After reading this story, I am pulling for Bradley. They just beat big-time heavyweights, Indiana and Maryland to make the elite 8.
www.chicagotribune.com/sports/chi-newdowney02dec02,1,7338906.story
chicagotribune.com
Haunted by tragedy, Bradley succeeds
But goalie's death not a simple lesson
Mike Downey
December 2, 2007
What were they supposed to do after Danny died?
Should they play? Should they cancel a game? Call off the season?
What do you do when a student-athlete is not only killed but is accidentally killed by his own teammates?
"I used to hear a lot after tragedies, 'He would want you to play,'" Jim DeRose says. "I don't know that to be true. How could anybody know?"
DeRose is the coach of Bradley University's soccer team. Danny Dahlquist, 19, was one of his players.
An honor-roll student. Son of two faculty members. A star for 2005's state high school championship team.
In the early-morning hours of Aug. 12, a fire broke out in Danny's off-campus residence.
Four friends, three of them members of Bradley's soccer team, apparently set off Roman candles under Danny's bedroom door as a prank.
The apartment went up in smoke. The others tried to rescue Danny, but to no avail. He was pronounced dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in a Peoria hospital at 5:09 a.m.
What do you do? How would anyone know what steps to take after a tragedy on such a scale?
DeRose certainly didn't.
"There's no road map, no book for a coach or a team or a student body to follow after something like that," he says.
Mike Haynes didn't either.
"It's something none of us will ever forget," says the senior from Dunlap, Ill., who is Bradley's goalkeeper. "It's always with you."
Ken Kavanagh felt like everyone else. He had never known anything comparable to this.
"You're just numb," says Kavanagh, the school's athletic director. "And on top of it, Craig Dahlquist is someone I work so closely with, someone I know so well."
Craig Dahlquist is the assistant athletic director, an Arlington Heights native who from 1986 to 1996 was Bradley's track and field coach.
His wife, Patricia Carew Dahlquist, is a professor in the university's English department. She was once a Bradley track athlete.
Danny was the oldest of their seven kids.
He was born Sheridan Carew Dahlquist on Dec. 30, 1987. He was small as athletes go, just 5 feet 9 inches and 145 pounds. But he led Peoria's Notre Dame High to a Class A state title as a junior and a 20-2 record as a senior.
An outstanding student, Danny enrolled in Bradley's unique academic exploration program to help shape his future. He was the pride and joy of his large family and his grandmothers in Wilmette and Joliet.
Bradley soccer was on the rise. It had never been to the NCAA men's tournament's top 16, but it did win last season's Missouri Valley Conference crown.
T-shirts reading "4.4/16" were worn by the team.
"It's how close we came to the field of 16," Haynes explains. "We were 4.4 seconds from an automatic NCAA bid when Creighton scored a goal on me. Then we lost in overtime."
DeRose, 40, was the youngest head coach in Division I when he took over in 1996. He thought this Braves team could be his best yet.
Until the morning of Aug. 12.
Who knew what to think after that? The first step Bradley took was to cancel its annual public scrimmage. The season's first game was not too many days away.
A funeral mass was held at St. Mark's Church near the campus. Danny's teammates were there.
But three faced criminal charges as well as expulsion from school. Only the accidental nature of the crime and the frantic rescue attempt kept the law from pressing murder charges against the Bradley athletes and the fourth young man, a student at another college.
"Danny threw himself into everything he did," DeRose remembers, "whether it was the classroom or the weight room. He always gave it everything he had."
The season proceeded, without Danny and without the three implicated in his death.
Bradley not only played, it used each game as a two-hour refuge from a horror no one could forget.
The first five or six weeks were torture. DeRose says, "You tried to get it across, 'It's OK for you to smile.'"
Someone else tried to drive home that point, too -- the Dahlquists, who came to the games.
"I don't think they've missed a game," says Haynes, the goalkeeper.
They traveled to Omaha to see the Braves avenge their "4.4" loss. A goal by Hersey grad Stephen Brust with 86 seconds to play defeated Creighton for the MVC title. An award medal for Danny was presented to his dad.
As faculty members, Craig and Tricia Dahlquist often encounter the athletes on campus. Out of sight, out of mind isn't always an option.
No one had healed entirely from the ordeal. But two days after Thanksgiving, a holiday when absent loved ones are often on everyone's mind, the Braves had to focus on a first-round NCAA game with DePaul.
They won it 2-0, the school's first victory ever in the tournament.
It would likely be the end of the team's run. A road game with seven-time national champion Indiana came next.
"Anyone who knows anything about college soccer," says Haynes, "knows that Indiana is the school that defines success."
John Mellencamp, the singer's nephew and namesake, has been a friend of Haynes' since childhood. He plays for the Hoosiers.
"I trash-talked him before the game," Haynes admits, "and 97 seconds into the game, he scores on me."
It didn't look good Wednesday night for the visitors from Peoria or for several busloads of their fans. Indiana had won 47 of 51 NCAA tournament games at home.
But in the 69th minute, Brust scored on a shot from short range. Regulation play ended 1-1. The score stayed tied through overtime.
It came down to penalty kicks. Chris Cutshaw gave the Braves a 5-4 lead, then the final shot, by Indiana's Michael Roach, glanced off the crossbar, and Bradley had won.
"Unbelievable," Haynes says. "We hardly knew how to react. I know more than one of us pointed up to the sky and thought of Danny."
Bradley had made the NCAA's Sweet 16 for the first time. The dream went on when the Braves edged Maryland 3-2 in double overtime Saturday to reach the final eight.
"Did this tragedy bring us together? I don't know," DeRose says. "Who can answer a question like that? No one wants to."
No one can. No one will.
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mikedowney@tribune.com Copyright © 2007, Chicago Tribune
