Every high school sports team has a set number of athletes and coaches listed on the athletic roster, but one member who never shows up on the stat sheet plays one of the biggest roles on game day — the bus driver.
Retired Bartholomew Consolidated School Transportation bus driver Kim Fowler was a Columbus North team member for 21 years, and she played a pivotal role for the Bull Dogs during her time, as do many other bus drivers. She drove the bus for North girls basketball, volleyball and girls tennis after completing her regular school bus routes.
“I was part of that athletic family, and they treated me just like they would the kids and the parents,” Fowler said. “It’s a relationship. You build that relationship with that team and those girls.”
Fowler’s day would usually start with her day-to-day routes at 6:30 a.m., and it lasted until it was time to pick up one of her athletic teams for the evening.
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She would find time to get food immediately after dropping the teams off while they were warming up and be back in time to watch the game. Her nights dropping the team back off could be as late as midnight, depending on the sport, but she was just as invested into watching them perform well as any parent would.
“I’ve had so many grandparents and parents through the years, they would ask me, ‘Which one is your child?’ ‘All of them,” Fowler said. “You would see the looks I used to get. Then when I would explain that I was the bus driver, then they would laugh.”
Each athletic team is assigned a bus driver once the request comes through the Bartholomew Consolidated School Transportation, and the drivers are decided using a bidding process. All of the available teams are posted for the drivers, and the administration determines who gets the teams they bid on based on seniority. The drivers keep that assignment each year until the driver decides to call it quits, so Fowler was able to keep her teams for as long as she wanted.
“That’s what’s nice because that way, the coach establishes the relationship with the driver,” Columbus East athletics director Pete Huse said. “If there are changes or something, the coach can just contact the driver and say, ‘Can you pick us up at this time?’ or something like that.”
Huse and Columbus North athletics secretary Cindy McCoy handle all of the bus request for their respective schools, and both said the process runs pretty smoothly. All schools within the Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. use the same system to request bus drivers from its transportation hub.
McCoy and Huse use the same online site that requires them to log in and feel out all of the required fields to request a bus before the BCSC Transportation assigns a driver. All of the request are sent in before the seasons start.
Once the driver is assigned, McCoy and Huse can look to see who the driver is with the scheduled arrival time and phone number. That information then gets passed on to the coaches.
“Consistency is always a good thing,” BCSC transportation manager Karen Wetherald said. “Plus, it builds camaraderie between the team players and their bus drivers and their coaches. It’s just a better fit all the way around.”
Schools aren’t able to request an athletic bus until after 4:15 p.m. weekdays because of the earlier bus routes, but a 4:15 to 4:20 arrive time doesn’t always work in certain situations. The Columbus East girls basketball team ran into that problem during the East Central Sectional, when the Olympians had a 6 p.m. game time. The latest the team could leave for the hour-long ride was 4 p.m., and no bus driver can be available that early.
BCSC Transportation also allows coaches who are certified to request a white bus that they’re able to drive on their own. East varsity assistant and junior varsity head coach Kylie Weichman got trained and certified and was able to drive the team to East Central on time.
Weichman said driving a white bus is a helpful option when only the varsity team is traveling, but it doesn’t make much sense for them to choose that option during the regular season when both JV and varsity teams are traveling because multiple white buses would be needed. She also said driving the white bus took her focus away from the actual game, and that’s not something she wants to happen often.
“My focus was not so much on the sectional games, but more importantly making sure I was able to get 12 of our student athletes and two other coaches beyond myself there safely in a vehicle that is much bigger than I typically drive,” Weichman said. “It just changes your focus. I think when there are situations that we experienced having to go to East Central with the (early) game start time, it was nice to at least have an option available to us such as the white bus. But all in all, would that be our primary option, absolutely not. I think we would always go with a yellow bus and a driver.”
That’s why many of the local coaches are appreciative of their routine driver whose job it is to get them back and forth in a safe manner. Fowler said having drivers stick with the same team gives assurance to the coaches, knowing they have a dependable driver who will be there to pick them up, stay to support the team and safely get them back home.
Columbus North baseball coach Ben McDaniel echoed Fowler’s statement when commenting about his team bus driver Bruce Dailey in how he and the rest of his program love Dailey as a driver.
“I think I can say the feeling is mutual. Bruce likes driving for us,” McDaniel said. “He knows me, he knows my staff, he knows my guys, he knows how we operate. He can read our moods, and he is always in a good mood when he picks us up, whether we win or lose. He takes it personal whether we win or lose, but even if it’s a loss, Bruce has a job to do, and he does it. Our guys are getting back on the bus and he’s trying to pick them up … Bruce has been around, he’s seen some stuff and I think he feels like it’s his job to pick the guys up and get them back in a good mood.”
McDaniel would like for his team to reach their destination an hour before game time, but that’s hard to do when the Bull Dogs are traveling to Indianapolis or Bloomington for a game. Driving a white bus is too much of a hassle for a team of that size, McDaniel said. That’s why he appreciates the job that Dailey does in getting his team back and forth as quick as possible, and McDaniel always makes sure to text the opposing coach about an estimated arrival time when en route.
“He gets us where we need to be safe and sound and knows we’re on a tight schedule and gets us there as quick as he can,” McDaniel said of Dailey. “But it is difficult getting a bus at 4:15 p.m. when you’ve got a 5:30 game somewhere in Indianapolis.”
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BCSC transportation numbers
Schools needing transportation: 16 (11 elementary schools, two middle schools and three high schools)
Athletic bus routes: 98
Available drivers: 113
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