Picking up the pieces: Hurricane Ian destroyed the homes of 3 Canterbury volleyball players

They tried to hold back tears.

But the memories of Hurricane Ian wouldn't allow it.

Maryn Fancher, Delaney Fried, and Brighten Sedmack sat in The Canterbury School weight room adjacent to the gym last week.

They were back in their safe space, where they had spent so much time training, playing, and building friendships on the Cougars volleyball team, but their stories from Ian were anything but safe or happy.

They hugged themselves, their legs twitched and their fingers fidgeted as they recounted how their lives changed after the Category 4 storm battered Southwest Florida on Sept 28.

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The three Cougars, a quarter of the 12-member varsity roster, lost their childhood homes as well as most of their possessions and their sense of peace. Like so many in the area, their families are facing uncertain futures but they know it could be much worse.

"I feel like I have survivor’s guilt because we were lucky enough to be alive," Fancher said. "... There was this guy I’d see every day, he walked his dog every morning and I used to pass him every morning. He was older and he wore his military cap. His house is just missing, and he’s gone.

"He’s gone, but we’re lucky we’re still here. Every time someone asks me how I’m doing, I tell them, ‘I’m alive.'"

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"I legitimately thought we were going to die."

Fancher doesn't know if she wants to go back to Fort Myers Beach.

The house she grew up in was destroyed. The community around her is no more. The restaurants and places she and her family frequented are leveled.

Fancher said a false sense of security was one of the reasons why she and her family didn't evacuate this time. Meteorologists projected upwards of 15 feet of storm surge during Hurricane Irma in 2017, a storm they left the island for. That projection never materialized.

The Fanchers prepared for the storm accordingly, moving all of their belongings from the lower level of their house upstairs, where their living room, kitchen, and bedrooms were. The things they left downstairs were placed on cinder blocks approximately 7 feet off the ground. If the water were to get higher than 7 feet, they were things that were going to get destroyed anyway, she said.

“My family has lived on the beach since ’95," Fancher said. "I’ve lived in the same house my entire life. I have two older brothers, and we’ve all lived there. My family’s gone through multiple hurricanes, and the only one where we had flooding was Charley. Other than that, we haven’t really evacuated and have been in a good situation. We kind of got a false sense of security with Irma because we did evacuate for Irma and they said we were going to get 15 feet of storm surge, and it didn’t happen. So, we thought it was fine, and we stayed."

As the storm got closer, Fancher and her family started to worry about her grandparents, who live in a one-story residence a mile away. Fancher's father wanted them to come stay with them during the storm, so they were all together.

"We were in contact with my grandparents for most of the time until about 12:30, when we lost contact with them," Fancher said. "Their phones are old, so we kept thinking it could just be their phones. The last time we talked to them, they were sitting on their bed with water coming up. In our house, it was halfway up our stairs at that point. We were on the phone with our two brothers, and it was very scary. It was the loudest noise you could possibly imagine.

"I legitimately thought we were going to die."

As the water rose, the Fanchers also heard their roof giving way. So they went to the safest spot they could find, their windowless bathroom.

"We started hearing every nail pop out, and it was the loudest noise. It was just us, hiding in this bathroom, and my mom and me were hyperventilating, crying, it was very, very traumatic.

"Slowly, our ceiling started collapsing. We were putting pots and pans everywhere, to avoid the leaks from ruining the floor. But everything was ruined. My parents' room collapsed. Our kitchen collapsed. We were watching the garage across the street because there were windows on the top. The windows were completely covered, and the water was about four inches from being upstairs. We were watching to see if it was going lower or higher. We were trying to make a plan of what to do. Eventually, the water started going down, and thank God.”

The three of them spent the rest of the night in a room used as an office on the second floor. Maryn was on a bean bag in the corner. Her mom slept on a chair. Her father slept on the floor.

The next morning, the family went to check on Fancher's grandparents, who they still couldn't contact. They saw a neighbor outside who told them they were bundled up inside their house and were alive.

