Press file photo
Initially getting everything up and running in Niceville took additional planning.
Camp Timpoochee functions as a 4-H camp, not a boarding school, so the D.S.A. staff repurposed the auditorium into six different classrooms.
“It was a little odd, but it ended up working out very, very well,” Brown said.
The lodging portion took care of itself. Camp Timpoochee featured nine cabins with five bunks apiece, so 90 students could be accommodated there. Up to 32 people could also sleep in cottages.
Getting the D.S.A. crew to Florida contained some logistical quirks, too.
Plan A: Charter a flight from Dallas. That fell through. Plan B: Put them on buses.
Those in Dallas boarded a Greyhound bound for Jackson. Once they arrived in Mississippi, other students, staffers and two yellow D.S.A. school buses greeted them. They then drove the six hours to Niceville.
Before Katrina, every staff member had their role. After Katrina, the coaches had another task thrown in: dorm dads.
Joseph became a de facto parent to 100 boys overnight, and the days were the easy part. The nights, especially for the 12- or 13-year-old seventh graders, were fraught with anxiety and nightmares.
“They’ve never been away from home and in the middle of the night, they’re screaming for their mom,” Joseph said, his voice breaking, “their grandmothers. It was so sad.”
The older boys, like Edwards and Haskin, had an easier time adjusting to Camp Timpoochee than the middle schoolers.
They still had rough patches, the bouts of homesickness, missing their families, coming to terms with losing nearly everything they had, Edwards said, but Joseph’s advice and positive energy helped lift everyone’s spirits.
“We had just went through something tragic,” Haskin said. “They tried to keep our mind off of everything we were going through, knowing that our family was still in different places. It made everything better.”
Just like D.S.A.’s students, the staff had to come to terms with the same things. But they had to process their trauma alongside those of their students.
Joseph relied on periodic calls with his younger brother Vance, then an assistant coach for the San Francisco 49ers.
“He was fathering a bunch of kids and trying to keep them alive, basically,” Vance told the Journal Star. “That was a big job. That really shaped Mickey. Those kids, for Mickey, were the most important thing.”
‘I REMEMBER BEING IN SHOCK’
The D.S.A. buses peeled off the highway bound for a season-opening game against Crescent City Christian on Oct. 10. They had a pit stop to make.
Before they could return to the field, before they could try to move past the crippling months away from home, they needed to see the Ninth Ward and their school that called it home.
The school still looked like it had endured hell. Mud still caked the floor of the gym. Mold spores decorated the walls like abstract art. Glass everywhere, shattered from broken windows.
A line ran down each and every wall, far above their heads, marking how high the water had risen.
“Seeing the water line on the gym wall, I remember being in shock,” Edwards said. “There were certain things you could see on the news, but once you actually get in there and see how bad the damage was? It was just shocking.”
Joseph, with 17 years of hindsight, said that trip to the Ninth Ward, “was too emotional” for the boys. They didn’t drive through that area for the rest of the season.
Hours later, the Lions lost their opener, 50-14. Then came the five-hour bus ride back to Niceville.
“That was one of the hardest things,” Edwards said. “I commend all of our coaches, especially coach Mickey, because that’s tough to get a group of guys ready to play football and have to ride on a bus for however long it took to get from Florida to New Orleans and back every week.”
Joseph considered the games to be therapeutic help for those on the team at the time. He feels differently about that 1-3 season in hindsight.
“If I had to do it again, I would have never played those games,” Joseph said. “I would have kept them right there in Florida, took them to the beach, let them have fun.”
‘THE SKY WAS THE LIMIT’
Several hypotheticals still run through Joseph’s mind.
D.S.A. never moved back to New Orleans. After Camp Timpoochee, D.S.A. set up in Baton Rouge for four years before shuttering in 2009.
But what if it returned to the Ninth Ward?
“I’d probably still be at Desire Street,” Joseph said. “It’d be 18 years, something like that, and I’d still be there. I had no desire to move. I started at Desire Street because I thought I could be able to build a championship football team in the Ninth Ward.”
Joseph isn’t the only one who thought it would work.
That’s why D.S.A. hired him in the first place.
A man pushes his bicycle through flood waters near the Superdome in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina left much of the city under water on Aug. 31, 2005.
ERIC GAY, Associated Press file photo
“The sky was the limit,” Edwards said. “We were building something really, really special. I just wish it could have went the way it was planned to go. We definitely would have been the best program in the city. I believe we would have got there – if it wasn’t for Katrina.”
Before Joseph left ahead of the 2008 season, the football program flourished.
In 2006, the Lions advanced to the Class 1A regionals and finished their first full football season with a 7-5 record. In 2007, they made it all the way to the semifinals, losing to the eventual state champs.
D.S.A., for its short-lived stint, produced several success stories.
Both Edwards and DeAngelo Peterson signed with LSU and had stints in the NFL. Tim Jackson played at Louisiana-Lafayette. Nick Chartain initially went to Southern Miss before latching on at Memphis and Nicholls State. Haskin went to Tennessee State and now plays in the USFL for former NU coach Mike Riley.
It’s not just the football players, though. It’s all the other kids who grew up, too — like Darwin — and made something of themselves in spite of everything. For Joseph, there’s a great sense of pride that comes along with that.
“If you can help one kid in that situation, but we helped multiple kids,” Joseph said. “It’s a good thing they made it. They’re daddies and husbands and you feel like you had a part in it. You easily could have sold them to the wolves, but you didn’t. You raised them and they counted on you.”
Joseph’s résumé speaks for itself.
He’s coached a litany of past and present NFL stars. He was on the 2019 LSU staff that won a national title. For some, that’s the pinnacle.
But for Joseph, nothing comes remotely close to 2005.
“No matter what I do with my coaching career — even being the interim head coach at the University of Nebraska — Desire Street was my best coaching job,” Joseph said matter-of-factly.
“Because I saved my kids’ lives.”
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