Published: June 27, 2008 11:49 pm      

Hurley team recovering after van crash

HURLEY, Va. — It is, thankfully, a rare occurence.

Since the movie “We Are Marshall,” the potential for a tragedy involving a traveling sports team is always in the back of the mind of coaches, if not players and families. The Hurley boys basketball squad narrowly avoided such a tragedy, and every member of the program is thankful to be back home.

A dozen or so athletes and an assistant coach with the Hurley High School boys basketball team were involved in a traffic accident Saturday while attending a summer basketball camp in High Point, N.C.

According to published reports, some 12-to-14 people were on the bus and eight students and one coach were treated at High Point Regional Medical Center Saturday after the mini-bus they were riding in turned over after being struck on its side by a pickup truck.

All the injuries were described as minor, from cuts and abrasions to a dislocated shoulder, except for one student-athlete.

Tyler Cooper, whose father Mark is the varsity coach at Hurley, suffered a neck fracture and underwent surgery on Tuesday at Wake Forest Baptist Hospital in nearby Winston-Salem.

After the surgery, Mark Cooper said, doctors remained cautiously optimisitic that Tyler will make a full recovery.

The elder Cooper was in another bus with three other players and did not witness the collision. He arrived a short time later to find a frightening scene. In addition to Tyler, Cooper’s son Austin was also injured.

“When I got there all I saw were the kids wandering around outside the bus, bloodied,” Cooper said. “You can imagine how horrifying a scene it was.”

Tyler, his father said, suffered a displaced fracture in his C-5 vertebra, the fifth cervical vertebra, in his neck.

“It was a terrible scene,” Cooper added. “I went around and talked to all the kids to see how they were doing, not as a coach, as a parent. Those kids are all like sons to me.

“For most of them, thankfully, it looked, at first, a lot worse than it actually was, with all the blood. But no one else was seriously hurt, and the doctors seem to think Tyler will be all right. We’ll know more after they examine him again next week.”

Hurley assistant coach Steve Hamro III was among the injured. Cooper said Hamro remained on the bus with the trapped driver until emergency officials were able to free the female bus driver with the “jaws of life.”

“I was worried when I first arrived and didn’t see coach Hamro around,” Cooper said. “It was a difficult situation. We’re just thankful everything turned out all right. We’ll recover from this and we’ll be stronger as a team for it.”

According to several newspaper and TV accounts, the truck driver was identified as Douglas Roscoe Branscome, 65. No address was listed. Branscome was charged with running a red light, according to a High Point police report.