Members of the Division I Championships/Competition Cabinet certainly felt the after-effects of 9/11, especially since they were meeting in Philadelphia at that time.

Nora Lynn Finch, senior associate athletics director and senior woman administrator at North Carolina State University, was helping conduct an orientation for new cabinet members when she, like others, began hearing about the events at the World Trade Center.

Within 10 minutes of returning to her hotel room, Finch received a phone call from her friend Allyson Siegel, the vice president of Tru-Pak Moving Systems, operated by Siegel’s family in Conover, North Carolina. Siegel was aware by then that Finch and others would be stranded in Philadelphia because the airports would be shut down.

NCAA staff members who rented a van already were planning to drop off cabinet members who lived along the route to Indianapolis. Siegel helped out, too, arranging for a Tru-Pak truck to be dispatched from western Pennsylvania. Finch asked if there was room for University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, athletics director Dick Baddour in the semi-tractor trailer.

Siegel told her the whole trailer would be open. "She said, ‘If you want to take everybody in the southeast back and have them play cards or whatever, you have the whole thing. The driver needs a seat, but other than that anybody you want to take can go,’ " Finch said.

So that afternoon, a tractor trailer pulled into downtown Philadelphia, where Finch and Baddour had some trepidation before boarding.

"George was the name of the driver, and he had a beautiful rig," Finch said. "Drivers put the name of their tractor on the door or on the grill. They have these affectionate names for their rigs. This one was called the "Sin Wagon." I looked at Dick and told him, ‘I’m not getting in the Sin Wagon until we’re sure that George is safe.’ "

It turned out the name was derived from the driver’s favorite song by the Dixie Chicks.

So with that straightened out, Finch and Baddour, who had to leave a cabinet meeting two years earlier before Hurricane Floyd hit the Carolinas, left for a 12-hour journey home.

They were able to keep track of the news because the rig also was equipped with satellite television.

"It was unlike any ride I’ve ever had," Finch said. "You sit up so high, but those chairs are constantly in motion. They are moving with the rig all the time."

She arrived home around 3 a.m.

"The radio stations here had a fun time with the fact that Dick came home with me in the Sin Wagon," Finch said.