More than half of the LSU baseball team spent Wednesday afternoon helping former Tiger pitcher Ben McDonald’s mother-in-law begin picking up the pieces at her flooded Denham Springs home, The Advertiser reports.
LSU coach Paul Mainieri helped coordinate the effort after McDonald’s wife, Nicole, texted him to let him know her mother, Margaret Smith Courville, needed help with her destroyed home. “That’s something I know I can provide,” Mainieri answered. By 2 p.m. Wednesday, about 15 LSU baseball players arrived at Courville’s house and began bringing water-ruined furniture to the front lawn and ripping up floors and removing carpets.
“They were animals in there,” Mainieri tells The Advertiser. “Before you knew it, they were finished. But then they just started walking down the street and knocking on doors and asked if they could help. The people who opened their doors to these perfect strangers had eyes as big as grapefruits. I’ve been coaching for 34 years and had a lot of great things happen, and I’ve never been prouder of a group of guys. They must have done another eight or 10 houses.”
The Courville family lost everything, but the baseball team restored some hope.
“It’s like a godsend,” Margaret Courville told ESPN. “The only thing I told them was, ‘Don’t get hurt. Please don’t get hurt. And thank you from the bottom of my heart.’”
Denham Springs native Ben McDonald was one of the best in college baseball history while at LSU from 1987 through 1989, finishing with a 29-14 career record, leading the Tigers to the College World Series and winning the Golden Spikes Award in 1989 while also becoming the first player picked in the 1989 Major League Baseball Draft.
Among the players who answered Mainieri’s call were true freshmen Jake Slaughter, a shortstop from Ouachita Christian in Monroe, and Todd Peterson, a right-handed pitcher from Lake Mary High in the Orlando, Florida, area. They met flood victims before they met some of their new teammates.
