New Seton Hall women's coach Anne Donovan was stunned by the news of Friday's off-campus shooting, which killed one student and injured one of her freshman, F Nicosia Henry.NEW YORK — The phone call was the worst kind of phone call. It was the type of phone call that no parent wants to get. It was the type of phone call that no coach — in charge of a student-athlete from another part of the country — wants to get, but it was the type of phone call that Anne Donovan got late Friday night.
There had been a shooting at an off-campus party, she was told. Five people were hit and one of them was Nicosia Henry, a freshman forward from Illinois. For Donovan, who had only been on-campus for 10 days following her conclusion as head coach of the WNBA's New York Liberty, it hit her hard.
"One of the reasons that I'm back in college is that I love to nurture," Donovan said in the Citi Field dugout before throwing out the ceremonial first pitch with new men's head coach, Kevin Willard. "It's hard. There's no background. We're still forming our relationships."
Finding out that Henry was one of the three Seton Hall students that were injured in the shooting was stunning for Donovan.
She had just been getting to know her new team on a day-to-day basis with school starting earlier in the month. Despite being on-campus for only 10 days, she was gaining a pulse for how her team was, how they behaved. Then this.
A shooting at an off-campus fraternity house, where a rejected partygoer allegedly returned shortly after and fired into the crowed party. A 19-year old honor student at Seton Hall, Jessica Moore of Virginia, died from her injuries. Henry, 18, and fellow Seton Hall student Yvon Christophe were also shot, in addition to two others.
When Donovan arrived at University Hospital in Newark, her team had just been sent home from Henry's bedside.
"It was one of the most shocking things in their lives," Donovan said of her team's reaction to the shooting. "I just tried to talk to them. I'm a big believer in communication and just trying to stay with them and keep my arms around them the best that I could."
Still getting to know her team on a more intimate basis, Donovan switched to pure instinct when it came to consoling members of her team about Henry's shooting.
Players that were still learning to trust her.
"I have to say it is," Donovan said about it being the most difficult thing she's ever dealt with as a head coach. "This was just so difficult. But we're so blessed with good people on the team and around us."
While Henry is expected to make a full recovery, her shooting and the death of a classmate has been a lot to handle.
Tuesday was the first day back on the court for her team since the shooting happened on Friday and Donovan said that her team was not only on time for drills, but more focused than they had been before.
Sitting in the dugout, where before her ceremonial first pitch Citi Field observed a moment of silence for Moore, Donovan — with a black ribbon with a Pirates logo pin in the middle for the victims — was joyed with relay the news of her team's bounceback. It's given her the one thing that she almost lacked when she got that phone call: hope.
"I didn't know what to expect today," she said. "I really didn't. No one did. No one's gotten any sleep or rest or all of that, so I didn't know what to expect with the workouts. But with flying colors, they got through. It shows me a lot of who they are and I've seen that from the second I started."