Clifford Brown’s mother desperately wants to see her son play basketball in this, his last season at Sarah T. Reed High School.

By Bradley Handwerger / WWL-TV.com

The gym at Sarah T. Reed High School remains without bleachers more than two years after Katrina. Officials with the RSD said the bleachers have been ordered, but have yet to arrive.

But to do so pains her each time the team plays on campus.

You see, she has a bad ankle, and because Reed has no bleachers in its recently refurbished gymnasium, she has to stand the entire time.

“She gets home and she has to ice her ankle,” said Brown, a senior.

And that’s when she can get into the gym. Only one side is available for fans to take in the game, and the area they can watch the game is small and usually roped off with yellow caution tape and garbage cans.

“It’s very heart-breaking,” junior Reed player Isaiah Edah-Dike said. “A lot of folks want to come see us play, but it’s hard because they’ve got to stand up all game long. We lose supporters.”

He added, “It brings down the value of them doing the floor without the bleachers. It’s like having an ice cream cone without the ice cream. What’s the sense of having just the cone?”

Head coach Bernard Griffith said the gym was supposed to have bleachers by the beginning of this season, which started in November. The Hornets redid the school’s floor while Toyota repainted the walls, he said. And the bleachers were to be replaced by the Recovery School District.

“It’s disappointing that we haven’t been able to take a step up to making the program something that kids want to get involved in,” Griffith said. “A lot of things kids want –you want your parents and friends to come see you play, to see if you’re good. We can’t get that here. We can’t get them in here.”

The bleachers aren’t the only thing missing. Though two scoreboards are bolted high on two of the walls, they don’t work. Reed’s gym was in part of the city that flooded badly.

It’s not the only school searching for equipment to replace what was lost in the storm, however.

According to Alan Woods, an athletic director with the RSD, Booker T. Washington just got a brand new floor and bleachers. It didn’t have a gym last year. Ditto for Douglass.

So, while Brown and Edah-Dike wonder when they’ll be remembered – “We feel like we’re put to the side,” Brown said, – Woods wants to make sure people know that help is on the way.

The permanent bleachers that the RSD ordered take 12-16 weeks to come in and could be put in place as early as this spring, Woods said. In the meantime, the RSD ordered temporary bleachers from New Orleans firm Center Staging that should be installed in as few as two weeks, he said.

What has taken so long, Woods said, is that there’s a specific process the RSD must go through to place an order.

“Everything that the RSD has to order has to go through a bid process,” Woods said. “Items have to be put out on bid. Bids clear. Purchase orders have to be filled out, then approved.”

By Bradley Handwerger / WWL-TV.com

One of the walls in the Sarah T. Reed gym remains barren. Normally, a set of bleachers would be flush against the bricks or pulled out for fans to sit on.

As for the scoreboards, Reed has a temporary clock and scoreboard that sits at the scorer’s table for now. All the school needs is a control box, and Woods said that, too, is ordered.

But there’s another reason in the delay at Reed – “Having desks and books and electricity and classrooms becomes top priority,” Woods said. “It’s not that we minimize the hard work coaches and kids put in. But sometimes you have to make a decision on whether you’re going to buy a text book or basketball.

“I think overall, for the most part, we’ve been doing well.”

Though it’s difficult at times to deal with, Griffith ultimately knows and understands what’s going on.

“I’m still laboring under the realization we’re starting from scratch,” he said. “Everything is going to be at its own pace and we’re coming out of ruins. When you look at it, we’ve got a lot more than some folks got. We count our blessings and move on.”

For now, Griffith can say something about his program that few other New Orleans area schools can – “I tell them all we’re standing room only.”