From the issue dated March 20, 1991
Northwest College's Basketball Team Survives Accident and Brings Storybook Ending to Season
By Peter Monaghan
Kirkland, Washington -- If Doug Filan were the star of a made-for-television movie, he would not only have risen from his deathbed, miraculously recovered from the traffic accident that could have killed him, to coach his basketball team again.
He would also have led them by power of will and a sense of destiny to unlikely victory after unlikely victory, culminating in a national championship. In an emotional announcement, Mr. Filan would then have been named coach of the year.
That is just what did happen to Mr. Filan's underdog team at Northwest College of the Assemblies of God, with only one exception: The team narrowly missed the national title, losing to Kentucky Christian College this month in the championship game of the National Christian College Athletic Association's Division II.
The NCCAA is a group of 113 church-affiliated institutions. Division II contains 56 "Bible colleges" that do not offer athletic scholarships.
If the division title finally eluded Mr. Filan's Eagles, just about every other feature of a comeback fantasy still applied.
"We went through something you wouldn't beg someone for," says Wes Davis, the captain of the team. "But all of us are changed people and thankful. We learned a lot of things about each other, and our friends, and our coaches, and our God."
At about two o'clock one morning last November, Mr. Filan was driving the team van toward Walla Walla, Washington. Mr. Filan hails from that eastern Washington town, and had driven the route hundreds of times.
He was expecting to be reunited with family and friends. Instead, the van hit a patch of ice, slid 100 feet before blowing a tire, flipped, spun on its side four times, and came to rest 900 feet away.
Riding in the van with Mr. Filan were his seven top players. All but one were thrown from the van and knocked unconscious, several still strapped to their seats.
Mr. Davis doesn't remember much of what happened. But he recalls regaining consciousness in a strangely silent, darkened, snow-covered field scattered with bodies. "I thought I might have been scared. But there wasn't any sense of fear," Mr. Davis says. "In fact it was probably the most peaceful setting I've been in. Inside of myself I started to pray and to sing."
He recalls other players' singing hymns, too: "It wasn't really in unison. It gave everyone a sense of peace."
When the rest of the team arrived in a second van, two truck drivers were calling ambulances and helping the victims. No one had been killed, but Mr. Filan's nephew, Jason Filan, had broken a collarbone and his 12th vertebra. Injuries to other players included a deep cut to the head, broken ribs, and facial lacerations.
The coach was by far the worst off. All his ribs were broken, five of them "beyond description," he says. Both lungs had been punctured and collapsed. A tibia, fibula, scapula, and collarbone were fractured. A major nerve had been severed in one foot. One broken rib poked ominously against his heart.
It seemed that Northwest College, a four-year institution for some 700 students in this town near Seattle, would be without a basketball program for a while, and without its coach for good. Mr. Filan recalls that as he lay in a hospital in Walla Walla, doped with morphine, the doctors around him disagreed whether an operation or infection would kill him first.
In retrospect, he can piece together what happened. Just before the crash, he had stopped the van at a rest stop. He had forgotten to put his seat belt back on. "That probably saved my life," he says, "because the whole front end of the van was bashed back into the second row. I popped out the back two doors. I remember feeling like I was going round in a dryer."
Lying in a heap in the field, he remembers, "it was scary thinking you're going to die, but the real scary thing was calling out names and not hearing anyone and thinking they were all dead except me."
Some of the players visited him in the hospital. Recalls Mr. Davis: "It was hard to believe it was him. It kind of scared you. We were wondering whether he was going to live or not. We had to leave because we didn't want him to see us break up."
Mr. Filan remembers that two players "couldn't hold back the tears when I told them I'd see them on the third of January," at the team's first practice after Christmas break. When that day came, he was there, propped on crutches.
He has his own explanation of how he started to breathe unassisted again, 10 days after the accident, defying predictions he would die or at least never walk again. He left the hospital weeks before he was expected even to get out of intensive care.
"The same miracle that saved me is the reason I can walk. The Lord healed me up real quick. It shocked quite a few people."
The mood at that first practice, he recalls, "was pretty emotional." Jason Filan, who had been scoring 34 points a game, was lost for the season. Mr. Filan set about revamping his whole offense with new starters and new plays.
What he came up with worked so well that the team, after losing three straight games when the season resumed after Christmas, won 16 of the next 23 games, including two at the Christian-college championship in Chicago. It all ended in the title game against Kentucky Christian.
"Initially," says Mr. Filan, "it was really disappointing. We kind of felt like we were a team of destiny. The whole season had been a storybook thing. We thought we were going to win that championship game. And it didn't work like that." They lost, 71 to 54.
But the season didn't end quite there. "It was a real surprise I never dreamed of," says Mr. Filan, in only his second season as a basketball coach, "but I ended up getting the NCCAA Coach of the Year. That was quite overwhelming."
He is still in considerable pain, worsened by his decision to ignore his doctors' advice and travel to Chicago for the national tourney.
"The trip put me back three weeks, but it was worth it," he says. "The season was worth it."
Copyright © 1991 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
