Atlanta crash hits close to home

For junior Joe Antinone, a pitcher for the Youngstown State University baseball team, the bus crash in Atlanta early Friday morning involving another local team provided a shocking wake up call for him and his teammates.Antinone said he first learned of the crash - in which four players from the Bluffton University baseball team were killed - while in Missouri during the team's weekend series against the University of Missouri Tigers. The tragic impact also hit close to home as Bluffton sits just 50 miles south of Toledo.

The bus was traveling on Interstate 75, heading for the team's annual spring training destination in Florida. When the bus came to an overpass, the driver merged onto an exit ramp that was mistaken for a lane. Unable to correct the mistake in time, the driver rammed the bus into a concrete barrier at full speed and nose-dived onto the interstate below, crushing two other vehicles.

"It was a sudden shock simply because I stopped and thought that it very easily could have been us or one of my good friends in a crash like this," Antinone said.

For Antinone and the rest of the Penguins squad, the news came after a 12 hour bus ride from Youngstown to Missouri. The team also had to endure the same elongated ride home that night.

"With long hours on the bus and baseball being a [fulltime] commitment, we all took a step back and looked at life from a different perspective, putting ourselves in their shoes," Antinone said.

YSU junior Rick Banna is an avid baseball fan and coach of the junior varsity baseball team of Mooney High School. Banna believes the fatal crash will be a difficult memory to erase for everyone.

"I'm not sure anyone on that team will be able to recover from it," Banna said. "It really gets into the players' heads when they have to think about something normally taken for granted."

Banna said his team first learned of the incident during a practice in which they themselves were considering a spring training bus trip to Florida.

"This event definitely brought our team closer together," Antinone said of the Penguins. "Everyone has each other's backs and we would act the same way the Bluffton players did, putting teammates before yourself."

With both emotional and physical scars to overcome, Banna said canceling the rest of the season for Bluffton would be ideal, but there could be a chance the team's remaining schedule could be played out.

"That's going to be the story of the year if they keep playing," Banna said