Correction: This story was updated to correct the date of Hurricane Katrina, which hit landfall in Louisiana on Aug. 29, 2005.
Hurricane Katrina slips further into history on Aug. 29 with the 20th anniversary of its carnage along the Gulf Coast.
But the massive storm with winds that reached 174 mph, killed nearly 1,900 people and piled up billions in damage in Louisiana and Mississippi, will forever be present in Danny Grieves’ mind.
The coach who led Metamora High School to an IHSA Class 3A state championship in 2023 is coming out of retirement to return to Mississippi and coach with his son, Daniel, in the 2025-26 season.
But 20 years ago, both the Grieves men — who have the same first name but are not Jr. and Sr. — were there, in Gulfport, Mississippi, when Katrina made landfall just 18 miles away in Bay St. Louis.
Danny, the elder Grieves, was head coach at Gulfport High School at the time. His son, Daniel, was in seventh grade, a future star who would later lead St. Stanislaus Catholic School in Bay St. Louis to a state basketball championship in 2011.
The younger Grieves is now heading into his fifth season as boys basketball head coach at St. Stanislaus, while his father, Danny, has decided to move back to Mississippi and serve as his assistant this season.
“Katrina is something that moves into you, becomes part of your history and never really leaves,” Danny Grieves said. “It’s just impossible to describe some of what happened. Helicopters with spotlights flying overhead. Martial law. Gunfire around the neighborhoods at night. Lining up with 5,000 desperate people in a parking lot hoping to get water and MRE from 18-wheelers that had guys on top holding M16 rifles.
“It was like being in one of those apocalypse movies.”
Except it was real.
“It was trauma-bonding,” said Daniel Grieves, 34. “We were kids who all grew up way too fast.”
‘It was mass destruction’
Danny Grieves’ family, which includes wife, Kim, daughters Nike and Tara, and sons Daniel, D.R. and Jackson, had been through hurricane threats before.
The elder Grieves was head coach at Bay St. Louis in 2000-2001, moved on to be assistant at Gulfport High School in 2001-02 and became head coach there from 2003-07. He headed to St. Stanislaus at Bay St. Louis to serve as an assistant from 2007-09.
Daniel said the family had dealt with hurricanes multiple times, including two false evacuations that turned out to be minimal, he said. “Because of that, we weren’t going to evacuate for Katrina,” he said. “I remember us going to the store and getting water, but we didn’t feel like there was a cause for concern.”
Danny then got a call from his assistant: Katrina was touching Florida, Yucatan and Texas at the same time. They needed to get out.
“Within an hour, we had everything we needed packed,” Daniel said. “We unplugged everything and put our stuff into trash bags.”
The family stayed two nights near Destin, Florida, and then came back to a harrowing sight after the storm. “Everything was bent over, the pine trees, they were hunched over, beaten down by the wind,” Daniel said. “It triggered a lot of emotion. It looked like a nuclear bomb had gone off.”
The elder Grieves said five men from Jackson, Mississippi, showed up in a pickup truck with chain saws and cut a path through the roads on their way to Biloxi.
“We were fighting for our lives. Literally,” Danny Grieves said. “We got out and went to the Florida Panhandle before it hit. Coming back it was mass destruction, just unbelievable. The bridges were totaled. It was just crazy.
“Think of that tornado in Washington, the destruction, but extending for 100 miles in every direction.”
A baseball bat, a hammer and a knife
In the aftermath, there were no leaves left on the trees, no shade, and the heat was relentless.
The family’s house had trees all over it, the windows were busted out, the furniture and carpet were ruined. The Grieves’ neighbors had eight trees fall on their house, and they went over to help.
The heat was so intense, Danny Grieves says they’d return to their house, strip down to their underwear and lay on the tile on the kitchen floor, trying to cool off.
Then came nightfall. Danny and his sons — only ages 11, 14 and 16 — guarded their ravaged home with makeshift weapons.
“It was martial law declared, and at night you could hear gunshots in the neighborhood,” Danny Grieves said. “… We had a bat, a hammer and a knife. You don’t take that to a gunfight. After that, I got my concealed carry permit.
“I don’t ever want to be that helpless again.”
Said Daniel Grieves: “It was crazy at night. We took turns with the bat and the hammer and the knife. I was in seventhth grade, but I was 6-foot-3 and in martial law terms I was big enough to fight.”
High school basketball and Robert Brown
Danny Grieves had a loaded Gulfport High School team that was projected as a contender for the state title heading into the 2005-06 season. But the Admirals lost three starting players in the aftermath of Katrina, their families forced to move to other states after their homes were destroyed.
One of them was star point guard Robert Brown, whose family left to Ohio.
“I was a junior when it hit and we lost everything,” Brown said. “Our house was torn apart. The back end was caved in. We were renting it. We left to Columbus, Ohio, a week later.”
Brown had been in Ohio a month at Reynoldsburg High School when the basketball head coach there told him, bluntly, he’d be on the junior varsity team.
Brown thought about the projected powerhouse he’d left behind in Gulfport, and then he got a call from Grieves, who was calling around to check on the well-being of all his players.
He told Grieves he wanted to come back.
“So he talked to my mom and dad and we drove down there and Coach Grieves went to court, fought for me, became my legal guardian so I could live with him,” Brown said. “Dealing with the hurricane, you learned to survive on canned food and noodles. But I feel like if I didn’t go back, I wouldn’t be the man I am today.
“Living with Coach Grieves molded me into that man.”
That man is 36 now, has kids of his own, and is a boys basketball coach at Bishop Hartley High School in Columbus. He carries the memories of Katrina with him.
