Jerome Bechard: ‘We were definitely in God’s hands’

As his world was being turned on its side Thursday afternoon on the shoulder of an Illinois interstate, Columbus Cottonmouths Coach and General Manager Jerome Bechard sat in the front of the bus with everything out of his control.

That’s a tough place for man who spent 13 years in minor league hockey, much of it as an enforcer in absolute control of who he was going to hit and when.

“We were definitely in God’s hands,” Bechard said Friday afternoon, a day removed from a bus accident 10 miles outside Peoria.

Bechard scrambled to find players to fill out the roster to play Saturday’s game, though Friday’s game was postponed.

What was bad — goalie Brandon Jaeger, equipment manager Mike Nash and bus driver Wayne Allen suffered serious non-life threatening injuries — could have been much worse.

And Bechard knows it.

“If you had told me we were going to go through what we just went through and no one would lose their life, I would have told you that was not possible,” Bechard said. “We were so blessed. We’re banged up, but we are blessed.”

Blessed is a matter of perspective. On Wednesday night as the team bus left the Columbus Civic Center parking lot, it would have been hard to imagine that one of life’s great blessings was going to come in a dirt ditch at the interchange of I-55 and I-74.

But it did.

Grueling road trips in minor league sports are a necessary way of life, and the vast majority of them have an uneventful ending. Tom Maldonado, now a local real estate agent, spent five years riding the circuit with the Cottonmouths before retiring two years ago. Prior to that, the New Yorker played in the Central Hockey League, where he faced road trips from Albuquerque to North Dakota.

He knows a thing or two about the road.

“A lot of guys don’t like those 14-hour bus rides, but a lot of guys do,” Maldonado said. “There is a lot of team building that goes on during those bus rides. People play cards, watch TV. Some of them just get in a bunk and sleep.”

The trip that ended up with the charter bus on its side at an interchange in the heart of Illinois, started at midnight Wednesday when the bus, pulling a trailer loaded with the smelliest cargo in athletics — hockey equipment — left Columbus.

Nearly 14 hours later, word of the accident quickly got back to Columbus via text and Twitter posts from those on the scene nearly 800 miles from home.

Maldonado was going about his business Thursday afternoon when he received a text telling him the team bus had crashed outside Peoria.

“My heart went into my stomach,” said Maldanodo, who knew several former teammates and others, including Bechard and Nash, that he remains close to on the bus. “My first thought, was ‘God, I hope everybody is OK.’ ”

As it was unfolding and information was coming out of Illinois from various sources, Maldonado got a sign it was not as bad as it could have been.

One of his friends, Cottonmouths defenseman Kyle Johnson sent a simple “thumbs up” text.

“That made me feel a lot better,” Maldonado said.

Hockey players are used to sudden and violent contact. It’s part of the game. Did that help keep the tragedy from being worse?

The bus has two lounge-type areas, one in the front and the other in the rear.

“Those of us in the front had an idea of what was going on,” Bechard said. “Nobody in the back of the bus knew what was going on.”

Even though they knew there was a problem as the bus went off the road, Bechard said reaction time was limited.

“There was not a whole lot of time to prepare for anything,” Bechard said.

Even the trauma personnel at OSF St. Francis Medical Center in Peoria knew there was something different about the 23 people being rushed in for treatment, Bechard said.

“One of the people said, ‘Oh, these are hockey players, no wonder no one is whining or complaining,’” Bechard said. “It didn’t take long to to figure out we were a pretty tough bunch.”

How tough? Banged and bruised with a handful of new players, the Cottonmouths were schedule to be back on the ice Saturday night against the Peoria Rivermen.

Go ahead and create the meme now. “You may be tough, but you are not ‘survive-a-bus-crash-play-hockey-48-hours-later-tough.’ ”

A bus accident was always one of those worst-case fears that a minor league hockey player lives with, Maldonado said.

“I always felt safe on one of our buses,” Maldonado said. “We only had one or two different drivers when I played over that five-year period. Everything was pretty consistent. And I never once doubted who was driving our bus.”

Part of the reason for that was Bechard and Cottonmouths owner Wanda Amos.

“I always trusted Jerome and Wanda to provide us with the best possible transportation,” Maldonado said. “You make one of those trips, you will always find Jerome sitting in the front of the bus. I know that he gets very little sleep. It is almost like he is the second driver. He always took his responsibility on those trips very seriously.”

Since the accident, hundreds of people inside and outside the hockey community have reached out to Bechard, one of the really good guys.

“The response has been unbelievable,” he said. “You know, I wanted to put Columbus Cottonmouths hockey in the news, but this is not how I wanted to do it.”

This story was originally published January 21, 2017 at 10:46 AM with the headline "Jerome Bechard: ‘We were definitely in God’s hands’."