Nearly one year after deadly bus crash, football team returns to field

ROCK HILL, S.C. — Rock Hill football team Ramah Junior College is making the most of its second chance.

Nearly a year after a deadly bus crash brought a local football team's season to a devastating end, it is getting ready for a new beginning.

This year, Ramah JUCO Academy plans to play in honor of those teammates they lost.

Coaches and players are still hurting and the team has only returned about 10 percent of the players who were on the bus when it crashed on Highway 74 in Richmond County.

Past Coverage:

• Federal investigation of deadly charter bus wreck that killed 4 is closed
• Troopers: Blown tire caused deadly charter bus crash; no charges filed
• 8-year-old among 4 killed in Rock Hill football team bus crash

Last September, while headed to its first game of the season, the team bus crashed into a median in Rockingham after one of its tires blew out.

Four were killed, including two football players and a coach’s son. Forty were injured.

The team cancelled the game, and then its inaugural season following the crash.

"I was scared to play football again," said Danny Todd Jr., a second year player out of Greenville, Alabama. "I didn’t know what was going to happen."

Within months, Bakari Rawlinson, one of nine coaches for the program, decided to honor the crash victims by moving forward to a second season.

"One hundred percent of this is to honor those guys," Rawlinson said. "The players that lost their lives, they wouldn’t want to quit. They were not quitters."

Its program is built on offering the opportunity to athletes who want it most.

The team also lost nearly all its equipment in that crash.

They were scheduled to play their first game this weekend, but have pushed it back to next month while they wait for new equipment to arrive.

The team returned to their practice field in Rock Hill earlier this month and is scheduled to play its first game Sept. 9.

Rawlinson said nearly 90 percent of players from the team's inaugural season chose not to return.

"God told me to do it," Rawlinson said. "When God says move, you’ve got to move."

Cox Media Group