Words couldn’t express.
Terry Don Phillips’ voice quivers as he thinks back to the night and then words fail him.
“Even right now it’s hard, even though it’s been 10 years,” Phillips said in a phone interview.
Phillips, who was Oklahoma State’s athletic director at the time of the Jan. 27 plane crash in 2001, said days went by in a blur after the accident.
“It was one of those things where you don’t have a lot of time to do a lot of things other than do your very best,” Phillips said. “You are dealing with wonderful people and wonderful families, it was just indescribable how terrible it was.”
Phillips, who is now the athletic director at Clemson University, said the days after the wreck went by in a haze, but the athletic department staff still had jobs to do and games to put on. But most
importantly, they had
hurting families to tend to.
“Oklahoma State is a special place with special people, and the way everybody joined hands and worked together no matter what the task was is something I will always remember,” he said. “I can’t say enough about the staff at Oklahoma State or enough about the community and the state. Everyone was absolutely tremendous for their support for the families and for their support of those that were having to work with the situation.”
Now that 10 years have passed, members of the athletic department have left to take other jobs or retired but a few still remain.
Ryan Cameron finished his undergraduate degree in 2001 and began working at the OSU athletic office as a graduate assistant. He said, “was like a dream come true.”
“I used live and die by wins and losses,” Cameron said. “I would be so upset after we would lose and so excited when we would win.”
Cameron, who is now the sports information director for women’s basketball and OSU golf, developed a relationship with Will Hancock, who was the sports information director for men’s basketball.
“Will was like my role model,” Cameron said. “He was the best in the business, and I wanted to learn as much from him as possible.”
But when Cameron was at his house watching a movie on Jan. 27, he got a call from a friend that shook him up.
“He said, ‘I don’t know what has happened, but it’s not good. We need you to get to the office,'” Cameron said. “When they said the plane went down and everyone is gone, I just remember thinking ‘This didn’t happen.’ We answered the phone until nearly 2:30 in the morning, and I just remember being kind of numb when I got the word and got the names, and I was just in shock.”
Noteware, who was the women’s basketball sports information director at the time, said his immediate reaction was to get people to relatives’ houses nearby and to make sure they were being comforted.
He went to Molly Noyes’ house, brother of Pat Noyes.
“It wasn’t until I got home the next morning and turned on the TV and saw those guys’ 10 faces,” Noteware said.
“That’s when it hit me because when you saw it on TV then you knew it was done.”
Noteware said the next couple of weeks were the hardest he had ever gone through in his life; coming to work and seeing the empty offices or desks of the people he had lost was almost more than he could bear.
“Because I just lost four of my best friends, I just didn’t want to go to work,” Noteware said. “For three or four days, I just kept thinking they were eventually just going to come out of the air, and land at Stillwater airport. And go ‘We were never gone.’
The group in charge of releasing sports news to the media, was now in charge of answering phone calls about the friends they had just lost.
“We were just relying on someone to hold us up while somebody else was holding that person up, and it was just a chain reaction,” Noteware said.
“Everyone around here is so tight, and we all felt it. And it was almost like every single person knew somebody on that plane, and so they were just relying on each other.” Noteware, who took over Hancock’s post for men’s basketball the following season, said he was happy and grateful to be able to tell the story of his friends.
“I didn’t know all of them, but between Will, Pat, Jared and Bill, those were guys that I considered very close. And I want people that never had a chance to meet them, to know what good people they were,” Noteware said.
Cameron said what he remembers most are the times he shared with the guys, especially Will. Whether it was pickup basketball games in Gallagher-Iba Arena or late nights at the office talking sports.
Cameron said one memory that sticks out in particular is when Hancock asked him to drive his black Honda to Tulsa for an OSU soccer game because he hadn’t been getting much sleep.
“I drive him there and back, and he probably didn’t get one ounce of sleep because we ended up just talking the whole way,” Cameron said. “I felt bad for it at the time, but now, I think it was kind of meant to be.”
The week after the crash as Cameron was headed into the office, he saw Will’s black Honda pull into the parking spot right next to him.
“(Will’s dad) had come to clean out Will’s desk, and I just lost it,” Cameron said. “And Bill comforted me and asked if everyone was OK. A guy that just lost his son is asking me if everything was okay. It was just like, wow.”
Cameron said he didn’t know if anything good could come out of such a tragic event, but now he said he has at least one silver lining — perspective.
“I remember being so disappointed with the way the guys had played that day at Colorado,” Cameron said. “There are bigger things in life and you really never should take things for granted. In a way it was kind of strange because you never felt prouder to be apart of the Oklahoma State family at that time because people got to see what we were all about.”