ANNAPOLIS, Md. -- By all accounts, including hers, Haley Scott was just an average college swimmer. No top national times, no Olympic moments.
She's Haley Scott DeMaria now, suburban housewife and happily married mother of two. She wrote a book about herself, to be released June 2, so there has to be something more to the story.
There is. Much more.
A little past midnight in the wee hours of Jan. 24, 1992, Scott, an 18-year-old freshman, and her Notre Dame swim team were on the Indiana Toll Road in a chartered bus. They had competed against Northwestern in Chicago, and were four miles from their South Bend exit. They had just finished watching a Julia Roberts' movie, "Dying Young."
It had been a warm day in wintry northern Indiana. Scott DeMaria laughs about that now. The Irish had recruited her from Xavier College Prep School in Phoenix and brought her in one day in February when the temperature was 60 degrees. That happens about every 75 years.
"I thought, hey, I can handle this," she recalls.
The warmth that January day, however, turned cold and snowy that night, and the snow turned quickly to ice. Scott DeMaria recalls the bus passing a car, then veering back to the right lane. "I thought we were exiting," she says.
Instead, the bus skidded on the ice, left the road, slid sideways down an embankment and, when a wheel hit a concrete culvert, turned over.
Two team members, freshmen Meghan Beeler and Colleen Hipp, were thrown from the bus and killed when it landed on top of them. Scott DeMaria was slammed around inside and ended up next to a window that either popped open or was blown out. She pulled herself out and ended up on her back in the snow.
"I remember telling everybody two things, over and over," she says. "I was cold and my back hurt."
She was dressed in standard Dress Code A for Notre Dame traveling women's teams, cotton skirt and top. She stayed like that, on her back, in the snow, for an hour. Most likely, that is why she is walking today. She had no idea she had broken her spine. The term "paraplegic" hadn't occurred to her, even though it now defined her.
"I noticed when they finally lifted me onto a board for the ambulance, I couldn't move my legs," she says. "But one of the girls who stayed with me reminded me that I had been on my back in the snow for an hour, so I was probably just numb. I'm sure that's what I wanted to hear, so I accepted it."