"We full-on just started running down the street, and my grandparents were sitting in the closet of their house with a shower curtain over them," Fancher said. "They had no walls, and everything was gone. Their car was in the backyard, and my grandpa held onto my grandma with one arm and held onto a shelf with his other hand for four hours during the storm so they wouldn’t drown. Their legs were all cut up from debris. His finger was sliced all the way to the bone, and they were just sitting there, in shock. My grandma didn’t speak. The one thing she said to us was, ‘Sweetie, we’re alive.’

"That moment just replays in my head because we thought they were dead. We spent every Christmas Eve there, and the tile was ripped off the floor, there’s no walls, they have a table that has glass over it, and that’s family photos and everything. That’s not there. Everything was gone. We kept a boat at their house, and it was flipped on the house across the canal. I didn’t cry that day until I saw their house. It hit when I saw they had nothing. They didn’t even have shoes. All they had were the clothes on their back."

After gathering everything and finding a temporary residence, Fancher briefly stayed with Jasmine Santana, a teammate and fellow senior. She is the daughter of former Major League pitcher and two-time AL Cy Young award winner Johan Santana.

"As soon as I got in her car, I just started bawling," Fancher said. "Her dad started crying, and I’ve never seen her dad cry. It might be PTSD, but I haven’t fallen asleep until 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. since it happened, and when it first happened, I couldn’t close my eyes without seeing all the things that happened.

"It was my entire home. It’s so much different than the pictures to see it in person. I played soccer at the field when I was 3, and that’s just gone. The place where we’d vacation every summer (Lahina), it’s the place my mom’s gone to since she was 11, and she started bringing us. It was all wooden, and that’s gone."

The drive back home to Fort Myers Beach was an emotional one for Fancher, as she saw what was left of the beach for a second time. She and her family went ahead and grabbed things that were still in good shape before vacating the island and heading out to Babcock Ranch, where their family, grandparents included, are now staying temporarily.

"They finally opened up the beach, and we went to try to get anything else we could, and I was lucky enough that my closet didn’t collapse, and I was able to get my clothes out," an emotional Fancher said. "There’s a bunch of stuff my dad had when he was a kid that we couldn’t get. One of the big things for me, I was driving back, and there’s this place called Junkanoo. It’s a restaurant there. I used to always do the coin slot and the stuffed animals, and now, it’s just the beach and the broken sign. It’s crazy to think about.

"Everything I grew up doing, it’s just gone. That was my last experience there. I don’t really know if I want to go back.”

"Don't come back."

The morning of Ian, Sedmack's family made a late call to head inland.

The family went from their house close to the Caloosahatchee River to Alva, after the street started to flood at 10 a.m. that morning. Ian made landfall in Cayo Costa shortly after 3 p.m., nearly five hours after Sedmack saw her street starting to flood.

After returning from Alva, not much was left inside the house. They suffered serious flood damage, which included multiple inches of mud.

"My dad and my brother went back, and they texted us and said, ‘Don’t come back, just stay where you are. It’s not safe,’" the sophomore said while wiping away tears. "There was a tree that fell, you couldn’t even get in and out of our neighborhood without going around it. A couple of hours later the next day, we went back, and it was heartbreaking looking at just all the stuff that we had. Our yard was destroyed, our house, our roof, it was just tough and my dad cried. It was emotional.

“We didn’t lose everything, but there was enough to pretty much destroy all that was touching anything. There were two or three inches of mud. Anything that was touching the mud, we had to throw away. The water just sept into all the cloth we had on the floor. I’m not really sure, I wasn’t allowed in the house for very long. My parents didn’t want me in there.

Sedmack is staying with teammate Aaliyah Harlow. Her brother, Jake, is staying with the Piatt family, who have had two daughters go through the Canterbury volleyball program in Avery and Addison, who is a junior this season.

“Aaliyah’s helped a lot," Sedmack added. "I can’t even go to the lengths to describe how much they’ve done for us. The Piatts are keeping my brother, and I know they have a lot of people in the house. They have a big family. They’re just all being very loving and supportive, and it’s really nice.”

