NIU's Patton close to two tragedies

For Northern Illinois basketball coach Ricardo Patton, last week's tragedy jarred memories of the Columbine High School massacre in 1999. He was the head coach at Colorado at the time and one of his players, Josh Townsend, lost a sister.

"I remember Josh Townsend's mother stating it was very important that Josh was part of the team, and it's no different now," Patton said.

He never envisioned encountering a similar scenario. Yet that's what he's doing 11 months after taking the job at a school in a bucolic community 65 miles west of Chicago.

He was heading back from a recruiting trip to California when an assistant coach called with the news. He remembered his Colorado team rallying around Townsend.

Now, Patton expects the players to support each other when they return to campus today.

There will be no athletic competitions -- home or away -- until Monday, when classes resume. For the men's basketball team, that means games against Western Michigan, Toledo and Tennessee State were called off. Patton thought only one might be rescheduled.

No NIU athletes were among the dead or wounded, although one men's soccer player was in the class when the gunman started firing. The school is offering grief counseling, and coaches already met with counselors.

"The biggest thing that we heard was to listen to our students about how they're feeling," Patton said. "You certainly don't want to try to tell them how they're feeling.

"That's the biggest thing I got from it is that we need to listen to them. That's what we plan on doing -- making sure that we clearly understand how they're feeling, and knowing that we all have our different ways of dealing with tragedy. We all have our different ways of grieving.

"Even though none of our players were actually in the classroom that day, we do have student-athletes that have class in that same lecture hall. Those students will certainly feel a little bit different than students that may not even have a class in that building."