The Ohio baseball players whose bus crashed Friday in Atlanta — including their ace pitcher from Alpharetta — were already baseball survivors.

The Bluffton University Beavers, including junior pitcher Timothy Kay from Blessed Trinity Catholic High School in Roswell, nursed their dreams of competing without the traditional reward of an athletic scholarship.

John Spink/Staff (ENLARGE)

Ed Kay, father of Bluffton pitcher and Blessed Trinity graduate Tim Kay, speaks to the media outside Grady Memorial Hospital. His son called at 6 a.m. Friday to tell him of the bus crash that killed four teammates, the bus driver and the driver's wife.

Bob Andres (ENLARGE)

Timothy Kay is shown in a Blessed Trinity yearbook.

Bob Andres/Staff (ENLARGE)

Mass at Blessed Trinity Catholic School included prayers for graduate Timothy Kay, a Bluffton player who survived the bus crash.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Kay was among those who escaped with cuts and scratches after the wreck that killed four members of the team. Most of Bluffton's athletes are not skilled enough or big enough to play for larger programs, and their NCAA Division III college does not grant athletic scholarships.

"The reason most players end up at Bluffton is because they're not recruited by a [bigger] school, and yet, they are someone who all through school said, 'Hey, I want to continue to play baseball,' and they worked hard," said Bluffton sports information director Bill Hanefeld Jr.

"The biggest difference is physical attributes. You take a pitcher who is 6-foot, 175 pounds, he's not big enough to pitch [for bigger schools] but he can play the game, and he comes to Bluffton and works his butt off."

Kay is listed as 6-1 and 185 pounds on the roster. Size wasn't his biggest obstacle when he arrived at Bluffton.

Kay, 20, had missed his senior season year in high school after "Tommy John" surgery on his right arm, and he didn't get to pitch or play first base as his team went to the 2004 state quarterfinals, said his high school teammate Tyler Flowers of Marietta.

"He was always kind of the quiet guy. He was one of the smart kids on the team that the rest of us would go to for help with classes," recalled Flowers, now an Atlanta Braves minor-league catcher and first baseman. Other teammates went to play for bigger programs such as Penn State.

"I remember him fielding ground balls at first base before one game and the ball took a bad bounce that no one could have expected and it broke his nose. He was a good guy and laughed it off, and blood was going everywhere."

Nicknamed "Squints," Kay "would literally run through a wall for you," said Andy Harlin, his coach at Blessed Trinity, whose team said a Hail Mary for the Bluffton team before practice on Friday. "He loved the game and was very respectful."

"He always tried to outwork everyone," said assistant coach Brad Kolowich. "He was the ultimate teammate. ... always the first one off the bench to pat the back of his teammate."

Kay recovered well enough from his surgery to earn a place in the Beavers' starting rotation as a freshman, Hanefeld said. He was good at the plate too, hitting .405 as a designated hitter as a sophomore — in the games when he wasn't pitching — to make the all-conference team.

Athletes in Division III pride themselves on determination like Kay's and closeness like his team demonstrated after the wreck.

After their bus jumped an overpass railing and plunged onto Interstate 75 on its way to spring training in Florida, surviving players described a scene where teammates helped each other get out and made sure the most injured got treated first.

Kay phoned home around 6 a.m., his father said. Kay described how he had been sleeping on the bus and "he woke up and he was on the ground," his father said.

Ed Kay said he tried to ask his son for more details, such as where he had been sitting on the bus, but his son couldn't remember.

"It was just a crazy scene," he told his dad, who spent Friday filling in as a surrogate dad for his son's teammates.

The team's response also showed selflessness expected of student-athletes at Bluffton, affiliated with Mennonite Church USA. Most will miss part of a season to go overseas for a school program or take part in a volunteer project, said Tom Bohlsen, commissioner of the Heartland Collegiate Athletic Conference, in which Bluffton competes against eight other private liberal arts schools in Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky. All, but one, are church-related.

"These guys have a lot going for them outside of sports," Hanefeld said. "I know they were worried for their teammates more than anything in the world, and how their parents were going to find out."

Bluffton does not schedule sports events on Sundays, and its teams pray with conference opponents on the field after the games, Hanefeld said. "Whenever the NCAA starts getting flak, they like to hold us up because our kids play for the love of the sport," Bohlsen said. Bluffton and Defiance College are two conference teams that for several years have hired the bus company involved in the wreck "without difficulty or problem," Bohlsen said.

Hiring a bus allows a college team to avoid a coach or staff member driving the team in a school-insured van, he said.

Bluffton teams sometimes fly out of Toledo, Ohio, or Fort Wayne, Ind., but neither are hub airports that offer competitive fares for teams heading south. Plus, they typically have to transport loads of equipment as well, Bohlsen said.

"You pay a higher rate to fly, you have to make one to two connections, and sometimes when you add all that up, it takes just as long as if you travel by bus," he said.

This week, two HCAC sports teams drove south. Two others flew. Three more teams had planned to drive next week, Bohlsen said.

In baseball, the conference "is pretty competitive at the national level, which is unusual for small schools," Bohlsen said.

He said two HCAC baseball teams went to the NCAA championship last season, and in the past several, have appeared in the Division III World Series.

Bluffton, a young squad with no seniors, was expected to finish in the top six in the conference this season. Another unique aspect of competing in the HCAC is the friendships forged between teams, many of whom reached out Friday to the Beavers with offers to help, Bohlsen said.

Student-athletes pay upwards of $20,000 a year to attend these schools like Bluffton, whose 1,155 students puts it about average in enrollment for its athletic conference.

Money for sports is tight, and teams like the Beavers have to raise money to take trips such as the bus journey to Florida. They most recently hosted "Kids Night Out" for about 100 kids in their nook of northwestern Ohio, Hanefeld said.

There wasn't enough money for the whole team, so about 10 players missed the trip, he said.

Most of them had already left campus by the time the wreck occurred, Hanefeld said.

Staff writers Ronnie Ramos, Keri Smith, Eric Stirgus and Ernie Suggs contributed to this report.