“The city was dead afterward, nothing happened there,” Brown said. “We did basketball, just a breeze on the street and putting up shots is all we had. Spent time at Walmart. To fill up a tank of gas you had to travel to distant towns. Half our school was not accessible. It was bad.”
Exclusive book: How Katrina changed all of us
The Gulfport High School Admirals
Gulfport head coach Danny Grieves grew up in Peoria and was a 1976 graduate of Peoria High School.
He was boys basketball head coach at Notre Dame High School in Peoria, had stints as an assistant coach at Woodruff High School, played and graduated from Monmouth College in Illinois and was an assistant coach on a Bay St. Louis St. Stanislaus High School team. His son led that program to a 34-2 record and state title in 2011.
As boys basketball head coach over at Gulfport High School, the elder Grieves went 106-19 over four years.
Katrina pushed water into town 11 feet deep and more in some places.
“We had about 15 teachers had to cut their way out of through their roof,” Danny Grieves said. “In Gulfport, we kept axes and chainsaws in the attic because that was the last resort to save their lives, cut themselves out when the water rose.”
Then he saw the Gulfport school.
“I went to check on the school, and our gym floor was torn up, our school was torn up,” Danny Grieves said. “There were people in there, taking refuge, they broke into our locker room and were wearing our game uniforms because they had nothing else. We broke into our concessions and got out any kind of food and drink we could.”
The basketball floor had buckled 6 feet high in sections and was destroyed.
“We tore up the floor boards and put down plywood,” Danny Grieves said. “We played the season, half the court was plywood.”
There was no time to take it all in. So much work to do, on a scale that seemed insurmountable.
“Me and my three boys were drinking bottled water and eating canned sausages,” Danny Grieves said. “I swear I’ll never eat another one. But it was the churches who came down in droves and stayed for a year and really got the whole area back on its feet.
“So much destruction, you just went around helping people. We saw so much good done after the devastation.”
And Gulfport High School went 29-2 that season, ranked No. 1 heading into the playoffs but falling short of a state title.
One of those games, an annual showdown against rival Biloxi, marked another moment among the Katrina chaos.
Army Spc. Tara Grieves was a water purification specialist, Company A, 64th Brigade Support Battalion, 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team, 4th infantry Division, Task Force Lightning around the time of Katrina.
She is Danny Grieves’ daughter, and was deployed to Iraq with the Striker Brigade from Fort Carson, Colorado, in late 2005. She survived an IED that detonated just as the truck she was driving had passed through.
“I get a call from my daughter and hear a bunch of bombs going off,” said Grieves, voice wavering with emotion as he recalled the moment. “I was coaching, and she called me in the middle of the Gulfport-Biloxi showdown game.”
So what did he do?
“I called a timeout, and I took her call,” he said. “I talked to her for that one minute. Said ‘Thank God you’re alive.’ I didn’t like night. We had gunshots at night in the neighborhood after Katrina. And night is when the military comes to your house in the dark, waits until they see a light go on, then knocks on your door to tell you your loved one is a casualty of war.”
It was a timeout well-spent. No one complained.
Coaching and healing in Mississippi
All of Danny Grieves’ kids played basketball. Tara was an all-state eighth-grader who once made eight straight 3-pointers in a game. D.R. was an all-state player in Mississippi, as was the 6-foot-7 Daniel Grieves, who went on to a collegiate career and now has followed his father into coaching.
“My kids all grew up here, we were here 14 years,” Danny Grieves said. “Daniel has always wanted to coach with me. He’s got a really, really good team coming in. He asked me to help coach the kids and ‘Coach me.’ “
Daniel Grieves, excited about having his father alongside, joked: “He said he can’t sit still in retirement. We won 20 games last season for the first time since I was a senior. Now he’s coming down here.
“I told him, ‘Nice timing, old man.’ “
‘Humanity was tested’
Daniel Grieves thinks about Katrina and the enormity of the sea port at Gulfport, the sight and smell from piles of fruit and seafood rotting on the streets in the aftermath of the hurricane in 2005.
There are remnants of destroyed piers that will never be rebuilt. There is a Hurricane Katrina museum.
“We all joke that we were too young to do anything about it, but old enough to understand,” Daniel Grieves said. “We would have teachers break down in class. Our emotional intelligence grew from that.
“Most of the healing has been done. We had buildings condemned from Katrina that just got torn down three years ago. That was a big piece to moving on.”
Daniel drives around Bay St. Louis and Gulfport, checks on the old Grieves family home he once guarded with a baseball bat, and a school gym where basketball was played on a plywood floor.
“Chicago Simeon is good, but their full-court pressure had nothing on Katrina,” said Daniel Grieves, noting that nothing remained five blocks deep in Bay St. Louis after the hurricane struck. “Everyone has a Katrina story. But everyone’s story is one-upped by the person next to them.
“There is no economic or social status when you’re standing in line waiting for an MRE. There were doctors, janitors, laborers, lawyers, all standing together in that disaster, and whether you were rich or poor, you lost everything.
“Humanity was tested, and the broken hearts were the same in all of us.”
Dave Eminian is the Journal Star sports columnist, and covers Bradley men’s basketball, the Rivermen and Chiefs. He writes the Cleve In The Eve sports column for pjstar.com. He can be reached at 686-3206 or deminian@pjstar.com. Follow him on X.com @icetimecleve.
This article originally appeared on Journal Star: Tragedy and humanity: Peoria native basketball coach recalls Hurricane Katrina’s indelible mark
Reporting by Dave Eminian, Peoria Journal Star / Journal Star
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