UNO basketball slowly coming back 10 years after Katrina

— -- On March 11, 2015, the University of New Orleans beat Nicholls State in the first round of the Southland Conference tournament.

It was an insignificant game in the grander landscape of college basketball, but a major milestone for UNO. A school nearly drowned by Hurricane Katrina 10 years earlier, an athletic department targeted for a Division III demotion only six years prior, instead emerged victorious.

The win prompted a major celebration in the locker room, a feeling that not even a loss in the second round of the conference tournament could diminish.

"That was probably one of the best feelings I've had in college so far,'' rising senior Kevin Hill said. "Even after losing that next round, it gave us returners the feeling that the sky is the limit for us.''

Hope.

That's what the players, the athletic department and the university all felt on that March day.

It's also what the city of New Orleans is about now. Ten years after Hurricane Katrina struck, the city's troubles are not entirely gone. They may never be. The people who left, the damage that was done represent more than just numbers and buildings long gone; they represent a culture and a history that can't be replaced.

But it can be restored. The resiliency of today's New Orleans is as much a part of the story as the tragic after-effects of the storm were 10 years ago.

That's what basketball coach Mark Slessinger has been selling to UNO recruits in their living rooms and to players in the locker room.

Hope is what keeps him going and it's what he sees every night when he arrives home. His neighborhood, two miles from the UNO campus, still has a few empty houses in it. A vacant lot sits next door; there was a house there once.

But when he opens the door, Slessinger is greeted by his wife, Toni; his 3-year-old son, Holden; and his 27-month-old daughter.

Her name is Nola.