A few weeks after the storm had passed, Joe Scheuermann hitched a ride with a friend into New Orleans, determined to see the impact of Hurricane Katrina for himself. He remembers driving east into the city and being stopped at an Army barricade off I-10, near the edge of the Delgado Community College campus. Troops escorted him into the Mid-City neighborhood where he lived and coached the school's baseball team, as his father had before him. The neighborhood, like an estimated 80% of New Orleans, had flooded during Katrina. AndKirsch-Rooney Stadium, like much of Delgado's campus, had not been spared. Several of the light poles surrounding the field had been toppled or bent in half. The scoreboard flung into a neighboring cemetery. Two-thirds of the wooden outfield fence destroyed. And the field itself had been submerged in at least 6 feet of floodwater for several days, turning grass and infield into a barren, muddy mess. "It was quite an eye-opener," Scheuermann, now 62, recalled in July. As the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina nears, however, it's not that first sight of the wreckage − nor the grainy photos he took with his Nokia cell phone − that Scheuermann remembers. It's what he described as "the renaissance" that followed. With little financial support and perhaps even less fanfare, Scheuermann and his players spent the next several months clearing the debris, cleaning the stadium and rebuilding a significant chunk of their own outfield fence. By January, the once-grimy field actually had grass. And in February, the Delgado Dolphins played a regular home baseball game in their own stadium, an apparent first for a sports team in the city after the storm. "We couldn't play (at night) because of the lights. We played day games. But we were the first facility to open that was in New Orleans after Katrina," Scheuermann said. "Probably one of the biggest accomplishments I had as a coach, to be able to do that." In May, Scheuermann wrapped up his 35th season as the head coach at Delgado, where he has won more games than any college baseball coach in Louisiana history. He's also been the athletic director since 2013. He said he and his players on that team nearly 20 years ago were simply trying to rebuild, as much as everyone else in the city was trying to rebuild at that time. Though, in fairness, some rebuilding stories are more personal than others. This was notthe renovation of the Superdomea few miles to the south, where 850 workers and more than $250 million in renovations set the stage for the New Orleans Saints' folkloric return in front of a national television audience. This was a five-figure check being passed through a cab window to a coach trying to scrape together $50,000 for a self-funded season. A group of 19-year-olds in the outfield digging postholes. A small-school team unwilling to wait around for "normalcy" to come back on its own. "The field wasn't a priority to the city, or to everybody else. But it was kind of everything to us," said Ryan Kamlade, a redshirt freshman pitcher on that year's team. "Nothing was ever like 'oh my God, I can't believe we have to do this.' It was one of those things that you were proud to do. ... If we can do it, then I feel like other people can do it." On a Saturday morning in August 2005, the Delgado baseball team met on campus for routine preseason meetings and physical exams. By the following Monday, Hurricane Katrina had made landfall and authorities had reported a breech along the 17th Street Canal near campus. And by midweek, the field at Kirsch-Rooney Stadium was underwater. Scheuermann and his family first evacuated to nearby Baton Rouge before eventually landing at a fishing camp in a small town called New Roads. He said the first news he got of Katrina's impact on the baseball field came from a campus security guard the morning after the storm made landfall. "Man, coach," he said the security guard told him. "You got smoked." A few days later, the longtime coach saw aerial footage of a football field at a city park across the street. The water, he said, was touching the crossbar of the goalposts. It was difficult for Scheuermann to stomach. He had taken over as Delgado's baseball coach after the retirement of his father,Louis "Rags" Scheuermann, a legendary local figure who had started the program there in 1974. On top of coaching, the Scheuermanns had also managed and overseen the operations of Kirsch-Rooney Stadium since 1957. It was almost like a second home. Exclusive book: How Katrina changed all of us Joe Scheuermann's actual home was also nearby, about three blocks from the stadium. Despite being elevated about 3 feet off the ground, he said, he returned after Katrina to find wood floors that were starting to buckle and furniture in ruins. "Everything was like somebody put it in a washing machine and just turned it off," he said. Delgado's main campus was, unfortunately, in a similar situation – with 20 of the school's 25 buildings either damaged by the floodwaters or destroyed, according toa 2006 article co-authored by then-chancellor Alex Johnson. The fall semester was canceled, and the financial future of the college was unclear. Scheuermann knew that Johnson had more pressing issues than fielding a baseball team in the spring, but during a trip to the school's temporary headquarters in Baton Rouge, he decided to ask anyway. Johnson told him the school would honor his players' scholarships, but it would be unable to provide any funding for the baseball team that year. If they wanted to play, they would have to raise the money. "I knew we had to do it," said Scheuermann,who was inducted into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame this year. "Because if we wouldn't have done it, we probably wouldn't have had a program. "I didn't want it to go dormant. I wanted to make sure that we kept moving." The first step toward that goal of playing the 2006 season was the simplest: Scheuermann had to locate his players. Every player on the team that year hailed from a Louisiana hometown,according to a school news release. But in the chaos of Katrina, they had scattered across the South. Scheuermann said two of his players were rescued off rooftops in Chalmette, Louisiana. One turned up in Arkansas. A few players had started taking classes at a community college in Baton Rouge. Overloaded cell phone towers and spotty internet connections didn't make the process any easier. Eventually, Scheuermann said, he was able to track everyone down. They met in early October at Archbishop Rummel