UMBC, Towson serving up outreach

Teams with deep ties to island raise thousands for Puerto Rico relief efforts

On Sept. 22, two days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in her native Puerto Rico, Krytsia Negron and the UMBC women’s volleyball team played Hartford. It was a comfortable win, 3-0, and Negron, a junior setter, finished with a match high in assists. She wanted to tell Soraya Lugo about it.

Negron has been playing volleyball since she was 4, and postgame conversations with her mother have become a ritual, as natural as an arcing pass to the net. They speak every day, or try to, so Negron, back in the Retrievers’ locker room, found her phone. Out of habit more than anything, she called Lugo. No answer. She tried again, more desperate this time. Nothing.

She had last heard from her mother two days earlier, just before noon on the day of the first Category 4 storm to hit the Caribbean island since 1932. It was a text message from Lugo: “We’re fine, but this is not looking good.”

“Of course, I knew I wasn’t going to reach out” and connect with her after the Hartford match, Negron said Tuesday. Lugo was in San Juan, where flooding was waist-deep in some areas and the electrical grid was destroyed. “But howamI not going to talk to my mom right now?”

Three UMBC teammates, all Puerto Ricans, sat quietly nearby and listened. A day later, three Towson players considered the bad luck of a fellow Puerto Rican they knew; she was the only one on her Iowa State volleyball team who understood that life back home had changed irrevocably. For as helpless as the seven Retrievers and Tigers felt as they watched the ruination of an island UMBC’s Carola De Jesus called “paradise,” they at least had each other. Together they could grieve. Together they could uplift.