Remembering Will Hancock and the Oklahoma State Ten

On January 26, 2001, I exchanged text messages with my friend Will Hancock. He was the sports information director for Oklahoma State’s basketball team, which was in Boulder for a game with the Buffs.

I’d known Will for years. He was one of my brother’s closest friends at Shawnee Mission East High School in suburban Kansas City and at the University of Kansas.

My brother Dave is seven years older than me. Sometimes, he and his friends needed an extra body for pickup football, softball or basketball. Nobody really wanted the smartass, punk, little brother to join in. Most were civil, but I was pretty clearly intruding.

The one exception to that was Will. He always greeted me with a smile and made sure I was part of the game, whether it was throwing the occasional pass my or convincing his team I should play quarterback for a few downs.

As time went on, I grew closer with my brother, and his friends became more accepting to me joining them for a baseball game or poker night. To be fair, I probably also grew up a little and stopped being the unbearable, little pest that used to ruin their football games.

At one of those baseball games at Royals Stadium, around 1991 when I was still in high school, Dave pointed to the press box and said Will was working up there. He was an intern for the Kansas City Royals public relations department for the summer. Damn, I thought, how cool was that.

Without realizing it, my career path was set in motion. Sure, the seeds were sown earlier, when I grew up living behind Neil Funk, then the radio voice of the Kansas City Kings. I was kind of destined to end up in sports.

But when I heard Will was working for the Royals, I realized that people actually did spend their days working with teams. And they got paid for it (albeit, not always very much).

By 2001, I was about to enter my third season in Major League Baseball, running the website of the Colorado Rockies. I like baseball a lot, but I love college basketball. Again, I was jealous of Will.

We talked about meeting up in Boulder. I wanted to hear about the Cowboys’ season and about his three-month old daughter, Andie. But I was going to have trouble getting out of work early and his schedule was tight. We were both planning to go to Indianapolis that April for the Final Four – Will was working it, I was heading in to watch.

We agreed to meet up for dinner or at least a beer. It was set, and we left it at that.

The next morning I woke to news that a small plane carrying 10 members of the Oklahoma State travel party crashed in a field just east of Denver.

There were no survivors.

When the phone rang a few minutes later, I knew what I was going to hear. It was my dad, who told me that he wanted me to hear it from him before I saw the news.

Will was on the plane.

I would never claim that I was close with Will. He was certainly closer to both of my brothers that he was to me.

But Will made a lasting impact on me. Five years later, I accepting a job as the sports information director for men’s basketball at the University of Denver, the same position that Will held at Oklahoma State.

And yesterday, as I have done each of the last 13 years on January 27 – not to mention many other days in between – I thought a lot about Will. I can still picture that welcoming smile with bright red cheeks, and I can still hear his laugh.

There were 10 men on that flight, and I certainly do not want to discount the impact that each of the other nine had on their friends and family. But I can’t speak to that.

What I can speak to is that Will Hancock had a profound impact on me, and I’m proud to know that my nephew, Dave’s son, shares his first name. 

For those interested in learning more about Will Hancock, Nate Fleming, Daniel Lawsom, Brian Luinstra, Pat Noyes, Bill Teegins, Jared Weiberg, Kendall Durfey, Bjorn Fahlstrom and Denver Mills, I recommend the following:

• Will’s father, Bill Hancock, who ran the NCAA Tournament for many years before taking over the BCS, wrote a beautiful yet heart-wrenching book called Riding with the Blue Moth. It’s out of print, but there are used copies available on Amazon. It’s the story of Bill’s bicycle ride across America, as he learned to cope with the death of his son.
• ESPN's Outside the Lines looked back on the tragedy on the 10th anniversary of the crash in 2011.
• Doug Gottlieb, who played for the Cowboys the year before the crash, wrote a nice tribute to all the victims while working for ESPN.
• Grant Wahl, who ran cross country and track at Shawnee Mission East the year after Will finished running there, fought back emotions and penned a column just a few short days after the crash for Sports Illustrated. 
• The Oklahoman did a video last year that’s worth 19 minutes of your time.