After the hundreds of class messages, photos and the three trips I made to campus that week, nothing really started to set in for me until 3:07 p.m. on Friday Oct. 25. Staring in absolute shock as I sidestepped pieces of glass and stray nails from the events of the prior Sunday night, I still couldn’t believe everything that I saw at 10600 Preston Rd. and the surrounding community.
As I came around the corner, the sign hit me straight on as I looked up from my phone and paused my playlist on Spotify.
St. Mark’s [heart] Hockaday — Strong Together.
After the hundreds of class messages, photos and the three trips I made to campus that week, nothing really started to set in for me until 3:07 p.m. on Friday Oct. 25. Staring in absolute shock as I sidestepped pieces of glass and stray nails from the events of the prior Sunday night, I still couldn’t believe everything that I saw at 10600 Preston Rd. and the surrounding community.
The photos and GroupMe messages couldn’t convey the significance of what happened: the damage to Hicks Gym, tennis courts, choir loft, bell tower, chapel, Decherd Performance Hall, the black box theater and some broken windows here and there. I felt numb, scrolling through the dozens of photos and horror stories of houses destroyed or lives almost lost as I was sitting in my bed, too nervous and anxious to sleep.
At 3:07 that Friday afternoon, I walked into Penson Gym at Hockaday. Getting ready for the St. Mark’s volleyball homecoming game against Greenhill, the images of the damage kept creeping up from the back of my mind, but I tried to push them out. They brought back that same nervous and anxious feeling I had on Sunday night.
As I came around the corner, the sign hit me straight on as I looked up from my phone and paused my playlist on Spotify.
St. Mark’s [heart] Hockaday — Strong Together.
I stood there and tears I knew I had but could never get out poured all over my face. I walked in the gym, and instead of seeing the Hockaday net that I have seen dozens of times, our associate athletic director, Josh Friesen, had replaced it with the restrung net from Hicks Gym that remained standing despite all the damage. The pads on the sides were replaced with the beaten and torn up St. Mark’s pads that still smelled like Hicks Gym. And the senior portrait shots, the ones that I thought were gone forever, were reprinted and strung along the north wall, reminding me of the three games I had left before our conference championship, wearing the blue and gold jersey for the last time.
At 4:30 p.m., those same tears came back. Huddling up before the game, I reminded everyone on the court that this was so much more than just a game. It was a moment when members of the community could come together to forget the devastation of the storm. It was a moment when people could be surrounded by others, bringing back that sense of normalcy that we all desperately needed.
I told my teammates that this game wasn’t for us.
It was for the workers who have made the campus their home the past few days, sacrificing their time and energy to make sure students and faculty could return to campus as soon as possible. It was for the parents, students and alumni who dedicated the next few days to serving the greater Dallas community by delivering countless meals, canvassing homes and volunteering to clear yards. It was for the younger Marksmen who worried about when they would be able to come back to school and see their friends at lunch again. And it was for the families whose houses were damaged. Families with no roof to live under.
Through all of this, St. Mark’s was just one site of destruction, and we made sure to keep that in the back of our minds. While the school initiated a ready plan for repair, we were very cognizant that others in our community needed help and so began our outreach to other communities. Thousands of other homes across the Dallas area were destroyed, and Marksmen made sure to do their best to take care of their greater community by volunteering to help the Dallas ISD schools in need. Organizing a fundraiser for those schools who faced many challenges, members of our community created “Dallas Strong” shirts, rewriting the definition of community to extend even further.
That whole night, members of Greenhill and Hockaday did everything they could to make their gym and fields feel like our home. As we finished the three-set match, we shook hands with the Greenhill players and immediately exchanged expressions of concern and support for both of our communities. And two days before, we had also received word of the support from the Trinity Valley team, who worked with Molten USA, provider of volleyball equipment, to get us new gear.
As I walked out of that gym, a sense of relief came over me to see a smile on the faces of every person in those grey and green Hockaday stands that night.
But I still wanted things to go back to normal.
I wanted to be able to put on my blue shirt, grey shorts, white socks and black Nike tennis shoes and go back to the Friday edition of AP economics or production week in the journalism suite or eighth-period calculus. I wanted to be surrounded by my 88 classmates, whom I consider my brothers, and laugh through the pain of the first trimester, volleyball season and college applications.
But the reality is that things are going to be different at St. Mark’s and across Dallas, and I’m okay with that. We can never return to normal, but we must continue on whatever path this new normal takes us. It’s a new normal that will unite us and the Dallas community like we have never seen before, extending helping hands further than we ever have.
Change — even when it’s unexpected — can be a beautiful thing.
Sam Ahmed is a senior at St. Mark’s School of Texas and editor of the school newspaper, the ReMarker. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.