Canzano: A team. A season. A tragedy.
Umpqua Community College softball team was doing everything right.
Investigators from the Oregon State Police sifted through the wreckage strewn along Highway 42 near milepost 23 in the wee hours of Saturday morning.
A Chevrolet Express bus carrying the Umpqua Community College softball team was heading eastbound on the two-lane road in Coos County late on Friday night when a westbound Chevrolet Silverado crossed the centerline and struck the bus head-on.
Ten passengers were on the bus.
Two are dead.
The softball program at Umpqua was playing its first-ever season. Try-outs were held in September. Players from towns such as Roseburg, Glide, and Winston made the school’s first roster. There was a player from Idaho. Another went to high school in Washington.
The team held a hit-a-thon fundraiser to raise money for uniforms and travel expenses before the season. But before the Riverhawks played a game, coach Jami Strinz told her players to get out and do something for their community. Umpqua players volunteered to work the local Veterans’ Day Parade and read books to local children as part of the town’s Celebration of Literacy.
Strinz, 46, was killed in Friday’s accident.
So was the team’s first baseman, Kiley Jones, 19.
Jones was a two-sport star who was an all-conference goalkeeper on the Umpqua soccer team. One of her high school friends posted a tribute online and wrote: “Her kindness knew no bounds.”
Strinz, who was driving the van, was a long-time softball coach with a successful playing career that took her overseas. Her close friends will tell you she had a sharp sense of humor, a giant heart, and a hard-scrabble mentality built to overcome adversity.
The school doesn’t have a dedicated softball facility yet. This is the inaugural season, after all. Strinz and her team borrowed a half dozen venues as their “home” field. They’ve practiced on baseball fields, used nearby high school and small college softball diamonds, set up bases in the college’s basketball gymnasium, and conducted drills in Umpqua classrooms.
Players were constantly pivoting, packing up, and moving equipment. It became a teambuilding exercise. Strinz posted to social media a week ago, celebrating the mid-point of the first softball season.
The coach wrote:
We hit our first home run, stole our first base, pitched our first strikeout, and won our first games ever in program history.
I am so incredibly proud of my players for showing up every single day refusing to give up! Thank you for pushing yourselves to the breaking point physically, mentally, and emotionally to help build the foundation of this program.
During one of the first road trips of the season, there weren’t restaurants open on the highway route. Players were hungry. So Strinz pulled off at a gas station, smiled, and announced: “This is where we’re holding the team dinner.”
I never got to meet her.
I love and appreciate the work she was doing.
Strinz is survived by her partner in life, Steve Williams, an assistant coach at Umpqua. They have a daughter together. The tragedy hits like a bag of bricks, and it’s not lost on me that I’m writing this column on Easter morning.
“Impaired driving is considered a primary cause of the crash,” read the police report.
Johnathan James Dowdy, 32, of Coos Bay went to the hospital with injuries. He was the driver behind the wheel of the SUV that crossed the center divider and struck the Umpqua team van. He was previously cited for driving under the influence of intoxicants on Jan. 19 of this year, court records show. He is due in court next month on that charge. Wrap your head around that.
The other eight passengers in the van “suffered moderate to serious injuries and were provided emergency medical services” per investigators. Their lives are forever changed, too.
We’re supposed to be thankful today. Easter Sunday is a day of new beginnings, renewal, reflection, and joy. All of those things were evident in the lives of the two women who were killed on Friday night in an accident that never should have happened.
Jones was a ray of sunshine.
Strinz was a rock-star coach, who recently snapped a picture of a sign that read “Do Epic Shit” and posted it to her social media accounts.
Those two were busy living deep and rich. They were playing softball, and sucking the marrow out of life, as Henry David Thoreau instructed us. Their lives never should have been cut short on the way home from a softball game.
I keep asking, what can we learn from this? Maybe it’s that we get mired in things that don’t matter? That we get distracted and bogged down by unimportant details? That the joys of life are all around us if we’d only open our eyes?
That life is precious?
That it’s fleeting?
That driving while impaired isn’t just stupid and selfish — that it’s like swinging a wrecking ball across the highway?
The softball team from Umpqua Community College was doing everything right in its first season. It was doing all the little things we ask college kids to do — work hard, keep showing up, smile through adversity, and keep faith. Amid that, it provided a cruel but valuable reminder on that dark road late on Friday night.
It’s how we live, not how we die, that matters.
I have no words. Only tears
Well done on a story none of wish to read or write
Powerful reminder of what matters. And a timely one on this Easter day. Thank you, John.