Sedmack doesn't know when she and her family will be living under the same roof again as apartments have become scarce and a housing shortage is imminent with thousands of Southwest Floridian's displaced and so many buildings and homes destroyed. Their house is unlivable for the foreseeable future. In the interim, her aunt and uncle who live in Utah purchased a motorhome and had it shipped down to Fort Myers for the family to live in.

"I’ve lived in this house since I was born, basically. It was just destroyed."

"I’m appreciative I survived this"

Fried and her grandparents, who she lives with, were preparing for the worst.

Living in a neighborhood off of Gladiolus Drive that frequently floods during basic thunderstorms, they knew the water would come. But what they didn't know, was that they were going to get 6 feet of water inside their home. They don't like to think about what would've happened if they stayed.

The three made a southward push to Naples, before trekking to Orlando to stay with family. Fried returned on Oct. 3, five days after the storm passed.

Fried's uncle found a kayak and went to their house the day after the storm. She said she saw her grandparents cry for the first time after he called to report the damage.

"They were bawling their eyes out, and were talking about how they have to dig into their retirement fund to redo the house," Fried said. "All of their valuable family-owned stuff that was passed down was just completely demolished. All of our cars were ruined, and basically, our flooding was the worst in the section of our neighborhood.

"I’ve lived in that house my whole life. I’ve never moved before. Seeing all the stuff that I’ve grown up with, destroyed, it was mentally exhausting and draining at that point. So many emotions were going through my head. I’m appreciative I survived this, because 6 feet of water is a lot, and if we would have stayed, we probably wouldn’t have made it. I’ve never felt emotions like that. I don’t know what emotions were going through my head at that point.”

Fried and her grandparents have found temporary housing in Whiskey Creek.

Cougars coming together

Canterbury coach Charlie Castillo has stressed uniting and supporting one another since taking over the program in 2020.

“I think that says a lot about what we preach every day in practice," Castillo said. "We always talk about it being bigger than just a game, about it legitimately being about love. It’s one of our pillars we have in our program, so it’s something we try to get the girls to understand. Life is a big game, it’s the big game, and sometimes, adversity is going to hit, and the way that you react to it is going to define who you are and the way that you’re remembered. I think it’s amazing to see that type of support throughout the team.”

While some teammates have opened their homes, others like Jordan Curran and Kayla Huether bought clothes for Sedmack, and the entire team has shared its emotional support.

Castillo knew many of his players lived in areas that were being battered by Ian's 150 mph winds and storm surge, which was estimated to reach as high as 15 feet along the barrier islands like Fort Myers Beach.

The thought of losing one of his players crossed his mind, wondering how to cope with potential tragedy. The hurricane has been named the cause of 61 deaths in Lee County alone and more than 120 in Florida.

“There was about a period of 24 hours there, where we really couldn’t get in contact with anybody," Castillo said. "If you’re able to see the news and see the devastation that happened on Fort Myers Beach, you definitely had some pretty hard thoughts running through your head. Luckily, we kept tabs on all of our girls throughout the storm and prior, making sure they were OK.

"But, you just never know. So many things can happen in situations like that. It was definitely a tough time for all of us.”

Castillo intentionally didn't have a schedule for the first practice back on Oct. 7. Many players saw each other for the first time, and that practice was used as a time to console and be around one another.

"It was very fun," Fried said of the first practice back. "My experience wasn’t as traumatic as Maryn’s, but I hadn’t seen anyone until that day. I felt very comforted. Everyone gave me a hug and asked how I was. I knew people cared. Until that moment, I didn’t actually feel it. I felt very supported."

Thursday night, the Cougars won their first district title in 13 years, sweeping First Baptist.

They'll look to continue their playoff run this week in hopes of winning the ultimate goal under extraordinary circumstances, which would be a state title.

A state championship medal wouldn’t be able to replace everything they’ve lost, but it would be a start.

"It would be a core memory forever," Fried said.

Follow Southwest Florida Sports Writer Alex Martin on Twitter: @NP_AlexMartin. For the best sports coverage in Southwest Florida, follow @newspresssports and @ndnprepzone on Instagram.

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Hurricane Ian: Lee volleyball players reflect after losing homes