High School, where the longtime coach showed photos of the stadium and talked about the financial realities of funding their own season. Yet, he also said definitively, that there would be a season. That was enough for sophomore pitcher Kyle Beerbohm. "It's kind of one of those things where if he says we're going to play, then we're going to play one way or another," he said. And so, with everyone on board, they got to work. Scheuermann, assistant coach Ryan Lousteau and assorted groups of players started meeting at Kirsch-Rooney Stadium to clean and clear the rubble. They draped wet jerseys over the fence on the first-base line and laid soggy file folders out in the sun to dry. They ripped out ruined lockers and the remnants of the wooden fence in right field. Someone found the skeleton of a 4-foot-long garfish that had gotten trapped in the batting cages. Obviously, that would have to go, too. ("I remember everybody wanted that fish," Scheuermann said with a laugh.) Sometimes, he said, there were 30 people out working. Other times there were five. A Red Cross mobile unit would often swing by and deliver lunches for the group. As residents of the neighborhood near the stadium began to return, groups of players would peel off and help them gut their houses, as well. "Everyone was kind of going through the same things," said Kamlade, who is now a high school baseball coach in the area. Scheuermann said somewhere along the way, a local philanthropist named Richard Colton read an article about the team's efforts in the local newspaper and pulled up to Kirsch-Rooney Stadium in a taxicab. Colton was an acquaintance of Scheuermann's, he said, and he asked how much money they were trying to raise for the season. The coach said about $50,000. The next day, during lunch, the cab returned. "Mr. Colton wanted me to give you this envelope," the driver said, according to Scheuermann, who recalled opening up the package during bites of his bologna sandwich to find "a pretty substantial check to get us going." "Without him giving us the huge kick start, we might not have had the program," Scheuermann said. Delgado Community College had been known, at least historically, as a trade school − a training ground for many of the city's plumbers, electricians and mechanics. But that didn't mean the Dolphins knew how to reconstruct parts of a baseball stadium. "It was trial and error," said Brian Legnon, a freshman on the 2006 team. "It was a bunch of error." Legnon remembered days when the team would spend three hours working on the field, then a few hours practicing afterward. Beerbohm, who later transferred and pitched at LSU, said he had memories of position players taking batting practice while the pitchers were in the outfield, digging postholes for the new chain-link fence. "You kind of looked forward to (it)," Kamlade said. "Some people might say, 'Agh, I have to go to practice.' It was like, 'Finally, we get to go practice!' ... It was an escape from reality of what was kind of going on around us, in a sense." Former players said replacing the fence was probably the most difficult part of the renovation. Scheuermann said they also got help from an electrical contractor, who disconnected the 70-foot light towers that used to illuminate the field, and a metal worker, who cut them down and hauled them away. As winter arrived, the Dolphins were finally able to focus on the playing surface itself. Scheuermann borrowed fire hose from another friend, hooked it up to the nearest hydrant and let it run for hours, day after day, hoping to wash away the grime and floodwater residue. In December, almost on a whim, he decided to try planting some rye grass in what used to be the outfield. "I hate to tell you," Scheuermann said with a smile, "but it was the prettiest greenest grass we've had, probably, since I've been coaching here." As he looks back on it now, Scheuermann thinks there was something powerfully calming for him about working on the field. It was like therapy, he said. He also marvels now at the way it bonded the players on that team together, in a way that no sort of contrived team-building exercise ever could. "Looking back at it, it was kind of the only time we had any normal kind of connection with anybody. Because everything in here was in disarray," Legnon said. "Baseball brought us all together, and we had to do what we had to do." Less than six months after Hurricane Katrina, on Feb. 12, 2006, Delgado played its first game back at Kirsch-Rooney Stadium. With a new chain-link fence in right field, and a temporary scoreboard tracking stats, the hosts beat Lincoln Land Community College 14-7. The Dolphins went on to finish a respectable 34-14 that year, and some of the same players helped propel them to the JUCO World Series in 2007. It was the first of five such appearances that Scheuermann has made as the program's head coach. "Coach Joe makes things happen, and never was that more evident than post-Katrina," the school's current chancellor, Larissa Littleton-Steib, wrote in an email. "He recognized that athletics weren't the college's top priority and used external support to make that season happen." It would be easy for members of the team to describe the first game back as a monumental moment, some sort of triumphant return in a compelling narrative arc. The truth is that many of them don't remember anything about the game itself. "I can't tell you who we played, or if we won or lost, but I could tell you that my chalker didn't work to put the foul lines down," Scheuermann said. "That's how silly things were back then." Perhaps it's telling what kinds of memories have stuck over the past 20 years, and which ones haven't. Legnon, for example, doesn't remember much about that first game back, but he does remember they had to pour two bags of concrete for every post in the outfield fence. Kamlade has also forgotten its details. But he remembers that, after they returned to play at home, kids started coming back to the neighborhood playground, too. For some members of that team, the process of fixing up the field and playing out that season is something that feels significant only in hindsight. At the time, as Legnon put it, they didn't think much about it. In a city of rebuilding stories, they just rebuilt. For a team that just wanted normalcy, maybe the real triumph is that they found it. Contact Tom Schad at tschad@usatoday.com or on social media@tomschad.bsky.social. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY:Hurricane Katrina flooded their field. The players helped rebuild.