By Brad Wetzler
Photo By Andrew Kaufman August 2007

"Go deep!" shouts a tall, lanky 19-year-old, squeezing a broken brick with both hands as if it were a leather football.

"I'm wide open," yells another kid who looks to be about the same age, this one more compact with tousled brown hair. He's running a fly pattern over piles of rubble and shards of glass.

A third member of the group begins to announce the action. "Jantz fades back," he says, watching the quarterback stepping around piles of branches, broken bottles and wayward red-and-blue cheerleader pompoms. "And he lets it fly..."

The brick soars through the air seemingly in slow motion and passes through the receiver's open hands before crashing through an already cracked window. Somebody yells: "You suck!" Three others join in the razzing.

It's an unlikely football field: They're playing on the sidewalk of a large brick building that looks as if it has just been bombed by the German Luftwaffe during World War II. Several walls of the massive structure are missing, and cotton-candy-like insulation and wires lie everywhere. It doesn't much look like a high school.

But that is what it is -- or was. This is what's left of Greensburg High in Greensburg, a hamlet surrounded by wheat fields on the plains of south-central Kansas, about 100 miles west of Wichita.

The boys aren't practicing for a big football game; they're members of the school's golf team. And moments ago they returned from Montezuma, Kan., an even tinier town farther west on the open prairie, where they won the Class 1A regional tournament by 45 strokes. That qualified the team for the state tournament, to be played in a week.

On this hot, sunny afternoon, this is how the players choose to celebrate: throwing bricks at broken windows. At least it beats spending another day picking through the rubble that used to be their homes, looking for keepsakes, a task that has taken most of their time. Ten days ago, on May 4, a 1.7-mile-wide EF-5 category tornado with winds estimated at 205 miles per hour ripped through the center of Greensburg, killing 10 people and destroying 90 percent of the town. One of the only things that was left unscathed was the massive grain elevator on the north side of town.

A chubby kid with short, brown bangs and a scowl takes a 5-iron from his golf bag, which is sitting next to some twisted corrugated tin, and sets a ball on a patch of dirt. He takes a practice swing, and then he takes a serious whack. The ball, making a noise like a bullet, ricochets off several brick walls before coming to rest in the gymnasium, now piled high with the wooden slats that used to be its ceiling.

The Greensburg High golf team -- seniors Alex Reinecke, Brenden Jantz and Devin Bundy, juniors Logan Waters and Justin Brokar and sophomore Andrew Seiler -- was third in the 2006 state tournament. This season, with the same key players, the team is determined to win.

But obviously there are new problems: With no place to call home and nearly every possession gone, the players and coach have taken residence in cramped apartments or relatives' houses in other towns as far as 60 miles away. According to psychologists, many of the people of Greensburg will be in shock for some time, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and a sense of rootlessness.

And now, Reinecke, who's consistently one of the team's top-three players, has begun to struggle on the course -- not a good omen. "It's my putting, mostly," he says. "I've got to get it back because the team is counting on me." There are signs that others are flailing, too. They seem, as one would expect given what they've been through, distracted.

Fortunately the storm doesn't seem to have thrown off the team's best player, the diminutive Seiler. His house, which is in the country about 10 miles from Greensburg, survived the tornado, and the other day he shot a 78. Jantz has kept his game together, too.

But as the players prepare to hit more shots amid the rubble, a slight man in a red Titleist golf shirt and cap, khaki-color jeans and brown, shin-high work boots approaches.

"That's enough," says Ron Roe, the team's coach. Roe, 58, a Vietnam vet with a master's in marriage and family therapy, and a dedicated golfer who teaches social-science classes at the high school, took over the team last year and immediately started seeing results. "We don't want you getting hurt before state."

"Just one more," says Bundy. This time the ball flies through the air, bouncing off a wall and settling not far from his feet.

"Save that for next week," says Roe, who has just returned from his demolished classroom to retrieve the year's golf records.

It's hard to believe, after what everyone has been through, but the Greensburg golf team is going to the state tournament -- and it has a solid chance of winning. If the players can keep it together, they'll have something to hold onto, something positive to tell their kids about the tornado of 2007.

"We may be homeless," says Bundy, "but we're going to state."

THE GREENSBURG SIX
The story of the remarkable 2007 Greensburg golf team started in April on the griddle-flat golf course that sits on the edge of town. Called the Cannonball -- named after the owner of the old stagecoach company, D.R. (Cannonball) Green, who helped found the town in 1886 -- it is a typical western Kansas course: nine holes of high, native-grass rough and nothing that resembles a hill, let alone trees, within miles. Here, in late spring, the azure sky is boundless and the green, uncut wheat waves like an inland sea in the near-constant 35-mph winds.